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Engineering education research and accreditation criteria have for some time emphasized that to adequately prepare engineers to meet 21st century challenges, programs need to move toward an approach that integrates professional knowledge, skills, and real-world experiences throughout the curriculum [1], [2], [3]. An integrated approach allows students to draw connections between different disciplinary content, develop professional skills through practice, and relate their emerging engineering competencies to the problems and communities they care about [4], [5]. Despite the known benefits, the challenges to implementing such major programmatic changes are myriad, including faculty’s limited expertise outside their own disciplinary area of specialization and lack of perspective of professional learning outcomes across the curriculum. In 2020, Montana State University initiated a five-year NSF-funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project to transform its environmental engineering program by replacing traditional topic-focused courses with a newly developed integrated and project-based curriculum (IPBC). The project engages all tenure-track faculty in the environmental engineering program as well as faculty from five external departments in a collaborative, iterative process to define what students should be expected to know and do at the completion of the undergraduate program. In the process, sustainability, professionalism, and systems thinking arose as foundational pillars of the successful environmental engineer and are proposed as three knowledge threads that can be woven throughout environmental engineering curricula. The paper explores the two-year programmatic redesign process and examines how lessons learned through the process can be applied to course development as the team transitions into the implementation phase of the project. Two new integrated project-based learning courses targeting the 1st- and 2nd-year levels will be taught in academic year 2023-2024. The approach described in this work can be utilized by similar programs as a model for bottom-up curriculum development and integration of non-technical content, which will be necessary for educating engineers of the future.
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How engineers negotiate domain boundaries in a complex, interdisciplinary engineering project
This paper is a research paper. Many engineering problems require efficient coordination across disciplinary boundaries. Few studies exist about how engineers negotiate and coordinate the knowledge required for working across these boundaries on large, intricate engineering problems. We approach knowledge as a complex and socially constructed system. Knowledge systems are inherently difficult to study because they are dynamic and ephemeral: they are only visible in interactions among the individuals of the community. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the knowledge system of practicing engineers through ethnographic observations of their practices. We used an ethnography-inspired situative approach based on observable knowledge practices to study the knowledge system of practicing engineers. Data was collected through observation of a Critical Design Review (CDR) of a satellite project at NASA. A CDR occurs after the technical design and specifications of a project nears completion and brings together the scientists and engineers on a project to present their plans to an external review board. A CDR therefore provides a unique opportunity to witness how knowledge is exchanged and negotiated within a complex, interdisciplinary setting. The resulting ethnographic observations were analyzed and categorized into peak events. Peak events were identified when successive questions were asked pertaining to the engineering design. Focusing on these events is a useful lens to get insight about the overall knowledge system because they can represent moments where different understandings and disciplinary perspectives emerge. This paper reports on one such peak event concerning the thermal design of the satellite. We focus on one peak to provide sufficient detail so that the knowledge system and its context can be understood. Thermal design of a spacecraft is complex and dynamic with the engineer having to design for drastically different external thermal environments while balancing the changing thermal demands of internal systems. The thermal design discussion provides a particularly thorough example of a knowledge system since the engineer explained, justified, negotiated, and defended knowledge within a social setting. For example, a reviewer asked the engineer if they had taken into account what they considered to be the worst-case scenario. This required an extended discussion to negotiate the criteria by which the credibility and relevance of design components were assessed and to create a shared meaning of what “worst-case” meant. This discussion was centrally important to the technical success of the project and was unequivocally “engineering,” even though it was light on technical detail. This aspect of engineering work is focused more on the epistemic criteria by which knowledge is assessed (i.e. on the foundations of the knowledge system), rather than the technical knowledge of the design itself. Engineering students do not get much practice or instruction in explicitly negotiating knowledge systems and epistemic standards. Although this analysis is limited to a single discussion, we argue that such discussions are important in many engineering projects. Understanding how engineers communicate across different epistemic and disciplinary viewpoints is another step towards creating an engineering curriculum that more closely aligns with engineering practice. Furthermore, it shows that engineering knowledge is not only something to be possessed but instead something that must be negotiated within an interconnected and socially situated knowledge system.
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- PAR ID:
- 10043759
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1524-4644
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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WIP: The Mechanical Engineering (ME) Department at Seattle University was awarded a 2017 NSF RED (Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments) grant. This award provided the opportunity to create a program where students and faculty are immersed in a culture of doing engineering with practicing engineers that in turn fosters an identity of being an engineer. Of the many strategies implemented to support this goal, one significant curricular change was the creation of a new multi-year design course sequence. This set of three courses, the integrated design project (IDP) sequence, creates an annual curricular-driven opportunity for students to interact with each other and professional engineers in the context of an open-ended design project. These three courses are offered to all departmental first-, second-, and third-year students simultaneously during the spring quarter each year. Each course consists of design-focused classroom instruction tailored to that class year, and a term design project that is completed by teams of students drawn from all three class years. This structure provides students with regular design education, while also creating a curricular space for students across the department to interact with and learn from one of another in a meaningful way. This structure not only prepares students for their senior design experience, but also builds a sense of community and belonging in the department. Furthermore, to support the "engineering with engineers" vision, volunteer engineers from industry participate as consultants in the design project activities, giving students the opportunity to learn from professionals regularly throughout their entire four years in the program. This course sequence was offered for the first time in 2020, and while the global pandemic impacted the experience, the initial offering was by all accounts a success. This paper provides an overview of the motivation for the three IDP courses, their format, objectives, and specific implementation details, and a discussion of some of the lessons learned. These particulars provide other engineering departments with a roadmap for how to implement this type of a curricular experience in their own programs.more » « less
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