In January, I was blessed with an invitation from Heather Murdock to speak as part of the 2014 Engineers Without Borders National Convention in Toronto, Ontario (here). The invitation was part of a Global Engineers Symposium (here). I've put my slide deck in a slideshare viewer below: After the presentation I had a beautiful The expecting chemical be after comprar…
Engin Ed(ie): A Troubled Client As a one-on-one leadership coach to academic administrators, faculty, and others, I've learned that clients oftentimes struggle with various misalignments in their lives. That is, they say one thing and do another, or they think one thing and say something else, or put one thing in one thing in one compartment and something somewhere else,…
Guest Hosts & Special Guests. Laurie Moore (here), @EpicenterUSA, will guest host the #BigBeacon twitter chat at 8pm ET (5pm Pacific) on Wednesday, 8 May 2013. She is joined by special guests including, Epicenter's Associate Director & D-School #designthinking lecturer @LeticiaBritosC (here) and @BU_ENGR (Bucknell Engineering) faculty member and Epicenter visitor @JoeTranquillo (here). About Epicenter. The National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter)…
An earlier blogpost (here) argued for authentically discussing the emotional phenomena of education transformation with emotional language in place of the usual rational code words of educational discourse. That post discussed Brene Brown's work and offered her TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability. This post continues in the spirit of giving us permission to access the right hemisphere of…
ne of the many blessings in my life has been my ability to travel to and work in Singapore. I love Singapore’s energy, its rapid growth and accomplishments, the boldness of its aspirations, its sheer human diversity per square millimeter. I relish returning to Changi Airport, to stroll among the young people walking in West Coast Park after dark, to its colorful food markets, its busy streets, and the sophistication of its night scene. I enjoy hearing the diverse views of taxi drivers about politics and the economy and business. And underneath, I feel a gentleness of spirit that is as attractive as it is personally calming. These words are perhaps a strange way to start an article on engineering education, but I share these feelings, in part because I want to talk about the role of feelings and emotional variables, more generally, in the transformation of engineering education, but also because I want readers to understand that I know I have only begun to scratch the surface of Singapore, that my understanding of her is of a meager and cursory kind, that I have so much more to learn and experience in order for me to be considered “Singapore-educated” in any meaningful way.
I just spent a beautiful day with hundreds of amazing Junior Enterprise students at the 2012 Junior Enterprise World Congress (JEWC2012) in Paraty, Brazil south of Rio de Janeiro. I was privileged to be able to give two talks at the conference, and you can see the powerpoint deck of the shorter of the two presentations, Three Steps Junior Enterprise &…
If we think of engineering education as an iceberg, many educators are focused on the visible part of the iceberg — the part above the waterline. As such, they teach students the known elements of existing science, math, engineering science, etc., thus leading students on a path of “mastery of the known.” While all this knowledge is important and useful, many fail to realize that there’s so much more to education — especially engineering education — than what we can see above the waterline. In fact, if the goal is to educate people for a full life, then we need to broaden our focus and educate in the areas that don’t involve known facts. In other words, we need to look below the waterline.
Focusing above the waterline and filling young minds with known facts and knowledge used to be sufficient for engineering education. In the past, engineers were category enhancers, making existing products and technologies faster, better, and more efficient, so mastery of the known used to be enough. Today, however, engineers do so much more. They are no longer category enhancers; they are category creators, bringing to fruition things that don’t yet exist. As such, because we don’t know what future solutions will be needed, we can’t merely pour existing knowledge into students’ heads, hoping that this will be enough; rather, we need to educate deep, lifelong learners so they can adapt, create, innovate, and lead the world to a better future.
This need for competent lifelong learning shifts the focal point of education. To instill the joy of being a masterful lifelong learner requires education to dive below the waterline, to stop focusing so heavily on mere mastery of the known so that in the future we develop engineers who can take initiative, find the problems that need to be solved, think both critically and creatively, and come up with solutions that our world demands.
Epictetus was a Greco-Roman moralist who shared practical advice and wisdom with his countrymen. Once a slave, Epictetus was freed and then went on to influence his followers, who captured his teachings and passed them down to us. One piece of wisdom that comes to us in the Enchiridion (here), is the following:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
We can visualize this advice and take it a step further on what I’ve called the Epictetus Square in the poster. On the y-axis, we have activities and whether we control them or not, and on the x-axis we have our internal state of mind and whether we are concerned with the particular activity or not.
In the West, a particular quadrant of concern is the quadrant of accomplishment. In this quadrant, we can control an outcome, we do, and we achieve something we desire. A lot of self help is focused here.
Dan Pink called for a Whole New Mind in his book on creativity of the same name (here). Mark Somerville and I call for a Whole New Engineer and a Whole New Engineering Education in our latest Huffington Post article: We live in a technological time. With nearly 7 billion people on the planet (and counting), we depend upon technology in almost every aspect of our…
I recently had the opportunity to travel to Belo Horizonte, Brazil to work with Alessandro Moreira, Vice-Director (Associate Dean) of Engineering at UFMG, Universidade Federale de Minas Gerais. During the visit, I learned of a special group of students and how they helped the University in its engineering education transformation efforts.
On the first day of my visit, Dean Moreira and I were touring campus and we went to the entrepreneurial business incubator, where I was surprised to meet students in Junior Enterprise. I engaged them in conversation regarding the need for change in engineering education, and they were articulate about the need for better pedagogy, more practical subjects, and hands-on projects. I also learned how they were backfilling what their educations’ were not providing themselves.
Junior Enterprise was started in 1967 in France, and it has chapters in many countries, but Brazilian universities have taken it especially to heart. At UFMG, most of the engineering disciplines have a Junior Enterprise chapter or enterprise, and each enterprise organizes to do consulting projects for local businesses. The students organize in functional specialties (marketing, technical, administrative, etc.), and take pride in teaching each other professional skills such as powerpoint presentation and project management. Enterprise sizes of 25-50 or so with 5-10 or more projects running at time are not unusual. Enterprises have faculty advisors, but they are largely hands off, and many of the research faculty would prefer that students concentrate on their studies.
I was unfamiliar with Junior Enterprise before this visit, but it is an exemplary model of students taking action in service to their education in a direct way. Students in design competition clubs and projects get similar experiences, but the connection to markets and work in Junior Enterprise closes the real-world loop in a very special way, and Junior Enterprise students come out of the experience ready to tackle the world of engineering full force.