Conference Program

This paper addresses the democratic turn in university STEM education by presenting the embedding model developed and implemented at Politecnico di Milano over the past decade. The democratic turn in university STEM education involves, among others, enriching educational programs through the acquisition of critical and reflective competences concerning scientific research and technological development. Particularly in the education of engineers and designers, sensitivity to the social impacts and ethical dimensions of technology is increasingly becoming a recognized imperative. This is especially evident in leading European technological universities, where subjects such as Critical thinking, Ethics of technology, and Technology and society are becoming part of standard curricula.

The embedding model is a strategy for integrating critical and reflective competences into the educational pathways of engineers and designers, based on the incorporation of SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) experts into technology-focused degree programs and courses. The first part of the paper will describe the model's main characteristics, highlighting its five pillars: not simply SSH disciplines but meta-technoscientific competences; multidisciplinarity; meta-technoscientific competences are not soft skills; embedment; starting from below. The second part will discuss the practice of integrating meta-technoscientific competences into technology design curricula, identifying several key features: the need to adapt conventional disciplinary content for audiences without prior exposure, while maintaining academic rigor; the diverse composition of student cohorts and the consequent value of fostering peer-to-peer learning among students from different disciplines; and the potential to leverage students' technical knowledge to develop case studies and exercises that effectively contextualize meta-technoscientific concepts and theories.

Innovative teaching formats, particularly integrated courses, will be specifically examined to demonstrate that co-teaching by both a technology specialist and an SSH scholar not only shows students the importance of incorporating critical perspectives into technology design but also facilitates mutual training and professional development among teaching staff. Furthermore, the simultaneous presence of both instructors interacting in the classroom illustrates to students that technology design processes should consistently integrate meta-technoscientific competences throughout all stages of development.

The embedding model aims to provide students with basic tools to identify potentially harmful consequences of emerging technologies and possible steps to eliminate and mitigate them in a context in which expert opinion should not override that of non-experts. Graduates should emerge attuned to the risks that even well-designed and working technologies can entail if developed within a technocratic framework and deployed without democratic oversight.

The paper will also provide a critical assessment of the difficulties encountered, the most arduous challenges, and main critical points of the embedding model.

In a complex world filled with controversies, fake news, and misleading communication, training students in critical thinking is of utmost importance.

To do so, the “tribunal for future generations,” a debate format created by the French media “Usbek & Rica,” is proposed as an educational tool. In a dramatized way, real witnesses or experts, testifying for the benefit of future generations, are questioned by a “fake” court composed of an attorney, a prosecutor, and the court president. Through cross-examination and the witnesses’ expertise, this format allows exploration of the complexity of the chosen subject, while the staging provides distance and humor to avoid moralistic speeches [1].

This style of debate was previously used in the STEM community during a scientific conference. In front of materials scientists and students, the question “should we keep inventing new materials” was examined through the insights of academics, industry professionals, specialists in the history of materials, and their future prospects with Sci-Fi.

To actively involve students beyond just attending events, a new “Tribunal for the Future Generations” is being launched at the University of Saint Denis within the Bachelor of Technology department. A group of volunteer students runs a one-year program, ending with the creation and hosting of a final event open to the public. The students receive mentorships every two weeks from a team made up of a researcher and a professional speaker. This changes students' roles from passive attendees to active participants responsible for presenting a controversy [2].

The chosen topic was recycling. Indeed, recycling offers hope that we can keep producing new materials without generating waste or extracting additional raw resources. However, behind this appealing idea, and after many decades of practice, the reality still falls short of the promise. Plastics, metals, paper, and construction debris are still, quite frankly, far from being recycled in sufficient volumes to reduce our society's environmental impact. Will this gap likely decrease significantly in the future? Or was our optimism about this industry's potential misplaced from the start? Is recycling the solution we hoped for to build a more eco-friendly planet?

With this project, students explore various aspects of the topic: materials science, industry technologies, public regulation, the economy, and greenwashing. Being on stage at the final event as president of the court, attorney, and prosecutor requires a broad understanding and a critical eye for this complex subject. Soft skills such as eloquence, event organization, communication, and teamwork are also developed [1].

This presentation will outline the project organization over the year, followed by an evaluation of the outcomes through post-event discussions with participating students and audience surveys. Lastly, the potential of this format to promote critical thinking will be discussed.

