About

Dr. Kent Wayland is an Assistant Professor in the science, technology & society program within the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on science, technology, & society, writing, professional ethics, and cross-cultural engineering. He is also the Course Director for a study abroad course in Guatemala titled “Public Health, Engineering, and the Environment: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Community Development.” His research has encompassed a wide range of topics, including the restoration of World War II warplanes, data collection practices of companies like Google and Facebook, and the ethics and practice of student community-engagement projects. With undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia respectively, he has been immersed in the interdisciplinary field of Science & Technology Studies for over a decade. His background includes working as a desk officer at the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Engineering management
• History
• Social psychology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Software engineering
• Aerospace engineering
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Using REU Program Evaluation to Foster Learning through Reflection

  2025-08-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Incorporating Giving Voice to Values (GVV) into an Engineering Ethics Course

  2024-02-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The Department of Engineering and Society instructors at the University of Virginia recently developed a new course on Engineering Ethics aimed at second- and third-year students. Unlike previous courses in the department, the mid-level course emphasizes micro-ethics and employs the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) framework. The emphasis on micro-ethics is timely and appropriate given the polarization and plurality of views and beliefs in our nation and world and the increasingly higher stakes of engineering practice. To help students understand how they can act on their personal ethics, the course also incorporates the GVV material, originally developed for application in business settings. The GVV modules in this course were adapted specifically for use in engineering education, in collaboration with the GVV founder and the Online Ethics Center (OEC) director and are now available through the OEC for anyone to use. This paper provides an overview of the GVV portion of the new course design and discusses initial impressions from piloting the course over three semesters.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Applying STS to Engineering Education: A Comparative Study of STS Minors

  2024

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering

  Their work examines the intersection of law, technology, and culture, with particular interests in materiality, sustainability, and practices of resistance and change

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• REU Program Evaluation: A Valuable Tool for Studying Undergraduate Socialization in Engineering

  2024 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Software engineering

  Abstract This Work in Progress paper introduces a project investigating whether and how a summer research experience relates to undergraduate students' sense of identity and belonging in engineering, understanding of research as a process, and research-related academic and professional skills. We draw from theories of situated learning and socialization into professional communities to ask what and how students learn during an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) summer program in materials science and engineering. In addition, we propose that REU program evaluation data can offer valuable insights into student learning, but that these data are rarely analyzed with regards to research questions. Typically, they are collected, used to evaluate the extent to which a program is meeting its goals for internal improvement and to satisfy funders' requirements, and then discarded. This is a missed opportunity. Furthermore, REU sites typically evaluate their programs with quantitative surveys, even though each site tends to serve only a few dozen students. Surveys designed for large-scale participant pools cannot capture nuances of students' experiences, especially with comparatively low participant numbers. As a result, the effects of research experience on these students' learning and identity are difficult for engineering education researchers to access. This is particularly problematic because many REU sites are designed to serve marginalized populations in engineering and science. Not studying these students' experiences because their sample size is small is inequitable, and contributes to the existing knowledge gap about marginalized populations' experiences and success in engineering. Designing evaluation methods to also produce rich data for research on these small student cohorts is a powerful way to address this inequity and provide important insights into student learning and identity formation. As the program evaluators for a three-year REU site, we pushed the boundaries of traditional program evaluation to generate data that can also be used to address research questions, in addition to conducting cumulative and summative evaluation of the program's effectiveness. To access broader questions about engineering identity, belonging, and comprehension of knowledge production practices among undergraduates, we designed new quantitative and qualitative instruments. These instruments are pre/post surveys and interviews that draw from existing instruments commonly used for REU evaluation (e.g., the SURE, the URSSA, the URES) as well as instruments that capture students' views of the nature of science. In this paper, we share our design process for these instruments, our research methodology (including how we achieved IRB approval for evaluation data), and preliminary results from one summer cohort's survey and interview responses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chapter 3 “It’s Not an Airplane, It’s My Baby” Using a Gender Metaphor to Make Sense of Old Warplanes in North America

  Vehicles · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• From Reverse Culture Shock to Global Competency: Helping Education Abroad Students Learn from the Shock of the Return Home

