8 Indigenising engineering education

Sustainable Minerals Institute

School of Chemical Engineering

“Engineering is social first and then technical. Increasingly, engineering should be a holistic profession whereby engineers consider the community, the consumer/user and the environment before embarking on technical design” (Australian Council of Engineering Deans [ACED], 2017, n.p.).

The course

ENGG2000, or Introduction to Humanitarian Engineering (hereafter, Humanitarian Engineering), was introduced into The University of Queensland (UQ) as an elective in Semester 2, 2020. It is the first-of-its-kind engineering course in Queensland, which was developed as part of a strategic initiative to introduce a a minor in Engineering for Sustainable Development. It offers a lasting opportunity to establish UQ’s thought leadership in shifting the scope – and role – of engineering education and, by doing so, strengthen the links between engineering solutions and human development outcomes.

Background and context

The concept for this course was built on an extensive international review of humanitarian engineering courses and programs and on interviews with academics across Australian universities delivering humanitarian engineering courses. This work identified a large gap in Queensland and a significant opportunity for UQ. The core team, at the time, was also engaged in interdisciplinary research on resources and development through UQ’s Energy and Poverty Research Group. A key message emerging from this research was the limitation of engineering solutions in addressing complex, modern challenges when aspects from the broader social, behavioural, policy and environmental ecosystems were disregarded in problem development and solution design.

These realisations aligned neatly with global, including Australian, discussion at the time about the future role of engineering education (ACED, 2021; Raza et al., 2024). Two key factors underlined these discussions. First, there were growing concerns that engineering as a career choice had struggled to remain inclusive, particularly concerning the representation of women, minority groups and Indigenous peoples (Engineers Australia, 2011; Marinelli & Calais, 2011). Second, the world was, and is, struggling with complex global challenges such as poverty, climate disasters and wars. Engineers have a critical role to play in addressing this complexity. Yet, traditional engineering education was limited in its ability to nurture engineering minds to be socially innovative and resourceful (Date & Chandrasekharan, 2024; UNESCO, 2021).

To address these mutually reinforcing drivers, we sought ways to introduce a shift in UQ’s engineering approach that would allow the next generation of engineers to be better aware of the social context within which modern engineering problems are situated. The Humanitarian Engineering course is a step in that direction. It was designed and continues to be delivered with the mission to cultivate well-rounded engineers and help re-position engineering’s appeal as a career choice, including for women and for Indigenous students. It introduces students to the role of engineers in humanitarian contexts by discussing and analysing challenges that push them to think critically about the societal role of engineering. In doing so, it facilitates the development of valuable personal and professional competencies that are otherwise not encountered in typical engineering programs.

The Engineering Habits of Mind Framework (see Figure 1) guided the premise that underlined our course design sensibilities. As course developers, its adoption also naturally enabled us to think critically about Australia’s rich Indigenous heritage, including evidence of Indigenous ways of engineering (Kutay et al., 2022). In many ways, the course embedded various Indigenising Curriculum Design Principles (Bunda, 2022) without consciously working to do so. In particular, the design principles of Respect, Country, Truth and Cultural Capability offer the necessary guidance to support our intent to build engineering students’ capacity to embrace habits such as reflection, ethics, systems thinking and problem-finding (before jumping to problem-solving). By building on these principles, the course encourages students to complement their core engineering skills and knowledge by bringing Indigenous knowledge systems, examples and perspectives into their approach towards designing an inclusive, novel, modern engineering solution.

Indigenising the Humanitarian Engineering curriculum

Humanitarian engineering is defined as the application of any given engineering discipline to a specific development or humanitarian context. The overarching purpose is to use engineering knowledge to develop affordable, context-specific, culturally appropriate, sustainable solutions that can directly improve the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of the millions of people in marginalised and disadvantaged communities worldwide.

