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Short abstract:

This paper explores what is communicated about technology and society, the ideal engineering student, and the engineering profession, when students are recruited to participate in challenge-based learning, a new pedagogy which promises both technical knowledge and societal relevance.

Long abstract:

Engineers are expected to simultaneously drive economic growth through technological innovation and offer solutions to important societal problems of sustainability. However, engineers often fail to fulfill this paradoxical potential, in part because a combination of “depoliticization” and strong meritocratic values frame social concerns as separated from technology and engineering (Cech 2014). In this context, challenge-based learning (CBL) is one framework showing how a new kind of engineer can be trained (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020). CBL is positioned as a contemporary and innovative pedagogy that can equip students with highly demanded professional skills, and prepare them for working on the frontline of sustainability and social relevance. In this paper we scrutinize what is communicated about technology and society, the ideal engineering student, and the engineering profession, when students are recruited to a CBL initiative.

We find that the recruitment material frames solutions to “societal challenges'' as technical or industrial in nature, melding the concerns of society with the concerns of industry. Students’ passion to contribute is redirected into providing industry with skilled workers, and acquiring professional skills. As such, we argue that CBL as a reform discourse risks communicating a technocratic and post-political picture of “what needs to be done”, in line with the capitalist realist assumption that the current liberal democratic marriage of private capital and public good is the culmination of development (Fisher, 2009) and that solutions to challenges must happen through and be contained within this system.