Research and Education Reform
Some of us who pursue a career in higher education also become involved in education and research reform. My contributions in this area involve interdisciplinary collaborations. Even at an early stage of my career, I was involved in interdisciplinary teaching and research. My first college-level appointment was in Colgate University’s Interdisciplinary Writing Program. By the late 1980s, the reform movement known as “writing across the curriculum” had already taken root in many colleges and universities, but Colgate took an additional step beyond finding faculty in other departments who would teach writing in the disciplines. Colgate’s writing program brought faculty from diverse fields into the Interdisciplinary Writing Program to focus on teaching writing. This approach to “writing across the curriculum” resulted in a publication called “Hiring across the Curriculum” (Howard et al. 1990). Although the teaching load was high and there were no graduate students, I learned a great deal about writing and teaching writing, and thirty years later I teach an interdisciplinary capstone seminar in Environmental and Sustainability Studies that is a “W” course with a focus on research and writing in the disciplines.
At Rensselaer, I became involved in another interdisciplinary initiative known by its acronym PDI. The acronym stood for “product design and innovation,” but I later encouraged the broader meaning of “program in design and innovation” because it went beyond product design. PDI was an initiative led by faculty in engineering (Gary Gabriele, Mark Steiner, and Burt Swersey), architecture (Frances Bronet), Arts (Larry Kagan), and STS (Ron Eglash, Linda Layne, Dean Nieusma, John Schumacher, and Langdon Winner). The program has survived years of turn-over, deaths of core faculty, and budget cuts, and a new generation now leads it. In many ways, John Schumacher, the former chair of STS, was the leading figure in the program. Before he died, he asked me to try to keep it alive because it was his legacy. When I became department chair, I attempted to maintain the program and to institutionalize it, and to that end I developed the unique major called “Design, Innovation, and Society.”
PDI was configured to allow students to have a second major in an engineering field, management, building science, or graphic arts. The core of the program was an interdisciplinary design studio taught every semester to introduce students to a wide range of perspectives in the design professions. For engineering students, they had the opportunity to start inventing and making things during their very first semester, rather than waiting until much later in their college careers. The STS component also taught students to think about what and for whom to design, design for profit and not for profit, social equity, environmental sustainability, and other aspects of design thinking and societal implications of technical and material choices. A publication that describes the program in its early stage is listed below, and the experience informs my ongoing work on “sociotechnical” and “design” thinking in STS.
At Vanderbilt, I also continued to work on interdisciplinary approaches to innovation in research and teaching. I served as the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment, where we worked to develop connections among faculty and students across all schools that could become the basis of innovative, team-based research projects. As Director of the Program in Climate and Environmental Studies, I worked with colleagues to develop a new minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and during the 2010-2020 decade I worked on various initiatives to institutionalize environmental curriculum in the College of Arts and Science. As I worked on curriculum reform, I came to see the need for a stronger core curriculum that included climate change education, and I published a few articles in support of bringing climate change education into the college core curriculum. I continue to nudge my colleagues toward developing something similar to writing across the curriculum for climate change education (what I have been calling “climate change across the curriculum”). In 2021-2022, as part of the college's grand challenge initiative in Climate Change and Society, we developed an innovative new major in climate studies that includes perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.
After 2017, I also began to work with computer scientists in projects involving artificial intelligence and machine learning in the energy and transportation fields. These projects brought me back to the bittersweet task of editing the papers of the late Diana Forsythe, which I had done after her untimely death, and to the interdisciplinary conversations she had with computer scientists. Part of the current collaboration includes cross-training of engineering and social science students, a task that I was able to embrace based on my experience with PDI. These collaborations have led to a forthcoming paper on sociotechnical approaches to responsible research and innovation. I hope to have the paper published in 2021. These papers were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, PIRE-OISE. See all research for the list of papers (on automated vehicles, transactive energy, and drones). I list below the central paper that outlines the approach I developed with Dasom Lee and other colleagues for research and teaching in this area.
2021. David J. Hess, Dasom Lee, Bianca Biebl, Martin Fränzle, Sebastian Lehnhoff, Himanshu Neema, Jürgen Niehaus, Alexander Pretschner, and Janos Sztipanovits. A Sociotechnical Design Perspective on Responsible Innovation: Perspectives on Problem Finding for Multidisciplinary Research on Digitized Energy and Automated Vehicles. Journal of Responsible Innovation 8(3): 421-444. Available open access at the journal web site.
2019. David Hess and Alexander Maki. “Climate Change Belief, Sustainability Education and Political Values: Assessing the Need for Higher-Education Curriculum Reform.” Journal of Cleaner Production 228: 1157-1166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.04.291 Final manuscript here.
2018 “We aren’t teaching what students need to know about climate science.” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8 Available here.
2018. David J. Hess and Brandi Collins. Climate Change and Higher Education: Assessing and Improving the College Core. Journal of Cleaner Production 170: 1451-1458. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.215. Final prepublication version here.
2003 “Product Design and Innovation: Evolution of an Interdisciplinary Design Curriculum.” By Frances Bronet, Ron Eglash, Gary Gabriele, David Hess, and Larry Kagan. International Journal of Engineering Education (IJEE) 19(1): 183-191. Available here.
2001. Forsythe, Diana. Studying those who study us: An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. Stanford University Press. Edited and with an introduction by David Hess. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001; Google Scholar Preview).