Indigenous peoples in Australia have continued to thrive despite a long history of systemic exploitation that includes abuse of rights and ongoing severe health and socioeconomic disadvantage. When developing content for humanitarian engineering that aims to situate traditional engineering challenges in areas such as energy, water and infrastructure within a broader social-political landscape, the experience of Indigenous peoples in Australia – both historic and present – provides an indispensable context for learning and reflection. The next section presents practical considerations that shaped the motivation to recognise and embed Indigenous principles and knowledge in the design and delivery of the Humanitarian Engineering course.

Motivation and intent

A defining factor that played an important role in the early stages of course planning was the design team’s personal and professional allegiance to issues of equity, respect and inclusion. As a first-generation immigrant, primary course developer Vigya Sharma spent her formative years in India. Her privileged middle-class upbringing amidst evident class and caste-based social structures in India has informed her sensibilities towards race, economic disadvantage and legacy. She built on these values and her interdisciplinary training to develop a curriculum outline that would nudge predominantly urban, young and white undergraduate Australian engineering minds to engage meaningfully with development challenges facing remote communities within their country.

Importantly, these ideas and efforts were further enabled by her senior colleague and course co-designer Paul Lant, an established engineering educator with a successful track record of introducing innovative teaching pedagogies and content at UQ. Indigenising the curriculum for Humanitarian Engineering was, therefore, an organic process of tapping into the personal and professional attributes of the team responsible for course design and delivery.

A second key motivation was the timing of the course. The design team’s intent to Indigenise the ENGG2000 curriculum was buoyed further by national conversations rapidly emerging at the time. The Australian Council of Engineering Deans released a position statement in 2017 that acknowledged the absence of the recognition of Indigenous perspectives both in engineering curricula and practice, despite Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ culturally and ecologically deep association with natural ecosystems over thousands of years (ACED, 2017). Around the same time, the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching funded a project to develop a guide to help better integrate Indigenous perspectives into engineering curricula (Kennedy et al., 2016). This output remains a valuable contribution to date, particularly for its position on exploring engineering from the lens of three intersecting perspectives: a dominant perspective (aligning with the broader views of postcolonial Australian society), an Aboriginal perspective (one that held a strong relationship to Country and valued all life as equal), and an engineering perspective (focused on practical problem-solving) (Kennedy et al., 2016).

Other developments that reaffirmed the value of Indigenising the ENGG2000 curriculum included, for example, the profession’s peak body Engineers Australia releasing its principles for Acknowledgment of Country in 2019 and recognising that, “as a profession with core values to serve the community, it is important and relevant for the engineering profession to show respect and reciprocity for the First Nations peoples of Australia and their communities … their sovereign rights and self-determination” (Engineers Australia, 2019, p. 1). Around the same time, in June 2019, Australia was successful in getting the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape on the Country of the Gunditjmara people inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List for its rich cultural significance as the world’s oldest aquaculture system, an engineering marvel (Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, 2019).

Approach and resources

The ENGG2000 course content is wide-ranging: from discussing the role of engineers in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Australian Government’s Closing the Gap initiative to developing human-centred design solutions for energy, water and livelihoods challenges facing remote Indigenous communities across Queensland, and globally.

We approached the course design to include theoretically informed learning that had a strong focus on application, drawing on examples from a mix of Australian and international experiences. This aimed to help orient students’ learning within a global setting, while recognising the value of humanitarian engineering principles in their core engineering training.

The course brings Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into all stages of the curriculum in various forms: guest lecturers, individual and group assessments, cases discussed during tutorial-style workshops, and theoretical concepts such as human-centred design principles. The focus is for engineering students to mainstream thinking about ethics, societal risks, stakeholders and appropriate technology when developing rigorous engineering solutions for complex challenges across Indigenous and/or non-Indigenous settings.

We also acknowledged that a pragmatic approach to our ambition of Indigenising the curriculum was necessary, considering none of the course team members were Indigenous. So, we relied on published and grey literature to inform ourselves and listened keenly to conversations on issues of interest within and outside UQ. This was important to remain sensitive to key historical facts and contemporary narratives on Indigenous issues in Australia. With open minds, we consulted colleagues who had experience working with Indigenous communities in Queensland and across Australia to test ideas and learn about values and principles crucial for the team to keep front of mind when considering ways to Indigenise the curriculum.

