Applying philosophical inquiry

Applying philosophical inquiry: Bringing future engineering education researchers into the philosophy of engineering education Robin S. Adams, Alice L. Pawley, Brent Jesiek School of Engineering Education Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, USA rsadams@purdue.edu, apawley@purdue.edu, bjesiek@purdue.edu Abstract—An ability to apply philosophical inquiry to both critique and create arguments about the current and future state of engineering education is a critical capability for future engineering educators to develop. However, there are few, if any, examples of how to do this. In this paper we describe a course that we have been offering for four years at Purdue University, History and Philosophy of Engineering Education, as an example of how to address this gap. We describe the learning objectives, conceptual frameworks used, learning and assessment activities, and examples of course assessments that illustrate learning outcomes. Keywords - philosophy, epistemology, graduate education, professional development, engineering education research

I. INTRODUCTION The philosophy of education is the study of education problems such as the goals of education, access to education, the process of education, and the role of government in education. Philosophers of education draw on a variety of tools to examine and critique these problems, in particular philosophical inquiry. Philosophical inquiry involves exploring positions, or “arguments”, about what is and should be, critiquing the likely outcomes or consequences of these arguments, and persuading others that these consequences should be valued (Noddings, 2006). As such, philosophical inquiry is often central to education transformation initiatives and plays a critical role in shaping new fields or disciplines. Therefore, an ability to apply philosophical inquiry to both critique and produce arguments about the future of engineering education in postsecondary institutions is a critical capability for future engineering educators to develop. In this paper we describe a novel and unique course that we have been offering for four years at Purdue University, History and Philosophy of Engineering Education, as an example of how to prepare future shapers of engineering education. The course may be viewed as an example of “scalable scholarship” (Downey, 2009) for training the next generation of engineering education scholars. We will describe the course objectives, structure, frameworks, and topics and content. We also provide examples of student evaluations and coursework that illustrate some of the insights students gain through the course as well as the challenges they face as they encounter paradox, ambiguity, and competing paradigms.

II. COURSE BACKGROUND In this graduate-level course, we examine the history and philosophy of engineering education through tools that guide critical analysis of philosophical, epistemological, ontological, and historical arguments such as: what is (and should be) engineering, what is (and should be) the purpose and process of engineering education, who gets to be an engineer (and who should be), and what shapes these decisions (and what should shape these decisions). Learning objectives focus on developing a culture of critical reflection and a tolerance of ambiguity, identifying and understanding tools to inquire into the history and philosophy of engineering education, using these tools to form arguments for oneself and for others about engineering education, and developing a perspective or identity as an engineering education scholar. This course is taught during the first term of the graduate program and represents a foundation course required of all graduate students in the program. As a foundation course, the course sets students on a pathway of inquiring deeply, early and often, into critical questions about engineering education that shape choices about research goals, questions, designs, and impact plans. It is also an entry point for students to learn how to understand and value multiple perspectives or new ways of thinking, and to link their personal professional goals with what it means to be an engineering education scholar and change agent. Inquiry tools used in the course include (see Appendix): (1) reflective practice and “sitting comfortable with paradox”, (2) drawing on insider (engineers) and outsider (those who study engineers) perspectives to reveal what engineers know and how they know it, (3) philosophies of education that argue for particular aims, purposes, and processes of education, (4) archival research and historical documents that reveal enacted philosophies of engineering education, and (5) boundary work metaphors to understand the managing and policing of ideas about the aims of engineering education, the nature of engineering knowledge (epistemology), and the nature of engineering being (ontology). III. COURSE STRUCTURE The course is 3 credits in a 16-week semester system, offered for the last four years in one 3-hr class period held once a week. The course is set at the 500 level, as an introductory

graduate-level course primarily for engineering education graduate students. Graduate students in other programs have been encouraged to enroll, and each year the course tends to include students from other engineering and education disciplines as well as students from technology and psychology. Four course tasks support the course’s learning goals: •

Weekly discussions on readings in class. We have used Nel Noddings’ Philosophy of Education (2006) as a key reference text, and have produced a reading list of articles and book chapters to provide additional breadth and depth (see Appendix). Class periods usually entailed a mixture of individual reflection, group discussion (in small groups and amongst the whole class), specialized activities and peer review opportunities.

