Juan C. Lucena

Engineers, development, and engineering education: From national to sustainable community development

In October 2007, Norman Borlaug wrote in Science magazine that ‘more than 200 science journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish papers on global poverty and human development – a collaborative effort to increase awareness, interest, and research about these important issues of our time’. Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and father of the green revolution, was demonstrating that the scientific community is at last taking questions seriously of sustainability and development. Borlaugs own contentious role in the history of ‘development,’ however, points to the complexity of the term and the contested role scientists and engineers have played in that history. As engineering education initiatives incorporating sustainable development practices proliferate, it becomes ever more important to understand the historical lessons of development and the contributions of engineers. This paper outlines a history of engineering practice and education in relationship to development, sustainable development, and community development to help those committed to making engineering education relevant to environmental protection and community needs to better understand the challenges ahead.

Where is ‘Community’?: Engineering education and sustainable community development

Sustainable development initiatives are proliferating in the US and Europe as engineering educators seek to provide students with knowledge and skills to design technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Many such initiatives involve students from the ‘North,’ or ‘developed’ world building projects for villages or communities in the ‘South.’ Sustainable development projects in engineering education are being lauded for meeting multiple educational outcomes and providing students with important international training. This paper argues that such programmes need to educate students to think critically about their role as development professionals, to understand and value the role of community in development projects, and to develop long-term assessment criteria for such projects. It argues that engineering educators need to meaningfully engage the ‘community’ in sustainable community development.

Globalization and organizational change: engineers’ experiences and their implications for engineering education

The demand for flexible engineers presents significant challenges to engineering education. Among these is the need for engineers to be prepared to understand and deal with organizational change. Yet engineering education and research on engineers have overlooked the impact of organizational change on engineering work. After outlining the impact of globalization on organizational change, this paper contributes to our understanding of how engineers experienced organizational change immediately after a merger when two major aerospace companies came together, bringing two different corporate cultures together and different models for the organization of work. Based on the analysis of these experiences, this paper offers, first, a hypothesis connecting engineers’ educational experiences with their responses to organizational change and, second, a curriculum proposal to help students prepare for the complex experiences of engineering work in ever changing organizations.

Flexible Engineers: History, Challenges, and Opportunities for Engineering Education

Flexibility is a desired characteristic that people must have to adjust to inevitable processes of economic, cultural, and political globalization. Engineering education reform is often used as a justification for changes in curricula, delivery modes, and problem solving that should lead to curriculum integration, modular pedagogies, and systemic reform. Some educators have incorporated the concept in their programs and courses in a variety of ways whereas others have resisted changes to this day. Yet a detailed analysis of the meanings of flexibility, its origins and different forms, along with its challenges and opportunities for engineering education, remains to be done. This article surveys the historical origins of flexibility, identifies different forms of flexibility in engineering education, outlines existing challenges to flexibility-drive educational reform, and provides alternative views to the existing interpretation of flexibility in engineering education.

The Problem of Knowledge in Incorporating Humanitarian Ethics in Engineering Education: Barriers and Opportunities

After both providing a brief overview of historical and connections between engineering practice and humanitarian efforts and noting the qualitative research methodology used, we describe an investigation into the barriers and opportunities in implementing a new initiative in humanitarian engineering ethics (HEE). As the first phase toward HEE implementation, the authors interviewed engineering educators and students to better understand the types of barriers and opportunities implicit and explicit in launching HEE. Study participants reported barriers and opportunities that can be categorized according to the problem of knowledge on three dimensions: the organization, content, and hierarchy of knowledge in current engineering disciplines. These dimensions include the notions that knowledge is and has been organized along disciplinary lines, that the engineering sciences curriculum promotes particularly dominant problem-solving methods, and that some knowledge is valued over other types of knowledge. Study participants also suggested possible opportunities for addressing barriers

Imagining nation, envisioning progress: emperor, agricultural elites, and imperial ministers in search of engineers in 19th century Brazil

This study shows how the development of engineering schools in 19th century Brazil is intimately linked with images of nation and visions of progress held by social actors who materialized these into engineering schools, curricula, and graduates. The study proposes that theories of nation present interesting conceptual and empirical challenges for engineering studies scholars by inviting us to explain the emergence and preeminence of engineering education in relationship to the emergence of nation. The article shows that in 19th century Brazil there were a number of competing images and corresponding visions of progress that significantly shaped the development of Brazils engineering education institutions. One such image was championed by the Emperor Pedro II who wanted to reaffirm Brazil as a civilized empire on par with France and the US. Another was defended by regional elites and defined in terms of agricultural development of their local regions. A third one was endorsed by an alliance of imperial ministers and business entrepreneurs who viewed Brazil as a future industrial nation. During Brazils Second Empire (1840–1889), no image became dominant. Yet each one materialized in a different kind of engineering education, including curricula, institutions, and graduates and set trajectories for Brazilian engineering education from late 19th century well into the 20th. Finally, this study invites engineering education reformers and policymakers to consider the importance of images of nation and visions of progress for engineering education in order to effectively strategize in their reform and policy initiatives.