When developing the idea for ENGG2000, the team reached out to other universities across the country that had similar courses and/or programs. We interviewed colleagues running these courses who were generous in sharing their experiences and the essential resources that had informed their approach to course design, including those specific to enabling Indigenous perspectives. For example, one such conversation pointed to the collective knowledge built by Engineers Without Borders (EWB) in this area. This was a valuable suggestion and one that the course continues to engage with and build on year after year.

Every year, the course uses the Indigenous case study collated and prepared by EWB as part of its Design Challenge series. The EWB Design Challenge offers a project-based learning opportunity that allows students to apply core engineering skills and concepts to solve a real-world problem with a strong social, cultural and environmental focus. The EWB resource offers high-quality project learning materials for students built by the EWB in close collaboration with local Indigenous community partners. With time and resource constraints typical in a university setting, these case studies are an effective way to bring real-world challenges to the classroom and get students to work in teams and learn about and contribute to addressing core engineering challenges specific to Indigenous communities in Australia. As part of the EWB Design Challenge, students have the opportunity not only to hear directly from local Indigenous community leaders and the EWB design team but also from members of the UQ EWB Chapter, who are invited to run a preparatory workshop. This workshop is an important course component that provides students with another chance to learn from the experiences of their UQ peers (also studying engineering) who have visited some of these Indigenous communities in the recent past.

The EWB Design Challenge and other complementary classroom conversations around it bring evidence-based, real-life cases that push students to think creatively about their approaches to problem-finding and problem-solving, and, importantly, to step back and consider the broader underlying Indigenous context that often shapes engineering challenges across many remote Australian communities.

Additional resources referred to in the course include work undertaken by the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) based out of Alice Springs. Set up in 1980 as an Aboriginal business, CfAT’s mission is to “research, design, develop and teach appropriate technologies and deliver technical training to Indigenous people living in remote communities” (CfAT, n.d.). CfAT’s work was an accidental find during the course design but has remained a pivotal resource in bringing human-centred design and appropriate technology principles to classroom conversations on humanitarian engineering. Notably, many publicly available videos on CfAT’s work offer critical prompts for discussion in the course workshops, which reinstate among students the value of context-specific engineering solutions that are practical and affordable for remote Indigenous communities. These insights are particularly useful for students as they begin group work on their EWB Design Challenge.

A conceptual distinction between human-centred and Country-centered worldviews (see Figure 2) is a core part of early class discussions about the value of humanitarian engineering. By drawing on the idea of Country-centred design proposed by the Government Architect New South Wales (GANSW) (2023), students find it helpful when making decisions about the final engineering solution from various options for their EWB Design Challenge. Essentially, the Country-centred worldview posits “work[ing] with Country to develop safe and healthy living for the group, in a manner that enacts a custodial role for humans of caring for Country and creating minimal impact on the environment as a self-sustaining system” (Kutay et al., 2022, p. xxiii).

To further complement this conversation, one of the individual assessment pieces in the course asks students to identify an appropriate technology used by the Indigenous peoples in Australia and critique this technology for its “appropriateness” in light of the attributes underpinning appropriate technologies discussed in lectures and other EWB resources.

Other key examples discussed in the course with regard to bringing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues and concerns include the Juukan Gorge case from 2020 (highlighting the societal and cultural risks from poor engineering decision-making), the Vedanta mining case in India (affecting the cultural and environmental wellbeing of India’s tribal communities), the Engawala Indigenous community experience in developing sustainable livelihoods, and climate and health challenges for communities in the Torres Strait Islands and within the PNG–Australia border area.