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Reflective essays students share with each other on a course blog or protected discussion page. The purpose of the reflective essays is to help students prepare for class discussion, develop reflective practice skills, and gain confidence with actively participating in discussions whether they be in class or public communication forums.

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Three short synthesis papers in which they receive peer and instructor feedback and on which they can iterate. The papers parallel the course content: What is engineering? What is education? What is engineering education? Papers are evaluated on the quality of the arguments they make – their completeness (whether they address the overall guiding questions), whether they are grounded in the literature we have discussed in class (or additional literature), whether they are wellorganized (both macro and micro-structure), clearly written, and engaging. The last essay, treating the question of “what is engineering education?,” is expected to be of the quality that students could include it in a portfolio of their graduate work.

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A YouTube video, produced in groups of 3 or 4, that presents a philosophy for the future of engineering education. The YouTube project was designed to provide opportunities to reflect on course ideas and to translate them into action in a way that may engage the broader engineering education community. The YouTube video project has been presented in more detail elsewhere (Pawley, Adams & Smith, 2009), and are publicly available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL841ECAED6 8149FD0 or on the course website http://tinyurl.com/ene502-youtube.

Course assessments include an end-of-course evaluation, open-ended student feedback at multiple times through the course, and feedback forums through our Graduate Student Association.

IV. COURSE FRAMEWORKS Choices regarding frameworks for designing the learning experience were made based on insights from engineernig education research capacity-building programs and efforts to help students connect the course objectives to the gradaute program as a whole and to the broader profession. A particular challenge was helping students move from a problem solving mindset to a problem framing mindset that involves developing persuasive arguments about the past, the present, and the future. Over the multiple offerings of this course, it became clear that students would experience questions such as “what is engineering” as something that has a correct answer, rather than something that might have many plausible answers. As such, it was important to help students become comfortable with ambiguity and living with paradox. Other work illustrate the challenges of transitioning from disciplinary to cross-disciplinary mindsets, learning and valuing new language and ways of thinking, navigating the existing literature, dealing with the complexity and ambiguities of education research particularly qualitative research, and evolving interdisciplinary identities (Adams et al., 2006; 2007; 2010; Allendoerfer et al., 2007; Borrego, 2007; Fincher & Tenenberg, 2006). Efforts to alleviate or address these challenges involved supporting a community of practice through group projects and peer feedback on course reflections and essays, attending to language and epistemological differences in course readings, focusing course essays on synthesis and identity formation, and scaffolding learning of difficult concepts such as “what is an argument” and “what does it mean to ground an argument”. To help students connect their learning to the graduate program as a whole, we mapped the course objectives to the School’s competencies required for student graduation (https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/Academics/Graduate/com petencies). We also used Shaffer et al’s (2009) epistemic frame structure of knowledge, skills, identity, values, and epistemology to communicate course objectives as a broader set of professional lenses. V. COURSE TOPICS AND CONTENT The course has been structured into three key questions for students to consider: •

What is engineering?

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What is education?

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What is engineering education?

