Developing Social Justice Self-Efficacy in Humanitarian Engineering Graduate Education

Abstract

While humanitarian engineering (HE) programs increasingly emphasize preparing students to engage in social change—from addressing inequitable access to infrastructure and technology in marginalized communities to challenging biases in the workplace and examining norms in engineering organizations that perpetuate inequality—there remains a limited understanding of how these experiences build students’ confidence to engage in social justice activism. This study investigates how HE graduate education influences students’ social justice self-efficacy (SJSE)—their perceived ability to create positive social change across personal, interpersonal, community, and institutional dimensions. Drawing from 88 interviews with 22 students across six HE graduate programs during their first year, we identify a distinct three-phase developmental pattern. Specifically, students often experience (1) a critical exposure phase in fall term coursework that dramatically increased personal SJSE while often decreasing community and institutional dimensions; (2) an integration phase in spring term experiences where students developed more balanced SJSE by identifying specific approaches to social impact while maintaining critical awareness; and (3) a testing phase during summer fieldwork where students confronted the challenges of applying their developing SJSE in real-world contexts. Rather than developing uniformly, students experienced nonlinear, asymmetric growth across SJSE dimensions, often maintaining optimism in one area despite challenges in others. These findings suggest HE education may benefit from providing targeted support during these critical transitions, encouraging specific, more focused engagement in social justice advocacy rather than system-wide transformation, creating opportunities for social justice advocacy practice, and having more of a focus on students’ interpersonal SJSE. This research advances understanding of how HE programs can foster advocates for making engineering more equitable, inclusive, and responsive to marginalized communities’ needs.