Join Students for a Whole New Education on Wednesday, February 3 at 8 pm ET for our chat about:

Humanizing Engineering Education

Undergraduate engineering programs have traditionally placed a large emphasis on developing technical knowledge and skills in students, often without placing an equal emphasis on the societal contexts in which the technology is situated. We teach students to design complex systems and processes, but do we adequately convey the importance of understanding the environments in which these systems and processes exist? Or how to address the needs of a particular community of people? Or the implications of social justice issues that are intertwined with engineering work?

Join us for our conversation on February 3 about how to introduce engineering students to the social contexts of their work and encourage students to become socially responsible engineers.  

Students for a Whole New Education aims to be a community that supports students and creates spaces for open and honest conversation. We especially welcome students to join our conversation in the hopes that we can encourage and support each other during our journeys through higher education.

Big Beacon invites students to join in our Twitter Chats focused student-centered issues! We want to engage students in our conversations to transform engineering education. We want to bring student voices to a platform that listens to students’ ideas and experiences and cherishes them. Big Beacon values student voices as professional voices and are as valued as those of teachers, professors, and administrators.

About Students for a Whole New Education

Students for a Whole New Education (SWNE) is an initiative Big Beacon launched this year to empower students to become change agents in engineering education. We want to keep students central to change efforts and encourage students to be active in conversations about transforming education. SWNE aims to bring together students from around the world who are united by the challenges they face in an education system that resists change.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy! First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.