These have been addressed in different orders over the various iterations of the course, with the most recent iteration in the following order. We begin the course with a discussion about “tools for thinking” that we use throughout the course: reflecting in and on action (Schön, 1995), paradoxes, and sitting with tension (Palmer, 1998), boundary work (Gieryn, 1998; Pawley, 2009), and classification as a political act (Bowker & Star, 1998). To discuss “what is engineering,” we treat engineering as a science and as a profession (Dall’Alba, 2009; Figueiredo, 2008;

Layton, 1971), as design (Dorst, 2006; Seely, 1999; Svarovsky et al., 2006), as sociotechnical practice (Koen, 2003; Bucciarelli, 2003). We also explore how engineering is viewed by outsiders compared to insiders (Forsythe, 2001; Latour & Woolgar, 1986)), using the tool of boundary work to help us position ourselves. To discuss “what is education,” we work through the majority of a text by Noddings (2006), regularly taking time to collectively synthesize the arguments she represents through tables on the shared discussion board on Blackboard that summarize different goals/aims/purposes of education as represented by various philosophers of education, and who they think should be educated, and what the consequence of this philosophy has been on modern US educational systems. The topic of “what is engineering education” is treated in more depth than the previous two. We spend two class periods looking at historical perspectives on engineering education, both reading engineering education reports (e.g,. Mann, 1918; SPEE, 1930) as primary sources, and scholarly works (e.g., Reynolds, 1992; Mitcham, 2009) describing different historical aspects of US engineering education. We particularly look at how engineering education systems have explicitly and implicitly excluded women and people of color except in times of national need (e.g., Slaton, 2001; 2010; Bix, 2002). We then shift to more contemporary perspectives on engineering education (ABET, 2009; Committee on the Engineer of 2020, 2004; Sheppard et al., 2008), including some of the more recent reports on engineering education reform. In the most recent iteration of the course, we broadened students’ perspectives from a US-centric perspective to incorporate more crossnational perspectives (Downey & Lucena, 2006; Lucena et al., 2008). We have also added an explicit discussion of engineering education research as a topic, again treating this from a US perspective (Adams & Felder, 2008; Jesiek, Newswander & Borrego, 2009; NEERC, 2009) then crossnational perspective (Jamieson & Lohmann, 2010; Jesiek, Borrego & Beddoes, 2010; Jesiek et al., 2009). We end the course with a formal activity to help students synthesize key ideas discussed and the YouTube Extravaganza where students present their projects to peers and the broader community. VI. COURSE EVALUATION AND STUDENT WORK Course evaluations were conducted at the course and program level. Each year students complete an end-of-term survey that includes questions about the overall experience and questions targeted towards specific objectives of the course. In particular, some questions ask students to rate the quality of the learning environment (i.e., clarity and organization of course, quality and balance of assigments, collaborative learning, team teaching, and supportive and respectful culture), and others ask students to rate the impact of the course on their learning (i.e., contributions to personal and professional growth, improved critical and reflective thinking, improved synthetic reasoning abilities, and broader perspective). The overall course evaluation has consistently been 4.7 out of a possible 5.0, and students’ average rating of the extent to which instructors “ask questions which challenge me to think” was 4.9 out of 5.0. An example of course evaluations from one offering is provided in Table I.

TABLE I.

COURSE EVALUATIONS , FALL 2009, N=15

Evaluation Survey Questions

Mean out of 5.0

CLARITY AND ORGANIZATION OF COURSE Course requirements are clear. 4.6 Required course activities are consistent with course 4.4 objectives. The course appears to be well organized. 4.6 QUALITY AND BALANCE OF ASSIGNMENTS This course strikes a good balance between reading, 4.5 discussion, and writing. Assigned readings help me understand concepts discussed 4.5 in class. Course assignments help me learn on my own. 4.4 This course helps me clarify my ideas through writing. 4.5 One real strength of this course is the classroom discussion. 4.3 Class discussions are helpful to my learning. 4.3 This course provides an opportunity to learn from other 4.6 students. COLLABORATIVE WORK AND TEAM TEACHING Collaborative work is a valuable part of this course. 4.5 The group work contributes significantly to this course. 4.1 The teaching methods used in this course enable me to 4.3 learn. Team teaching is effectively used in this course. 4.5 Team teaching provides insights a single instructor cannot. 4.4 SUPPORTIVE AND REFLECTIVE CULTURE When I have a question or comment I know it will be 4.7 respected. I am free to express and explain my own views in class. 4.5 Class sessions were interesting and engaging. 4.5 CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL GROWTH This course builds understanding of concepts and 4.4 principles. This course contributes significantly to my professional 4.4 growth. This course gives me an excellent background for further 4.4 study. My work is evaluated in ways that are helpful to my 4.5 learning. IMPROVED CRITICAL / REFLECTIVE THINKING, SYNTHETIC REASONING, AND BROADER PERSPECTIVE