Calls to embed responsible research and innovation (RRI) in science and engineering education emphasise the need to cultivate scientists capable of reflexive engagement with the societal dimensions of research and innovation. Yet doctoral training environments often struggle to translate these ambitions into concrete pedagogical and assessment practices. This paper examines an experiment in doctoral STEM education that introduces a deliberative democratic process—a citizens’ assembly—as a central component of assessment within a cohort-based PhD training programme.

The intervention takes place within two Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) at the University of Birmingham. These programmes bring together doctoral researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds but face a common challenge: ensuring that interdisciplinarity is experienced not merely as a structural feature of programmes but as a meaningful intellectual and civic practice. To address this, a module on responsible research and innovation integrates interdisciplinary perspectives with a transdisciplinary assessment in which doctoral researchers design and run their own citizens’ assemblies on controversial scientific topics.

Following a flipped-classroom learning experience involving contributions from scholars in law and history of science as well as external practitioners (including lawyers, entrepreneurs and industry collaborators), students organise assemblies structured around three phases: collective learning, expert engagement and deliberation, and the formulation of recommendations. Students identify topics, curate preparatory materials, recruit speakers and facilitate deliberation themselves. In doing so, they confront the ethical, political and societal dimensions of scientific research while experimenting with deliberative democratic formats typically absent from STEM training.

Drawing on five cohorts of doctoral researchers, we present survey data and qualitative evidence demonstrating how this assessment format reshapes students’ perceptions of their roles as scientists. Students consistently identify the citizens’ assembly as the most transformative component of the module, highlighting its capacity to surface plural perspectives, challenge disciplinary assumptions and foster critical reflection on research trajectories. Topics selected by students range across emerging technological and environmental controversies, providing a lens through which to analyse how scientists-in-training engage with contested futures.

We also explore higher-order effects extending beyond individual students. Evidence from interviews and programme observations suggests that the experience has influenced doctoral researchers’ behaviour in subsequent industrial internships, informed discussions within research groups, and shaped the thinking of CDT leadership and professional staff involved in doctoral training. These developments illustrate how democratic pedagogies can ripple outward through research cultures and institutional practices.

Finally, we reflect on the future development of such pedagogies. Current assemblies operate as internal educational simulations, raising questions about how and whether public participants should be integrated into assessed learning environments. Ongoing work exploring hybrid deliberative formats (including collaboration with initiatives such as the Tribunal for Future Generations) suggests possible pathways for connecting doctoral training more directly with public deliberation and stakeholder engagement. These developments open new possibilities for democratic forms of science education capable of reshaping both doctoral training and wider innovation cultures.

Gender disparity in scientific careers is not merely a quantitative imbalance but the result of cultural and symbolic structures that shape expectations, roles, and models of competence recognition. As Ernst Cassirer highlights, the symbolic categories through which we interpret reality contribute to consolidating dualisms and hierarchies that influence the distribution of opportunities. Within this framework, the gender gap in technical-scientific environments cannot be addressed solely through access policies; it requires interventions capable of influencing the cultural mechanisms and organizational practices that ensure its reproduction. This contribution analyzes the training experience developed at the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), conceived as a pedagogical device aimed at transforming organizational culture. The assumption is that the staff of a research institution are not only recipients of training but also social actors. Researchers operate as mentors, contributing to the transmission of cultural models. In line with John Dewey’s vision, training is understood as a transformative educational experience: a process of rethinking judgment capable of transforming the work environment into a space of dialogue and respect. From this perspective, deconstructing gender bias acquires a value that transcends the professional sphere, influencing the educational and social role of employees. As suggested by Erving Goffman’s sociology, individuals act according to social “scripts” and gender representations. The objective of the training is therefore to lay the groundwork for rewriting these models, providing researchers with the tools to act as multipliers of change within socialization processes. The aim is to counter stereotypes that influence educational trajectories and aspirations toward STEM disciplines among younger generations. The program, launched approximately eighteen months ago, has involved a significant percentage of the Institute’s personnel through courses dedicated to Gender-based Violence in the Workplace: Stereotypes, Recognition, and Effective Interventions. The phenomenon of violence was addressed through multidisciplinary contributions and considered the extreme outcome of specific cultural dynamics. The project’s different editions focused on several themes—particularly stereotypes and socialization—and included workshops designed to translate theory into reflective practice. The initiative aimed to reveal the mechanisms that shape thought and to examine the role of socialization in the normalization of discriminatory behaviors. Gender biases were interpreted as “habitus” (Bourdieu), understood as embodied social structures that guide individuals’ actions through forms of symbolic violence. The courses were designed according to the principles of experiential pedagogy. Moving beyond a purely transmissive model, an interactive communicative style was prioritized. Through storytelling, personal examples, and the analysis of regulations using historical case studies, the training became a dialogical process capable of generating emotional and cognitive engagement. This experience provides a framework for understanding the cultural structures and superstructures underlying inequalities. The educational goal is to encourage a revision of staff members’ interpretive lenses, positioning training as a lever that extends beyond institutional boundaries. The intention is to foster participants’ development as promoters of awareness, enabling them to rethink relationships within the organizational context and to support, in schools and homes, the aspirations and freedom of choice of those who will shape the science of tomorrow.

