Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 128 de 957
Context
For this it has been necessary to dialogue with disciplines of the social field as the
anthropology, sociology and the social work, likewise to go to tools and technical of
investigation and intervention characteristic of this areas with the purpose of that
students and professors learn how to know and to carry out assertive readings of the
different social realities, necessities and problematic that demands the society current, so
that this learning they are translated in successful projects that contribute to improve the
quality of most vulnerable people's life.
It is not new to hear in the communities marginal bewilderment expressions to be had
manipulated sense and little respected, with the academic government and/or practical
implementation of projects that little to or anything came closer or they gave solution to
the satisfaction of some of their basic necessities, due to the ignorance of the communities
in their cultural, educational, environmental, economic and social part, likewise the lack
and lack of assertive strategies of community intervention or superficial boarding, they
allow them to be generated between the groups population perceptions and attitudes of
rejection and indifference toward the professionals and students involved in some project
type and of these toward the same community, situations that put in risk the good
development and maintenance of a project with social character.
The above-mentioned is appreciations and conclusions that arise of the professors,
students and gone away from engineering (agro ecologic, Industrial, Civil, and Systems
among other) whose labor experience and participation in academic projects promoted by
the Center of Education for the Development (CED-Uniminuto) they have given
testimonies of its lived experiences, which have been key to identify the pedagogic,
theoretical and practical difficulties in the formative processes of the education in
engineering.
Example, student’s of Civil Engineering Testimony.
Project, El Ingeniero al Barrio, City Bolívar, Bogotá - Colombia.
" People of the common one recognize us to the engineers for two aspects: the first one, as
those people that take charge of to design and to build, housings, bridges, highways
commercial centers, machinery, energy nets, of water and big technological works among
other things, through the use and transformation of the natural resources for the "wellbeing"
of the man, but they also perceive us as those characters distant, not very talkative,
important and little experts of the next realities and of the felt necessities of people to which
go directed many of our projects and big engineering works. It is not pleasing to perceive
that our professional exercise finds it valuable for the material function and physics that we
give to the things, but lacking of arguments, reflection capacity and critic, social sensibility
and not because we want it but because we have not learned it. For that reason I consider
that it is necessary that in our academic formation, be offered tools and strategies so much
theoretical as practices that allow us to the future engineers to come closer assertively to the
realities of our society, to unwrap us better as citizens and to create an imaginary one more
positive of our work and professional image in the communities than we work…” R. Ciro.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011