Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 419 de 957
practicing engineers may be possible in e.g. project assignments, the core engineering
disciplines dominate the curriculum and provides the students with an instrumental
approach to engineering knowledge that guides the formation of their identity. This leads
to response strategies that demand a revision of the content of technical subjects and
courses to support design projects and to bridge between the needs of different actor
groups and engineering education and the skills provided.
These different response strategies all open up for broader perspectives on engineering
expected to improve the professional insights and competences of engineers, but what is
considered important and taken up as the context that engineering is embedded in points
in very different directions. These include differences in assessing the character and
completeness technological solutions included in techno-science leading to different
interpretations of the boundaries of core engineering and defining contextual knowledge
and the context of engineering.
The scope of the paper
Throughout a period of several years of teaching contextual knowledge and more
specifically a basic and mandatory course in ‘Engineering theory of science’ at the
Technical University of Denmark (DTU), we have been faced with the challenge of having
quite a large proportion of the students finding the course irrelevant compared to the core
discipline courses they are taught during their bachelor education. Despite several
improvements in the curriculum, the production of a specific textbook for the course and
changes in the pedagogical approach, the criticism remains fundamentally unchanged.
This has lead us to assume that other matters are at stake, than merely the students
criticism of the pedagogy and content matters, but that their criticism instead reflects the
course’s position in the overall education and the role of contextual knowledge in relation
to the engineering students’ self-understanding and identity. Resulting in the scope of this
paper being to analyze and discuss why contextual knowledge seems to challenge the
engineering students and thus which barriers need to overcome for a successful
integration of contextual knowledge in engineering education and curriculum.
The analysis is based on focus group interviews with students after finalizing the course,
students’ course evaluations from a period of 5 years, an evaluation carried out by
Learning Lab DTU (Hussmann & May, 2009) and the analysis and suggestions for a future
model of ‘Engineering theory of science’ based on the work of an interdisciplinary
dialogue forum commissioned by the dean of bachelor educations at DTU in early 2011
that resulted in suggestions to integrate and anchor the course in clusters of disciplines at
DTU and establish a cooperation between teachers from engineering disciplines and from
technology studies (Jørgensen & Brodersen, 2011).
Theoretical framework
To understand the role of disciplines in education include an understanding of how these
disciplines are framed within a scientific universe - whether this includes visions of
objectivism and instrumentalism or perspectives of interpretation and history and site
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011