This course effectively challenges me to think. This course has been intellectually fulfilling for me. This class provides a meaningful learning experience. This course stretches and broadens my views greatly. My critical thinking skills improved because of this course. This course helps me synthesize information from several sources.

4.7 4.4 4.5 4.7 4.3 4.5

Course evaluations also include open-ended questions. Students often comment about how the course helped develop a tolerance for ambiguity and multiple perspectives, and provided tools to inquire into engineering education issues that they can use now and into the future. Some examples of these are provided below: “…before this class, I was not a huge fan of history OR philosophy. However, thanks to this course I have come to appreciate these subjects and plan to go back over some of the readings at a later time. Thanks for making the content interesting and showing how it applies to ENE. The engineer-in-me loved the practical element of this course.” “Instructional team was excellent at facilitating the class

as a whole through a fairly intense learning process. They both did an excellent job of balancing our need for reassurance and comfort with their demand for excellence and high-level, synthetic thinking.” “I really believe I walked into a class that was designed to intentionally grow students in a way that balances self discovery and instruction. Concepts were linked without the information being forced, students can trace the connections on their own…I felt pushed at times, given an adequate break at other times, and important topics came full circle in the end….The dialogue was also appreciated and huge part of my learning, it could also be that I come from a discipline where dialogue does not happen very much and this all very exciting and new.” “I thought this class was exceptionally difficult, but I can't recall a time where I feel like I made so much progress in such a short period of time. “ In addition, in the spring of 2009 our graduate students conducted a full program review where more than half of the student body participated in two 1.5 hour discussions on what is working well in the program and opportunities for improvement. This was designed and led by our Graduate Student Association, who synthesized the discussion and submitted a report to the Graduate Committee. Regarding the course discussed in this paper, there was strong support for the iterative assignments and how they help students develop over the course of the semester. When asked to describe how the course prepares them for the future or fits within the rest of the program, students responded: “This course works to shift our thinking beyond our preconceptions and assumptions about engineering and engineering education” and “helps build a community of intellectual questioning and discussion that can be used throughout the curriculum.” Finally, the YouTube project videos are developed to be public, and are showcased at an end-of-semester celebration open to the school, college, university, and community. They are posted to YouTube and collected into a playlist on the course website. Readers are encouraged to review and critique students’ YouTube videos and the ways the demonstrate the ways students have inquired into the history and philosophy of engineering education and the extent to which they present arguments that are clear, organized, grounded, and compelling.

meaningful implications for practice, all while remaining wary of the dangers of co-optation, resistance, or worse - being ignored. Classrooms can help open up new spaces of opportunity for relating ideas to life, and linking critical inquiry to concrete action. By engaging foundational philosophical questions about what counts as engineering, education, and engineering education, the course described in this paper encourages graduate students to undertake critical self-reflection, which may in turn place them on transformative learning pathways (Baxter Magolda & King, 2004; Mezirow, 2000). In part, we are successful when we are able to help people see the world in new and different ways, including through productive dialog with both one another and the ideas, texts, and authors explored in the class. Yet ultimately, the real test of our labors is whether our students are able to carry the course with them into future situations and contexts, using it as a foundational scaffold to proactively interrogate and transform dominant practices in engineering education and professional practice. Such is the spirit of scalable scholarship. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We’d like to acknowledge the contributions of Karl Smith, who helped design the first offering of the course, and Holly Matsusovich, who was an Apprentice Faculty for that first offering. We also thank the students who have taken this course over the last few years and contributed to its iterative development. REFERENCES [1]