Progress to date, and student reception

We recognise that this is a new course and that much more needs to be done to Indigenise the ENGG2000 curriculum. However, we believe that, although it is small, it is an important start. Student reception to case studies and examples from Indigenous communities in Australia and other culturally resilient regions globally has been extremely positive. Anecdotally, students are grateful for the knowledge this course shares on topics such as ethics, culture and human-centred design. The EWB Design Challenge is a key course highlight that nudges students to think more creatively and bring empathy and cultural sensitivity to their engineering solutions. Students have successfully drawn core values from this course. For example, in course reviews, students have mentioned this course’s “transformative power” for their future engineering careers. We would like to argue that Indigenising the content has played an important role in shaping these transformations.

The wealth of Indigenous perspectives this course provides to a primarily white, privileged cohort of domestic students is both necessary and valuable (Winn, 2024). It helps re-establish the important societal role of engineering for a sustainable collective future. Hopefully, in doing so, the course will make future engineers more aware of their operating context, better informed of historical legacies and more responsible in adhering to their code of conduct as engineering professionals. So far, student acceptance of and engagement with the course content is promising; and, as educators, we find it reassuring that students are willing to embrace course content that pushes them to think and critically reflect.

Just last year, in 2024, one of our student teams working on an engineering solution to address climate change – a timely, pressing concern for the Saibai Island community in the Torres Strait – had their work on the EWB Design Challenge shortlisted by a panel of judges including community leaders from Saibai. The team was invited to the Design Showcase event in Sydney and won the Best Pitch Award for the Indigenous category. This was an important validation of the course’s efforts in pushing students to address a real-world challenge with an engineering solution that demonstrates a strong sense of community appropriateness and cultural sensitivity. The award is also a timely reminder that, by focusing on engineering habits of mind along with key learning habits, the course is also able to help students build their capability to communicate effectively and tell their engineering solutions story constructively – a further note of encouragement for us and future student cohorts of ENGG2000.

Conclusion and next steps

The Humanitarian Engineering course at UQ, delivered since 2020, contributes to a growing movement advocating much-needed shifts in engineering education (Conlon, 2008; Date & Chandrasekharan, 2024; Karwat, 2020). This recalibration is enabled further by an increasing recognition that, without genuine efforts to identify ways to weave Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into engineering education, the purpose of tertiary institutions to “prepare [engineering] graduates for reflective, socially responsible professional practice” will remain unfulfilled (Bucciarelli, 2008).

Although these are early days still, this course acknowledges and appreciates the importance of Indigenous perspectives in building future engineering leaders’ capabilities. This aligns with several values underpinning Universities Australia’s Indigenous Strategy 2022–2025 (2022), including the foundational contribution of “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ unique knowledge and knowledge systems … to Australia’s intellectual, social and cultural capital” (p. 14). By building on examples, lectures and assessment items centred around local Indigenous contexts, the course asks students to value and demonstrate their understanding of Indigenous Curriculum Design Principles such as Country (including the diversity of Country and peoples) and Truth (about Indigenous knowledge, practices and perspectives).

Student engagement with these topics has been encouraging. Anecdotal evidence from the last five years of course delivery suggests a genuine openness among students to learn more about the value of engineering in addressing complex problems facing diverse Indigenous communities across Australia (from climate change to sustainable livelihoods to preserving cultural heritage). As educators, an ideal next step would be to build on this promising start and identify pathways to engage more directly with Indigenous knowledge holders. This would help build successful relationships and allow students to achieve a deeper ethical and social understanding of the Indigenous milieu and knowledge, both of which have shaped modern Australia’s approach to engineering problem-finding and problem-solving.

Another aspiration for the course team is to work with Indigenous experts both within UQ and externally to co-design and co-deliver a comprehensive module on place-based approaches to engineering. We anticipate this would form important foundational content for the course, helping to further interrogate ways to reconcile the dominant, Aboriginal and engineering perspectives referred to earlier. Significant advances in collective knowledge are evident when Indigenous knowledge has been incorporated into research across other scientific fields, such as ecology and evolution (Jessen et al., 2022). Given the rich experience in innovation and resourcefulness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia over millennia, engineering research and teaching will benefit greatly from a deeper immersion into Indigenous worldviews and experiences.