Digital sovereignty in education can be described as the ability of the educational community to exercise their agency and self-governance to guarantee that the use of technology is aligned with the purpose of education. The lack of familiarity of educators with critical digital literacy studies often hinders productivity on the debate and practice of its principles, such as ethics, environmental impact, or digital agency. Novice learners, as are often average educators with respect to technology, often fail to represent the problems using domain principles, as experts do. Besides, self-efficacy is known to influence student learning, enabling the transition from motivation to action when positive. Previous studies suggest that in-service teachers commonly lack confidence with respect to their digital competence. Effective analogies can assist educators in critically interpreting technological innovations by activating relevant prior knowledge from their contexts, which facilitates the representational change toward more abstract understandings of technological impact. This paper proposes the analogy with the food sovereignty principles, broadly accepted within educators, and presents an initial qualitative evaluation. The results suggest its potential to address the barriers of misrepresentation and lack of confidence. On the one hand, the analogy is easily understood and allows teachers to identify structural similarities at the level of their educational values, facilitating more abstract representations than their initial encoding. In addition, it is anticipated that, by situating the discussion within domains where teachers feel more confident than in technical topics, they seem more confident to generate new knowledge that facilitates this learning.

1) Contribution: Course aimed at addressing the documented enculturation process in engineering education, which leads to a cognitive dissonance in students between technical and social dimensions, immobilizing the latter. From a learning design perspective, resolving this cognitive dissonance requires the development of learning strategies targeted at achieving a conceptual change. We argue that the minimum needed prior knowledge for this change to happen is already present in students. 2) Background: Engineering education does not happen in isolated but social contexts and is, subsequently, inherently sociotechnical. Despite the growing recognition of the necessity to promote a broader comprehension of engineering identities, there is a disparity in the way curricula are effectively designed and implemented, if they are. The intricate nature of ethics within engineering, encompassing individual, institutional, and cultural dimensions, requires approaches that are both transformative and feasible. 3) Intended Outcomes: The course was designed following the ICAP (Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive) framework on cognitive engagement with a focus on mobilizing existing prior knowledge in both technical and social realms, and assessing its impact on students' approach to learning and their identity as engineers. 4) Application Design: The examination of pre-and post-learning tasks embedded in the learning design indicates that the deliberate activation of students' pre-existing knowledge in ethical, political, cultural, and social domains enhances their awareness of their cognitive dissonance. 5) Findings: The findings suggest that the course activates students' pre-existing knowledge, fostering awareness of cognitive dissonance, and encouraging purposeful engagement with broader knowledge when tackling engineering challenges.