Without disciplined reflection on the past and associations with influential
and diverse groups beyond science and engineering, the field of technology education will not be able to provide its teachers adequate tools for understanding relationships between technology and society in the past and present. Historical analysis can help develop a professional capacity for understanding the role of human choice and freedom in technology and education. Contextualizing our heritage can improve critical thinking if we teach stories of how people designed and constructed technology in their own
contexts. We must avoid teaching a simplistic ideology of “effects” and a timeline of decontextualized artifacts and processes portrayed as a canon with a predictable, linear trajectory. Such teaching reinforces a deterministic view of history that makes it difficult to instill in students the importance of human choice and responsibility in design decisions. Teaching a contextualist heritage will increase the field’s capacity for reflection and analysis, and for designing standards that are flexible and that stimulate interest in alternate choices. As a result of changing from an “American” (AIAA) to an “International” (ITEA) orientation, Americans need to make a radical reassessment of what it means to be a professional who looks beyond narrow American nationalism.