Invisible innovators: how low-income, first-generation students use their funds of knowledge to belong in engineering

ABSTRACT Though engineering is often perceived as a pathway of upward mobility in the United States, very little is known about the experiences of undergraduate engineering students who come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college. The little research that does exist on low-income, first-generation (LIFG) engineering students is grounded in a deficiency perspective that emphasizes the barriers these students face: greater feelings of financial pressure and curriculum overload, along with lower family support, confidence in technical skill sets, satisfaction with instructors and satisfaction with the overall college experience. Our ethnographic research with LIFG students at a public engineering university and community college reveals that these barriers can create a sense of belonging uncertainty for them as engineering students. Yet our students were also able to draw on the funds of knowledge they acquired growing up in poor families and, when these funds of knowledge are validated, they establish a sense of belonging in engineering education and the profession.

Special issue introduction - From region to countries: engineering education in bahrain, egypt, and turkey

rior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, Americans tended to have relatively little interest in the region of the world they understood abstractly as the “Middle East.” Indeed, over the previous three decades, the Middle East had emerged as visible to Americans mainly in news reports about conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians and about potential threats to the supply of oil. Largely ignorant of the peoples and histories making up this part of the world, Americans tended to lump them together with a regional identifier. After September 11, this tendency continued, but with the additional unfortunate feature of connecting the region and the peoples within it to terrorism. Indeed, one effect of the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been to further cement American attention on the Middle East, as military strategies unfolded in maps that included the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Central Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to extrapolate from the few to the many. At the same time, the experience of September 11 generated expanded interest among engineering students and engineering faculty in the United States in achieving greater understanding of peoples and issues in the region. For example, students enrolled in an Introduction to Global Issues course taught by one of us, nearly all of whom had been born after the Iranian Revolution and Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979, began raising serious questions about the Middle East, in many cases for the first time in their lives. They moved beyond regional generalizations to inquire into contrasts among people from the region, such as differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and, for one student group, different views of technology held by Muslim engineering students and leaders of a local mosque. Interest in the Middle East also expanded among engineering faculty and administrators. For example, at engineering schools whose oil-related programs have historically attracted students and faculty from the “Middle East” region, admission officers developed strategies to keep their institutions attractive to international students. Student organizations throughout the country sought to create more welcoming environments for those Middle Eastern students who did come. Nationally, university administrators have responded quickly and enthusiastically to funded invitations to build new educational institutions in the P

Engineering and engineering education in egypt

Engineering education in Egypt is a mirror of the countrys history, a result of the confluence of foreign influences (French, British, Swiss, German, Soviet, American) and national desires for sovereignty, development, and Pan-Arabism. American political and economic influence in the most recent period can be seen in the current dominance of the Anglo-Saxon model in engineering education, particularly in such disciplines as electronics, telecommunications, computer engineering, petroleum engineering, biomedical engineering, and aeronautical engineering

Engineering Ethics and Engineering Identities: Crossing National Borders

This article describes and accounts for variable interests in engineering ethics in the United States, France, Germany, and Japan by locating recent initiatives in relation to the evolving identities of engineers. A key issue in ethics education for engineers concerns relationships between the identities of engineers and the contents and responsibilities of engineering work. These relationships have varied significantly over time and from country to country around the world. One methodological strategy for sorting out similarities and differences in engineers’ identities is to examine who counts as an engineer, or what makes an engineer. The significant interest in engineering ethics in the United States has been linked to difficulties in adding professional identities to corporate employment. While engineering ethics has attracted little interest in France and formal education in the subject might very well be seen as insulting, German engineering societies have, since the conclusion of World War II, demanded from engineers a strong commitment to social responsibility through technology evaluation and assessment. In Japan, recent flourishing of interest in engineering ethics appears to be linked to concerns that corporations no longer function properly as Japanese “households.” In each case, deliberations over engineering ethics emerge as part of the process through which engineers work to keep their fields in alignment with their changing images of societal advancement.