IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2013 - 35

function, acquired or learnt with practice."
("skill, n." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford
University Press. 4 Apr. 2000 .)]
If critical thinking is not only the ability
to think consistently but also the reflective act of questioning power/knowledge
relations (including the expertise of the
"skilled"), then critical thinking cannot
be reduced to a set of skills.
It becomes clear that as critical practitioners we must look into the mirror.
Not only must we encourage our students to engage in critically reflexive
thinking, but we must do so ourselves
in order to be able to rethink the role of
teachers with liberative intentions, that
is, not as holding special knowledge that
if transferred will liberate, but as people
caught in power/knowledge webs, working to resist them.

Conclusions
To implement t he underst a nding
of critical thinking developed here
in engineering education, we have
employed critical pedagogy in engineering classrooms and revised both
core technical and interdisciplinary
elective curricula to incorporate content related to critical theory, reflective
judgment, and science and technology studies. By emphasizing student
reflection, meta-cognition, critical
questions, self-directed learning, and
praxis in traditional engineering courses, students and faculty are critically
engaging with the engineering canon
and structures of engineering thought
[15], [43].
We have highlighted some limitations of conventional notions of critical
thinking in engineering education, and
brought critical theory to bear on creating a construct for critical thinking in
and about engineering. Critical thinking
in and about engineering should include
epistemic awareness and a critical view
of ourselves and the field. Critical thinking about engineering brings meaning
into the classroom by drawing together
practices of reflection, reflexivity, and
thinking critically within engineering. It provides a motivational context,

creating a relationship between learners
and engineering, unifying the personal, the technical, and the social. Such
approaches can and must find their
way into core courses in the engineering curriculum; this is not to replace a
required course in, say, philosophy of
science and engineering taught by a philosopher or a science, technology, and
society scholar but rather to reinforce
such material, demonstrate its importance to engineering, and model its
adoption in engineering practice. Critical thinking in and about engineering
will bring about student questioning
of course content, learning processes,
and engineering in society. While ABET
outcomes may have created a starting point for critical thinking to garner attention in engineering education,
the approaches we have described here
should ultimately lead to a critique of
outcomes-based education and those
forms of constraint imposed by accreditation schemas themselves. Bringing
about the "situation critical" advocated here promises to spark activities of
resistance; however, the proof is in the
praxis.

Acknowledgments
We thank those who commented on
drafts of this work, including Alice
Pawley and Eleanor Jaffee, participants in the 2008 REES symposium,
and Engineering Studies reviewers.
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant 0448240. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the authors and
do not necessarily reflect the views of
the NSF.
This article is an abridged version of
the original: Lionel Claris and Donna
Riley (2012), Situation critical: critical
theory and critical thinking in engineering education, Engineering Studies,
DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2011.649920.

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