Recent developments in STEM education raise a key pedagogical question that has implications for democratic and critical citizenship: how should future scientists and engineers be educated in a global context shaped by uncertainty, the rise of populist politics and techno-deterministic outlooks, and a retreat from critical global conversations into the nation-state container? This paper explores this topic by conducting a systematic review of scholarship on the nexus between STEM education and the humanities in higher education to examine whether, and under what conditions, humanities-integrated pedagogies cultivate the reflexive and deliberative capacities required for critical and democratic science education. Based on a preliminary assessment of the literature, the paper argues that giving STEM education a critical and humanistic edge requires more than the addition of participatory techniques to existing curricula and requires the embedding of pedagogical designs that reopen crucial and relational questions related to knowledge, methods of knowing and public responsibility within STEM itself, making the humanities not just ancillary to democratic STEM education but rather its integral parts.

What were the didactic objectives of medical education in the second half of the eighteenth century? How were physicians-in-training expected to cultivate the intellectual skills necessary to critically assess observations and transform experience into reliable clinical understanding?

The aim of the proposal is to examine the canon of medical education in the Scottish Enlightenment through the case of the published Lectures on Materia Medica (1773), delivered by William Cullen at the University of Edinburgh in 1761, historically reconstructing the training needs identified for medical students and the pedagogical practices employed, with a focus on the analysis of the course’s introductory discourse.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the University of Edinburgh had emerged as a leading center of medical education in the anglophone context (Ritchie, 1928). The Faculty of Medicine, formally established in 1726, offered structured lectures and practical training in anatomy, dissection, and clinical observation, building on earlier developments in European centers such as Leiden, where hospital practice and bedside instruction had been introduced (Kaufman, 2005; Reinarz, 2008; Parent, 2016). Within this context, William Cullen, professor of Materia Medica, sought to provide a critical approach to medical training. By defining Materia Medica as the “knowledge of all the Substances or Preparations employed in Diet or Medicine”, he considers every subject around four main components: “1st, its knowledge, or the method of distinguishing it; 2d, its virtues in diet or in medicine; 3d, the foundation of those virtues in the sensible qualities, or its chemical properties; 4th, its particular application to medicine, or its pharmaceutical treatment” (Cullen, 1773, p. 1).

This systematic framework reflects Cullen’s acknowledgement of the limitations of experience alone, “liable to so many errors of ignorant or deceitful men,” and highlights to the necessity of developing critical thinking in order to select “pauca scire quam multa opinari” (Cullen, 1773, p.1).

In his didactic design Cullen provides students with a method for assessing the properties of substances, in order to apply it in clinical practice. For instance, he notes that “Colour, of all methods of knowing the virtues of subjects a priori, is the most uncertain; Smell, extends a little farther; but Taste is the most extensive of all three” (Cullen, 1773, pp. 1–2). Through the combination of observation, sensory evaluation, and critical thinking, Cullen identifies the intellectual skills necessary to develope clinical judgment and independent reasoning: “analysis strictly chemical, is now found to be of no use; that of resolving bodies into their native principles, is more extensive, and often enables us to separate the salutary from the pernicious principles” (Cullen, 1773, p. 2).

Cullen’s teaching exemplifies how the development of intellectual skills was recognized as a central need in eighteenth-century medical education, when a vast body of observations had accumulated, making it necessary for students to navigate the material and identify reliable knowledge. The study of Cullen’s Lectures thus testifies to the pedagogical aims of medical education, providing a model for the formation of physicians in the Enlightenment context.