'Simple Service Simply Given': Systems Theory and Systems Thinking in Canadian Engineering Education

Central to questions about engineering practices are questions about engineering education. Confronting uncertain futures of socio-technological changes, engineers reform their education programs to stimulate competencies in pupils who, they hope, will be up for the challenges ahead. Despite a critical focus on technoscientific practices within science and technology studies, scholarship has given little attention to critical perspectives on education.

This dissertation offers a comparative ethnographic study of engineering education reforms, examining education policy formations and educational practices. I study these reforms through two organizations: Engineers Canada and the Engineering Change Lab. I collected historical data from Engineers Canada’s archive (1936–2012) on engineering education curricular and policy reforms. I collected ethnographic data from the Engineering Change Lab (2017–2019) on contemporary educational practices. Throughout, I compare developments of the Canadian engineering education system and its couplings with Canadian nationalisms, gender hierarchies, and technoscientific change.

I narrate how: 1. Nationalisms guide the structuring of Canadian engineering education sustaining a settler colonial Canada, resisted through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and practices. 2. Gender hierarchies guide Canadian engineering fostering a men-dominated industry where efforts to continually improve women’s low representation meet some successes. 3. “Technoscientific change” gives meaning to engineering through promises of technoscientific progress and anxieties of technological change.

Considering the tensions between engineering education and engineering practices documented in this research, I use Luhmann’s systems theory to examine a contradiction: engineering education is considered weakly connected with engineering practices while being leveraged as a perennial solution to problems in engineering practices. As such, engineering is a reactive discipline, one fundamentally incapable of securing its desired stability through a focus on potentialities over actualities. Occupying such a role destines one to a sense of insecurity that the present is never enough.

This dissertation advances science and technology studies by critically examining engineering education as engineering practices and the relevant sociopolitical dimensions at play, and by demonstrating nuanced approaches to understanding technoscientific education through ethnography. I argue for the utility of Luhmann’s systems theory in engineering education, specifying a language with educative appeal for engineers who direct their “system” of engineering education.