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VII. CONCLUSIONS Drawing on the work of Gramsci, Downey uses the term “scalable scholarship” to describe how academic teachers and researchers might critically participate in worlds of practice. Situating his remarks at the productive intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and engineering education, he explains: “[S]caling up involves inquiring into what is taking place when scholars not only conduct research on engineers and engineering but also design and teach courses for engineering students, serve on official panels and advisory committees, offer presentations to engineering audiences, and help build a new discipline focused on engineering education” (Downey, 2009). When one embraces scaling up, it requires showing how critical, theoretical analyses of practice have

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Downey, G.L., (2009). “What is Engineering Studies For?: Dominant Practices and Scalable Scholarship.” Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies 1(1):55-76. Noddings, N. (2006). Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO, Westview Press. Pawley, A., Adams, R.S. and Smith, K. (2009). “A vision of engineering education today: Using YouTube to challenge engineering’s disciplinary boundaries in the classroom.” Proceedings of the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association Conference – “Thinking, Working, Speaking from Margin to Margin”, Atlanta, November. Adams, R., Fleming, L., and Smith, K. (2007). “Becoming an Engineering Education Researcher: Intersections, Extensions, and Lessons Learned among Three Researchers’ Stories,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Research in Engineering Education (ICREE), Honolulu, HI, June. Adams, R.S., Allendoerfer, C., Bell, P. Chen, H., Fleming, L., Leifer, L, Maring, B. and Williams, D. (2006). “A Model for Building and Sustaining a Community of Engineering Education Research Scholars.” Proceedings of the Annual American Society for Engineering Education Conference, Chicago, June. Adams, R., Forin, T., Srinivasan, S. and Mann, L.L. (2010). “Crossdisciplinary practice in engineering contexts – a developmental phenomenographical perspective.” In K. Gomez, L. Lyons and J. Radinsky (Eds.), Learning in the Disciplines: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). Volume 1, (pp. 1166-1173). Chicago, IL: International Society of the Learning Sciences. Allendoerfer, C.R., Adams, R.S., Bell, P., Fleming, L., and Leifer, L. (2007). “Becoming an Engineering Education Researcher: Finding Pathways toward Interdisciplinarity”. Proceedings of the Annual American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April. Invited for full paper to Division I, Education in the Professions, Session 40.031.

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Borrego, M. (2007). “Conceptual difficulties experienced by engineering faculty becoming engineering education researchers.” Journal of Engineering Education, 96(2), 91-102. Fincher, S., and Tenenberg, J. (2006). “Using theory to inform capacitybuilding: Bootstrapping communities of practice in computer science education research”. Journal of Engineering Education, 95(4):182-196. Shaffer, D. W., D. Hatfield, et al. (2009). "Epistemic Network Analysis: A Prototype for 21st Century Assessment of Learning." International Journal of Learning and Media 1(2): 1-21. Schön, Donald. (1995). “Knowing in Action: The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology.” Change, November/December 1995, pp. 27-34 Palmer, Parker. (1998). The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Jossey-Bass. Chapter 3, pp. 61-88. Gieryn, Thomas F. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Introduction, pp. 135. Pawley, Alice L. (2009). "Universalized Narratives: Patterns in How Faculty Describe "Engineering"." Journal of Engineering Education 98(3): 309-19. Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Introduction: To Classify Is Human, pp. 1-32 Dall’ Alba, Gloria. (2009). “Learning Professional Ways of Being: Ambiguities of Becoming.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 41(1): 34-45. Figueiredo, A. D. (2008). “Toward an Epistemology of Engineering”. In D. Goldberg and N. McCarthy, eds., Proceedings Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE 2008), Royal Engineering Academy, London, November 2008, pp. 94-95. Layton, Edwin T. (1971). The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession. Chapters 2-3, pp. 25-78. Seely, Bruce E. (1999). "The Other Re-engineering of Engineering Education, 1900-1965." Journal of Engineering Education 88: 285-294. Dorst, K. (2006). Design Problems and Design Paradoxes. Design Issues, 22 (3), pp. 4-17. Svarovsky, Gina Navoa and David Williamson Shaffer. (2006) “Design meetings and design notebooks as tools for reflection in the engineering design course.” Proceedings of the 36th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, San Diego CA Oct 28-31 2006. Koen, Billy Vaughn. (2003). Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer’s Approach to Problem Solving. Oxford University Press. Chapter 1: Some Thoughts on Engineering, pp. 7-25. Bucciarelli, Louis. (2003). Engineering Philosophy. Delft University Press. Chapters 1-4. Forsythe, Diana E. (2001). Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford University Press. Chapter 3: Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 35-58. Latour, Bruno & Steve Woolgar. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press. Chapter 2: An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory, pp. 43-103. Mann, Charles Riborg. (1918). "A Study of Engineering Education." Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, New York. Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education. (1930). "Report of the Investigation of Engineering Education 1923-1929." Pittsburgh, PA.

