I was one of the presenters yesterday at RIT's Interdisciplinary STEM Ed Research Forum, so I'm posting my talk abstract here mostly for posterity, and because I'm too worn out at this point in the semester to say anything clever about it.

Title: Technology, Engineering, Computing, and Hacker/Maker Curricular Cultures: Alternative Universe Edition

Abstract: What is engineering? Who is a maker? What does it mean to be a technology professor? Questions like these point at the underlying ontologies of a group’s curricular culture, or their shared basic assumptions regarding teaching and learning, including how one should act, think, and feel in educational situations. My work engages with curricular cultures in postsecondary TECH (Technology, Engineering, Computing, and Hacker/Maker) education, a.k.a. “the making of people who make things.”

One aspect of this work is, quite literally, world-building and alternative universe creation. By bricolaging technical work with narrative interviews, ethnographic observations, science fiction, and the visual and performing arts, I create… not science fiction stories, but engineering (tech, computing, and hacking/making) education fiction -- or rather, things that start as engineering fiction, as well as tools for making them into engineering nonfiction.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the prototyping of alternate TECH education universes and cultures with two case studies: (1) what if computer science college courses were modeled after hacker/maker community praxis? and (2) what if engineering education had been historically led by Deaf people, and hearing engineers were a minority? As with most cross-cultural encounters, seeing other possibilities for TECH cultures helps make us aware of the assumptions we’ve embedded in the discipline thus far, so we can decide what worlds we want to build going forward.