Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - I: Overcoming Disjunctures in the Cultivation of Professional Skill Sets

Abstract

This session is the first of two INES (International Network for Engineering Studies) sponsored panels on contemporary efforts to transform engineering education. Building on the impulse created by nationalistic dialogues surrounding economic globalization, engineering programs especially in advanced industrial economies have sought to cultivate broader “professional skill sets” within their engineering graduates. However, history shows that academic institutions during the Cold War cultivated other capacities and commitments, especially knowledge creation and research. Today’s students also enter higher education with their own expectations about the purpose of a college education and an engineering degree. The first paper here builds from an on-the ground effort to implement the expanded focus on professional skill sets in a capstone engineering design course (Caron, Concordia University), while the second maps how the disjuncture plays out for engineering graduates in their first real position in industry (Smith, Colo. Sch. Mines). The remaining papers offer a deeper look at the competing value systems within a research university that reveal the mismatch between the faculty’s implied intentions regarding socialization and the students’ own imaginaries about engineering professional identity (Wylie, U Va.); plus a broader probe for how students perceive and navigate through the new emphasis on professional ethics and social responsibility (Cieminski, Rensselaer; Nieusma, Colo. Sch. Mines). Reminiscent of Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss’s classic study, Boys in White, this set of papers examines the implicit process of socialization and professional identity formation that occurs through the actual experiences of students encountering a reformed engineering curriculum.

Chair

• Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Individual Presentations

• Constructive Technology Assessment as Engineering Pedagogy - Brandiff Caron, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

• Engineering Accountability in the Extractive Industries: From Classrooms to Corporations - Jessica Mary Smith, Colorado School of Mines

• Engineering for Self or Society? How Undergraduate Engineers Learn to Value Research - Caitlin Donahue Wylie, University of Virginia

• Interrupted Identities and Engineering Ethics: Ability, Relationships, and the Public and Private of Engineering - Mitchell Cieminski, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Dean Nieusma, Colorado School of Mines

Session Organizers

• Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Vivian Anette Lagesen, NTNU

• Amy Sue Bix, Iowa State University

• Alice Clifton, Georgia Tech