[28] Reynolds, Terry S. (1992). “The Education of Engineers in America Before the Morrill Act of 1862,” History of Education Quarterly, 32 (Winter): 459-82. [29] Mitcham, Carl, (2009) “A Historico-Ethical Perspective on Engineering Education: From Use and Convenience to Policy and Engagement” Engineering Studies, 1(1) pp. 35-53. [30] Slaton, Amy E. (2001). Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 1. [31] Slaton, Amy E. (2010). Race, Rigor and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: History of an Occupational Color-Line. Boston: Harvard University Press. Selected chapter. [32] Bix, Amy Sue. (2002). "Equipped for Life: Gendered Technical Training and Consumerism in Home Economics, 1920-1980." Technology and Culture, 43:728-754. [33] Sheppard, Sheri D., Kelly Macatangay, Anne Colby, William M. Sullivan. (2008). Educating Engineers: Designing for the Future of the Field. (Selected chapters). Jossey-Bass: San Francisco. [34] Committee on the Engineer of 2020 Phase I. (2004). "The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century." National Academy of Engineering, Washington DC. Selected chapters. [35] ABET. (2009). “Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, 20102011 Review Cycle.” ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission. Read General Critieria, Skim Program Criteria. [36] Downey, Gary, and Juan Lucena. (2006). “Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering: Code-Switching and the Metrics of Progress.” History and Technology, 20(4): 393-420. [37] Lucena, Juan, Gary Downey, Brent Jesiek, and Sharon Ruff. (2008). “Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.” Journal of Engineering Education, 97(4): 433-447. [38] Jesiek, Brent, Lynita Newswander, and Maura Borrego. (2009). “Engineering Education Research: Discipline, Community, or Field?” Journal of Engineering Education, 98(1): 39-52. [39] National Engineering Education Research Colloquies (2006). "The Research Agenda for the New Discipline of Engineering Education." Journal of Engineering Education: 259-261. [40] Adams, R.S. and Felder, R. (2008). “Special Guest Editorial – Reframing Professional Development: A Systems Approach to Preparing Engineering Educators to Educate Tomorrow’s Engineers.” Journal of Engineering Education, July, pp 239-240. [41] Jesiek, Brent, Borrego, Maura, and Beddoes, Kacey. (2010). “Advancing Global Capacity for Engineering Education Research (AGCEER): Relating Research to Practice, Policy, and Industry.” Journal of Engineering Education, 99(2): 107-119. [42] Jesiek, Brent, Beddoes, Kacey, Sangam, Deepika, and Borrego, Maura. (2009). “Mapping Local Trajectories of Engineering Education Research to Catalyze Cross-National Collaboration.” Proceedings of the 2009 SEFI Annual Conference. [43] Jamieson, Leah, and Lohmann, Jack. (2010). “Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education.” [44] Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. Jossey-Bass. [45] Baxter Magolda, M. and King, P. (2004). Learning partnerships: Theory and models to education for self-authorship. Stylus Publishing.