1990 “Hiring Across the Curriculum,” by Rebecca Howard, David Hess, and Margaret Darby. Writing Program Administration 13(3): 27-36. Final version here.
Sponsorship:
2000-2003. National Science Foundation, “Product Design in Innovation,” 9950931, Division of Undergraduate Education. I was the lead implementer of the grant in its second and third years.
2017-2022. Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation, OISE-1743772, Partnerships for International Science and Engineering (PIRE) Program,"Science of Design for Societal-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems."
At Rensselaer, I became involved in another interdisciplinary initiative known by its acronym PDI. The acronym stood for “product design and innovation,” but I later encouraged the broader meaning of “program in design and innovation” because it went beyond product design. PDI was an initiative led by faculty in engineering (Gary Gabriele, Mark Steiner, and Burt Swersey), architecture (Frances Bronet), Arts (Larry Kagan), and STS (Ron Eglash, Linda Layne, Dean Nieusma, John Schumacher, and Langdon Winner). The program has survived years of turn-over, deaths of core faculty, and budget cuts, and a new generation now leads it. In many ways, John Schumacher, the former chair of STS, was the leading figure in the program. Before he died, he asked me to try to keep it alive because it was his legacy. When I became department chair, I attempted to maintain the program and to institutionalize it, and to that end I developed the unique major called “Design, Innovation, and Society.”
PDI was configured to allow students to have a second major in an engineering field, management, building science, or graphic arts. The core of the program was an interdisciplinary design studio taught every semester to introduce students to a wide range of perspectives in the design professions. For engineering students, they had the opportunity to start inventing and making things during their very first semester, rather than waiting until much later in their college careers. The STS component also taught students to think about what and for whom to design, design for profit and not for profit, social equity, environmental sustainability, and other aspects of design thinking and societal implications of technical and material choices. A publication that describes the program in its early stage is listed below, and the experience informs my ongoing work on “sociotechnical” and “design” thinking in STS.
At Vanderbilt, I also continued to work on interdisciplinary approaches to innovation in research and teaching. I served as the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment, where we worked to develop connections among faculty and students across all schools that could become the basis of innovative, team-based research projects. As Director of the Program in Climate and Environmental Studies, I worked with colleagues to develop a new minor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and during the 2010-2020 decade I worked on various initiatives to institutionalize environmental curriculum in the College of Arts and Science. As I worked on curriculum reform, I came to see the need for a stronger core curriculum that included climate change education, and I published a few articles in support of bringing climate change education into the college core curriculum. I continue to nudge my colleagues toward developing something similar to writing across the curriculum for climate change education (what I have been calling “climate change across the curriculum”). In 2021-2022, as part of the college's grand challenge initiative in Climate Change and Society, we developed an innovative new major in climate studies that includes perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.
After 2017, I also began to work with computer scientists in projects involving artificial intelligence and machine learning in the energy and transportation fields. These projects brought me back to the bittersweet task of editing the papers of the late Diana Forsythe, which I had done after her untimely death, and to the interdisciplinary conversations she had with computer scientists. Part of the current collaboration includes cross-training of engineering and social science students, a task that I was able to embrace based on my experience with PDI. These collaborations have led to a forthcoming paper on sociotechnical approaches to responsible research and innovation. I hope to have the paper published in 2021. These papers were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, PIRE-OISE. See all research for the list of papers (on automated vehicles, transactive energy, and drones). I list below the central paper that outlines the approach I developed with Dasom Lee and other colleagues for research and teaching in this area.
2021. David J. Hess, Dasom Lee, Bianca Biebl, Martin Fränzle, Sebastian Lehnhoff, Himanshu Neema, Jürgen Niehaus, Alexander Pretschner, and Janos Sztipanovits. A Sociotechnical Design Perspective on Responsible Innovation: Perspectives on Problem Finding for Multidisciplinary Research on Digitized Energy and Automated Vehicles. Journal of Responsible Innovation 8(3): 421-444. Available open access at the journal web site.
2019. David Hess and Alexander Maki. “Climate Change Belief, Sustainability Education and Political Values: Assessing the Need for Higher-Education Curriculum Reform.” Journal of Cleaner Production 228: 1157-1166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.04.291 Final manuscript here.
2018 “We aren’t teaching what students need to know about climate science.” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8 Available here.
2018. David J. Hess and Brandi Collins. Climate Change and Higher Education: Assessing and Improving the College Core. Journal of Cleaner Production 170: 1451-1458. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.215. Final prepublication version here.
2003 “Product Design and Innovation: Evolution of an Interdisciplinary Design Curriculum.” By Frances Bronet, Ron Eglash, Gary Gabriele, David Hess, and Larry Kagan. International Journal of Engineering Education (IJEE) 19(1): 183-191. Available here.
2001. Forsythe, Diana. Studying those who study us: An anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. Stanford University Press. Edited and with an introduction by David Hess. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001; Google Scholar Preview).
1990 “Hiring Across the Curriculum,” by Rebecca Howard, David Hess, and Margaret Darby. Writing Program Administration 13(3): 27-36. Final version here.
Sponsorship:
2000-2003. National Science Foundation, “Product Design in Innovation,” 9950931, Division of Undergraduate Education. I was the lead implementer of the grant in its second and third years.
2017-2022. Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation, OISE-1743772, Partnerships for International Science and Engineering (PIRE) Program,"Science of Design for Societal-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems."