In the comments section of the original article one will find the following abstract to a paper by the Dean of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education:
“Thermodynamics is a subject area in engineering that is deeply relevant as it deals with energy use in society. However, students often struggle to connect their experiences with energy course content traditionally based in theoretical discoveries from 19th century Western Europe. The work of French philosopher Michel Foucault is similar to thermodynamics in that its abstract poststructuralist theory strikes fear in the hearts of students, but can be made deeply relevant when its understanding is grounded in one’s experience”; abstract to “Power/Knowledge: Using Fourcault to promote critical understandings of content and pedagogy in Engineering Thermodynamics” by Dr. Donna Riley, Dean of Purdue’s School of Engineering Education
The errors, deceptions and diversions in just those three sentences of that abstract boggle one’s mind.
Students struggle with thermo NOT because they can’t connect it with their experiences, but because thermo is hard - and anybody who has taken a course in thermodynamics would know that.
Thermodynamics was not developed as a strictly theoretical proposition, but (as in most science) through an interplay of theory and experiment - heck, one could argue that the fundamental experimentation (which involved careful observation of processes as mundane as the heat generated when boring cannons) was more critical than the development of the mathematical theory related to it.
The fact that thermo was developed largely in 19th century Europe is totally and completely irrelevant - the Carnot cycle would describe a thermodynamic phenomenon equally well whether it was proposed by a Frenchman born in 1796 or a Korean born in 1896 or an Egyptian born in 1696.
The work of Foucault has practically nothing in common with thermodynamics - one would be hard-pressed to find to realms in academia more dissimilar: thermo provides a detailed understanding of a portion of physical reality with profound practical consequences; Foucault postulates a system of philosophical approaches best-described as a load of bull-pucky, which has mostly served the purpose of providing a pay check for poseurs like Riley.
One would hope post-structuralist theory WOULD strike fear in the hearts of undergrads; sadly what it does instead is provide an academic hiding place for students who have neither the intellectual ability nor the work ethic to handle stuff like thermo.
I could go on, but I don’t want to have to hit a booster dose of my blood pressure meds.