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Preparation needed for this class Read Schön [11] and Palmer [12], and group behaviors handout Introduction; talking tools  Tools: Paradox, sitting with the tension, knowing in/on action Assignment: Bring in a photo that represents engineering to you Reading, references: [11, 12] What is engineering? Engineering as a science and a profession  Tools: Boundary work Assignment: “What is engineering?” essay assigned Reading, references: [16, 17, 18], and Noble, David F. (1979). America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Chapters 23, pp. 20-49. What is engineering? Engineering as design  Tools: Classification as a political act Reading, references: [15, 19, 20, 21] What is engineering? Engineering as sociotechnical practice Reading, references: [22, 23], and Bovy, Michel, and Vinck, Dominique. (2003) “Social Complexity and the Role of the Object: Installing Household Waste Containers.” In Dominique Vinck, Ed., Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation, Ch 3, pp. 53-75. MIT Press. What is engineering? Engineering by outsiders  Tools: Insider/outsider perspectives (designers and non-designers), reflective practice Assignment: Draft of essay to peer reviewers due (bring paper copy to class), YouTube group assigned Rearing, references: [24, 25], and Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action. Harvard University Press. Introduction, pp. 1-17. Johnson, Ann, (2009). Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge. Duke University Press. Ch 1: Design and the Knowledge Community, pp. 1-22 What is education? Foundational philosophies of education, Part 1  Tools: Matrix of goals-aims-purpose/process/who is educated/consequences Assignment: “What is engineering?” essay due, “What is education?” essay assigned Reading, reference [2] Chapters 1-4 What is education? Foundational philosophies of education, Part 2 Reading, reference [2] Chapters 6, 8-9, 11 What is education? History of education in the US  Tools: historical lens Reading, reference [2] Chapter 10, and History of Education in the United States – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States What is engineering education? Historical perspectives on engineering education, Part 1  Tools: Archival research & primary historical documents Assignment: Bring paper copy of “What is education?” to class for peer review Reading, references: [28, 29] Read ONE, as assigned: Mann, Charles Riborg. (1918). "A Study of Engineering Education." Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, New York. (Selected sections TBD) Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education. (1930). "Report of the Investigation of Engineering Education 1923-1929." Pittsburgh, PA. (Wickenden Report: selected pages) (2004). "Journal of Engineering Education Round Table: Reflections on the Grinter Report." Journal of Engineering Education: 69-94. Goals Committee. (1968). "Goals of Engineering Education: Final Report of the Goals Committee." American Society for Engineering Education, Washington DC. What is engineering education? Historical perspectives on engineering education, Part 2 Assignment: “What is education?” essay due Reading, references: [30, 31, 32], and Bix, Amy Sue. (2005). “Engineering National Defense: Technical Education at Land-Grant Institutions during World War II.” In Alan I. Marcus, Ed., Engineering in a Land-Grant Context: The Past, Present and Future of an Idea, pp. 105-133. Purdue University Press. What is engineering education? Contemporary perspectives  Tools: Boundary work Assignment: “What is Engineering Education?” essay assigned Reading, references: [14, 33, 34, 35], and ASCE. (2008). Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century Preparing the Civil Engineer for the Future (Second Edition). Executive Summary and Chapter 1. What is engineering education? Cross-national perspectives  Tools: Historical ethnography Reading, references: [36, 37] and ONE additional paper/chapter focused on a specific country (see Blackboard). What is engineering education research? Origins and American perspectives Assignment: Draft design of YouTube videos for peer review Reading, reference [2], Chapter 7 and references [38, 39, 40] HAPPY THANKSGIVING – no class! What is engineering education research? Cross-national perspective and current trends Reading, references: [41, 42, 43] Synthesis of the course Peer review of engineering education synthesis essays done in class Final presentations: YouTube videos and rationale Electronic copy of “what is engineering education?” essay and YouTube rationale due