Humanising pedagogies in transdisciplinary education: Promoting critical thinking, empathy, and ethical awareness in real-world problem-solving

Engineering education has traditionally emphasised technical expertise and objective knowledge. While essential, this focus alone is insufficient to equip students to address the relational, ethical, and societal complexities of modern challenges. By integrating humanising pedagogies, including transdisciplinary approaches and Joan Tronto's Ethics of Care, engineering education can foster critical thinking, empathy, and ethical awareness necessary to address complex, interconnected societal issues requiring nuanced, collaborative solutions. This study aims to evaluate how integrating care ethics into transdisciplinary education can foster critical thinking, ethical awareness, and relational understanding among students. It focuses on a design-thinking hackathon challenge, Innovation Days (i-Days), supported by EIT Health. The event brought together students from diverse disciplines to address health literacy and access to clean water in Entebbe, Uganda. Employing design-thinking workshops and reflective practices, students collaboratively developed innovative solutions. Using Rolfe et al.'s 'What? So What? Now What?' reflective model, the study analysed student experiences, revealing growth in collaboration, communication, and critical reflection. However, the findings also highlight the challenges of fostering deeper contextual sensitivity, meaningful stakeholder engagement, and care-based approaches necessary to realise the potential for local and global impact. By situating engineering education within a transdisciplinary framework, this study explores how care ethics equips students to address societal complexities. Applying Tronto's Ethics of Care framework, the study examines key ethical elements-attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and caring with-while acknowledging gaps in responsiveness and stakeholder collaboration. While the project successfully fostered initial awareness of societal issues and promoted shared responsibility within teams, its limited engagement with the Ugandan community underscored the need for more structured and sustained support systems. This approach demonstrates the potential of embedding care ethics into education to prepare students to tackle relational, ethical, and societal complexities, but also highlights the need for enhanced practices that prioritise inclusivity and co-creation in addressing intricate global challenges. By positioning the ethics of care as a cornerstone of humanising pedagogies, this study explores how embedding care ethics into education can enable students to design solutions that prioritise the well-being of people and the planet. It highlights the potential for fostering collaboration, effective communication, and the ability to navigate uncertainty when addressing societal complexities. However, the findings emphasise the importance of structured support, sustained stakeholder engagement, and inclusivity to fully realise these goals. By increasing exposure to care-based, transdisciplinary projects, engineering education can help students build confidence and competence in addressing wicked problems through empathy, contextual understanding, and responsiveness to the specific needs of those involved.