Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING CAPACITY: EDUCATION, TRAINING AND MOBILITYa learning environment that stimulates student’s self-directedlearning processes.Research on engineering education should play a major partin these developments. Research on engineering educationis necessary to establish the extent to which general didacticprinciples and theories can be applied in the context of learningin order to become an engineer, and to support the developmentof new theoretical concepts for the understanding ofnew learning paradigms and techniques.Further readingClark, B.R. 1995. Places of Inquiry. Research and Advanced Educationin Modern Universities. Berkeley: University of California Press.Vroeijensteijn, A. (red.) (1981) Kwaliteitsverbetering HogerOnderwijs [Improvement of quality in Higher Education].Proceedings of the fourth national convention Research inHigher Education, December 1-180-1981. Eindhoven: StichtingNationaal Congres/1981.7.4 Engineering education for development7.4.1International DevelopmentTechnologies Centre,AustraliaDonald Mansell and Don StewartDevelopment Studies for Engineers and TechnologistsThe concept of development technologiesThe International Technologies Centre within the Faculty ofEngineering in the University of Melbourne started its lifeas ‘The Appropriate Technology Section’ in 1978. The term‘Appropriate Technology’ was then in vogue, as the extensiverange of UNIDO 74 monographs shows. Although such activegroups use a variety of ways to contribute to the ‘goodwork’, 75 76 in every instance one of the motivations was theconviction that some technologies in use were inappropriateto their users or to the environments where the users lived.The conviction that technologies needed to be created andrefined to make them concord with their environments (climatic,economic, social, cultural and so on) was not a newphenomenon in the 1970s. Many decades earlier, MahatmaGandhi invested much effort in support of traditional crafttechnologies because he appreciated the threat to them frommore industrialized manufacture. He saw industrialization asa threat to Indian culture. Perhaps the Chartists in eighteenthand nineteenth century Britain would have considered himto be a kindred spirit; they foresaw the huge impact of industrializationon a society that had depended for centuries onproduction from a cottage industry base.The economist, E. F. Schumacher used his skills as an economist,and his wartime period in exile in Britain, to reflect on suchmatters. He argued that in order to maximize the nationalbenefit from technological development it was essentialto design technology with attention to the capital cost perworkplace it would create. This was an economic and socialconstraint on technological development that could not befound in any reputable engineering textbook or curriculum.It is not by chance that the explosion of interest in ‘AppropriateTechnology’ coincided with the end of the Second WorldWar, the retreat of colonialism and the growth in internationalcommunications (both physical transport and telecommunications).The end of the war left colonial powers weakenedand nationalists emboldened creating a curious anomaloussituation in many less developed countries. The anomalyarose from the fact that the colonial country had inevitablybecome the most accessible role model – which had beenimprinted on the educated nationalist elite – and yet the elitefaced the task of fostering national ambitions that, the likes ofSchumacher pointed out, were non-feasible if those colonialmodels were used.Australia was, in many respects, one of those developing countries.Its economy had been developed to depend on the capitalwealth of Britain, and its products had evolved to serve theBritish market. The Australian population was well educatedin the language and values of the British economy and society.Its orderly political, economic and social environment derivedfrom its colonial past. In a word, it had been developed tomake it a dependent component of the British economy.74 UNIDO. 1978. Monographs on Appropriate Industrial Technology (MAIT), Vienna.75 Schumacher, E .F. 1979. Education for Good Work, Cape, London. .76 Such groups included Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) in Londonand in-country Technology Consultancy Centres such as those in Botswana,Ghana, the Philippines and Zimbabwe.Australian universities were similarly heavily influenced by aninvaluable but paternalistic infusion of models of British tertiaryeducational institutions 77 imported by senior academics77 The discussion thus far has referred repeatedly to ‘nations’; this is a convenience inwriting, but in fact there are sometimes such variations within a particular nation349