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Background: While engineers are pivotal to technological innovation and societal problem-solving, traditional engineering education often inadequately prepares them for societal engagement. Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a pedagogical model that promotes engagement with authentic, sociotechnical, and societal challenges, promising to produce a more socially responsible engineer. Given that CBL is advanced as central to reforming engineering education, it is crucial to understand how the relation between engineering and society is conceptualized in these initiatives.

Purpose: In this paper we analyze CBL as a reform discourse in order to scrutinize what assumptions about engineering are reproduced when CBL is promoted, focusing on the relationship between reformed engineering education and engineers’ societal responsibility.

Method: We investigate recruitment material from a reform initiative that aligns with the tenets of CBL. We utilize discourse analysis to analyze the rationales and interpretative repertoires the reform initiative draws on, as well as the ideological consequences of these discourses.

Results: We find that the reform initiative promises students the opportunity to be, simultaneously, societally important, professionally successful, and technically proficient. Students are not promised much opportunity for critically interrogating established engineering practices. In the process, engineering is mostly separated from sociopolitical concerns and society is equated with industry.

Conclusions: The investigated CBL initiative appears to reproduce rather than renegotiate dominant ways of thinking about engineering. As such, we argue that challenge-based learning as a reform discourse does not necessarily live up to its overarching promise of creating a new and more societally beneficial engineering profession.