Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses “instrumentalism” in engineering education. It draws on anthropological insights on how instruments like tools are formed by and come to form bodies and worlds, and outlines resulting insights for understanding and participating critically in classrooms.

Paper long abstract:

In engineering education, there is a substantial preoccupation with instrumentality of coursework. This orientation is the topic of significant discussion in engineering studies and STS more broadly as we seek to characterize and navigate the ways that we encounter, reproduce and undermine certain received forms of subjectivity and notions of knowledge.

In this paper, I consider how instrumentalism has cast education as a tool; a means to an end. I describe this as a double move: first, valuing direct and practical utility above all in coursework, and second, setting this value work within a particularly constrained and often techno-chauvenistic set of notions about what ends are worth moving toward and the means by which such ends might be achieved. I argue that we would do well to take the notion of the “instrument” seriously to better understand engineering education and the work of STS scholars and educators within it. I draw on the work of anthropologists to consider how tools are formed by and come to form the bodies of their makers, users, and the worlds around them to do this. Using my own teaching for reference, I demonstrate what thinking about instrumentalism from this embodied and material stance can show us about engineering classrooms and how STS scholars participate critically in them.