  2015-07-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The "wrap-around" model of education abroad programming posits that students will learn more and have a lasting, transformative experience if they receive cultural orientation and mentoring before, during, and after their sojourn. Preparation, support and post-processing help students navigate both the culture shock of the trip and the reverse culture shock of the return home. The pre-trip preparation, in some form, is nearly universal, and during the trip educators often have multiple opportunities to help students think through their experience. It is post-trip, or reentry phase, of study abroad that has proved most difficult to implement, due to the practical limitations of student careers and engineering curricula. Yet reentry programming greatly enhances the global competence that engineers can acquire by helping them adjust emotionally and behaviorally and by giving them the opportunity for transformative learning. This emotional, behavioral, and cognitive development enhances their global competence not only by improving their ability interact across cultural lines, but also by helping them synthesize their experience into a new understanding of how engineers define and solve problems differently across cultures. Educators have come up with a variety of strategies for solving this problem and understanding these different strategies might help overcome those practical barriers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Working Across Disciplines and Chipping Away at Silos with SLCE: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Educating Science and Engineering Students

  International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship · 2014-01-05 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A co-curricular approach to service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) designed to begin breaking through these institutional and personal silos that inhibit exchanges of knowledge between students, faculty and communities, is presented. This approach seeks to create a continuum of engagement and learning for students, faculty, and communities to redirect students and faculty away from the drive to solely produce a competitive product (or trophy) and toward an appreciation of the ongoing process of engagement. To construct this continuum, we draw on the idea of an intellectual apprenticeship. The students in this model serve as the apprentices, while the faculty, along with community partners and other colleagues, act as mentors in a guild of “artisans” dedicated to putting useful knowledge into action. We present the principles of engagement that underlay the entire process (respect, reciprocity and relationship), the stages of the apprenticeship, evidence that supports its effectiveness and challenges to the approach. The goal of the paper is to share the approach with the larger community so that others may borrow what they find useful and add what they believe to be missing to ultimately improve experiential education about SLCE for engineers and scientists.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Transparency Isn’t Transparent: Campaign Finance Disclosure and Internet Surveillance

  2013-06-17 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Campaign Disclosure, Privacy and Transparency

  2011-05-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  technology, those who wished to see and copy information in public records had to traipse to a public building, request a record, wait for the staff to find it, carefully read through the record to find the item(s) of interest, and then copy the desired information manually. 5 The physical presence and labor involved resulted in "practical obscurity," 6 that is, the work involved in obtaining access and duplicating information had the effect of protecting the privacy of the information.In the networked world, those built-in protections are removed and there is little or no obscurity.Records can be easily accessed, searched, analyzed, and reconstituted in new forms from nearly anywhere in the world.As early as 1989 in Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Supreme Court recognized that "there is a vast difference between the public records that might be found after a diligent search of courthouse files, county archives, and local police stations throughout the country and a computerized summary located in a single clearinghouse of information." 7 In that decision, the court held that rap sheets were not public information for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, recognizing "the privacy interest in keeping personal facts away from the public eye" 8 and "the privacy interest in maintaining . . .[its] 'practical obscurity.'" 9 Public records or not, the ease of access to personal information made possible by information technology and the Internet has resulted in what Joel Reidenberg refers to as the "transparent citizen," 10 what Dan Solove terms the "digital person," 11 and what Jeffrey Rosen sees as the "unwanted gaze." 12 Personally identifiable information is somewhat up for grabs by those who have money, time, technological skills, and motive.Although the contours and implications of "information societies" have been and continue to be identified, analyzed, and critiqued, the radical shift in what it means for information to be in "public records" is often noted but less often analyzed. 13 An important implication of this shift is an intensification of the tension between privacy and transparency.As Joel Reidenberg points out, the "scope of transparency and the ease of re-purposing are a surprise to data subjects and the public at large." 14 A 5 See SOLOVE, supra note 1, at 131 ("For a long time, public records have been accessible only in the various localities in which they were kept.").

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Bryn Seabrook

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Deborah G. Johnson

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Caroline Crockett

  University of Virginia

  1 shared

• William J. Davis

  Citadel

  1 shared

• Andy Wang

  University of Sydney

  1 shared

• Robert Swap

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  1 shared

• Priscilla M. Regan

  1 shared

• MC Forelle

  University of Virginia

  1 shared