The IMPACTS curriculum: education for creating citizens in an expert-controlled, changing technological society

This paper presents the IMPACTS undergraduate curriculum that makes graduates citizens within the complex cascadingly changing technological society, i.e., that makes them “Technological Citizens”. “IMPACTS” stands for -Interdisciplinary Modular Program for Achieving Citizenship in Technological Society.” It is a set of educational goals and learning modules woven into the extant undergraduate curriculum. Topics germane to attuning students to their technological society include (1) scientific literacy, (2) knowledge about how technologies are governed, (3) protean ethos, or the consciousness of how change works and how to continually learn and adapt to it, (4) engineering and scientific ethics, (5) civic virtue, (6) knowledge about epistemology and methods by which experts claim power through the framing of issues, (7) environmental studies. IMPACTS transcends mere open-ended scientific literacy. As the educational component of Technological Citizenship, IMPACTS empowers students. It places limits upon how much students need learn via limits on how complex the society is permitted to be