Are we misunderstanding our students?

At the beginning of every semester, I ask my students why they signed up for my course. I did the same a week ago as our semester got underway. My class is aimed at understanding health challenges faced by refugees and those who are forcibly displaced due to conflict and other factors. We focus on developing engineering solutions to address the health challenges faced by these communities. As a policy, I do not allow students to use computers or any electronic devices in the class – they have to write on paper, and I do my best to use the black (or white board) instead of powerpoint presentations. Lately, I have also added weekly in class writing assignments (on paper), with the hope that I will get to learn directly from students and their perspectives, instead of getting summaries generated by LLMs. My students are smart, well-informed, thoughtful and knowledgeable – I am far more interested in what they have to say and share than what generative AI creates.

The first time I offered the class, a couple of years ago, it exceeded my expectations and had 30 plus students. Last year, the number increased to mid-40s, and this year I had to increase the class size to 60. Not only did all available slots get taken, I have a few students who are on waitlist and want to enroll.

With this information in mind, I asked my students (in class) to fill an anonymous survey about why they would want to take this course when there are so many other options. Many wrote that they are interested in seeing how engineering approaches can be applied towards addressing the concerns of communities that are displaced globally. A few mentioned their interest given the state of the world. Some had family experiences with displacement. But a sizeable number of students wrote that they really like the idea of reading and writing in addition to engineering design, and want to take a class where the emphasis is on original ideas, creativity and not generative AI tools.

Intrigued, I spoke to some students after I had the chance to go through the comments. What I found was troubling: my students, who all come from engineering, are being given the message through their training that science and engineering is all about doing, and for some reason, they do not need to read broadly or know how to write seriously. The idea that an engineering class can also have a serious reading expectation, with readings that are not just technical but come from variety of disciplines (including creative works), and the students have to actually write themselves for a broad audience, while at the same time doing rigorous mathematical modeling and engineering design is highly unusual for them. I have long been concerned that students in science and engineering do not read enough, but what has bothered me increasingly is that they are being taught that they do not need to read to succeed and that somehow serious reading is for others who are humanists or social scientists.

I am also troubled because numerous other colleagues around the world have documented that students are hungry for longer engagement that poses deeper questions, are more than willing to accept situations that encourage them to disconnect from devices, and are not as dependent on AI as we think they are. As instructors we tend to imagine that students just want the easy way out, are addicted to devices, and not interested in doing the hard labour of writing by hand. And since we live in that imagined world, we act accordingly. But from my own interactions, I now believe that the bigger problem is perhaps with the teachers, not the students. We are the ones who are looking for the easy way out.

In the midst of the world that we live in, where injustice is pervasive, we need our future leaders to be honest, thoughtful, kind and caring. The road to that destination is not built by efficiency and algorithms, but serious engagement and reflections of our decisions, including what we choose to build. The students are ready for those reflections, but I am not sure if the teachers are.