Abstract
This paper raises the question of the philosophical base of a liberal technology education, assuming that it cannot be provided simply by an engineer’s perspective. It therefore reconstructs known ideas about technology in terms of the social relationships inherent in the development, gestalt and use of technical artifacts. The outcomes of this reconstruction are perceptual relationships in the phenomenology of technology, power relationships in critical theory, and artifact-designer relationships in social constructivism. Based on these outcomes, the paper suggests a series of questions for reconstructing the cultural meaning of technology and a structural model that shows how meaning is generated through a variety of social relationships. The final section deals with the educational implications of this approach. These include a shift from teaching content matter isolated from social considerations towards a dialectic engagement with the social and technical dimensions of technological activity in order to make technology education meaningful for all students.
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Hansen, KH. (1997). Science and Technology as Social Relations Towards a Philosophy of Technology for Liberal Education. In: De Vries, M.J., Tamir, A. (eds) Shaping Concepts of Technology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5598-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5598-4_5
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