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Enhancing Interdisciplinarity for the Engineer of 2020

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Enhancing Interdisciplinarity for the Engineer of 2020 AC 2011-994: WORKING AS A TEAM: ENHANCING INTERDISCIPLINAR- ITY FOR THE ENGINEER OF 2020 Lisa R. Lattuca, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Lois Calian Trautvetter, Northwestern University Lois Calian Trautvetter Assistant Professor of Education and Director, Higher Education Administration and Policy Program, Northwestern University, [email protected] Dr. Trautvetter studies faculty development and productivity issues, including those that enhance teaching and research, motivation, and new and junior faculty development. She also studies gender issues in the STEM disciplines. David B Knight, Pennsylvania State University, University Park David Knight is a PhD candidate in the Higher Education Program at Pennsylvania State University and is a graduate research assistant on two NSF-funded engineering education projects. His research interests include STEM education, interdisciplinary teaching and research, organizational issues in higher education, and leadership and administration in higher education. Email: [email protected] Carla M. Cortes, Northwestern University Carla Cortes serves as an instructor and research associate in the Higher Education Administration & Policy program at Northwestern University. She also conducts analysis and manages projects for DePaul University’s Division of Enrollment Management and Marketing. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2011 Promoting Interdisciplinary Competence in the Engineers of 2020 Introduction A review of recent policy documents from the federal government reveals a consistent call for greater investments in interdisciplinary education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels (National Academy of Sciences, 20041; National Institutes of Health, 20062; Ramaley, 20013). These calls for greater interdisciplinarity in postsecondary and graduate education are based on the belief that interdisciplinary educational approaches are needed to foster innovation and may be more effective in doing so than discipline-based educational programs (National Academy of Engineering, 20044; U.S. Department of Education, 20065); interdisciplinarity in both research and education is presumed to promote global competitiveness, national security, and economic prosperity (National Science Board, 20106; U.S. Department of Education, 20065). As early as 1982, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development argued that the need to solve interdisciplinary societal problems had taken priority over internally driven approaches that focused on advancing knowledge without clear concern for its societal implications. By 1986, the National Research Council reported that most of the growth in knowledge production was interdisciplinary in nature in emerging scientific and technical fields such as biophysics, materials science, and energy, and microelectronics. A subsequent NRC report, Interdisciplinary Research (1990; cited in Klein, 20107), noted increasing collaborations between the physical sciences and engineering as well as in the life sciences and medicine. Klein points out that boundaries were crossed not only between academic fields, but between industry and academia, evidenced by the growth in numbers and importance of university technology transfer operations. Although it is the mission of most undergraduate engineering programs to prepare new engineers to solve real-world problems, which are arguably inherently interdisciplinary by nature, changes in the engineering curriculum have been slow to materialize. Engineering programs in the United States took a step toward interdisciplinarity with the implementation the EC2000 accreditation requirements which specified that all new engineers should have the ability to work on multidisciplinary teams (ABET, 20118). The National Academy of Engineering’s two reports on the “engineer of 2020” make a stronger case for interdisciplinarity as a feature of the engineering workplace of the future and as a personal attribute: “In the next twenty years, engineers and engineering students will be required to use new tools and apply ever-increasing knowledge in expanding engineering disciplines, all while considering societal repercussions and constraints with a complex landscape of old and new ideas” (National Academy of Engineering, 2004, p. 434). In 2006 and 2007, we began two related studies, one qualitative and one quantitative, designed to provide data on the current state of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. We were particularly interested in curricular and instructional changes that would strengthen students’ skills in the following learning outcomes: design, contextual competence, and interdisciplinary competence. In this paper, we focus on the question of how undergraduate engineering programs are preparing students to think and work in interdisciplinary ways by exploring the undergraduate engineering curriculum and the learning experiences of students, as well as the impact of different learning experiences on students’ interdisciplinary competence. Defining Interdisciplinarity and Interdisciplinary Educational Experiences Many terms, definitions, and interpretations confound “interdisciplinarity.” One of the most frequent distinctions in the literature contrasts the term “multidisciplinarity” and “interdisciplinarity”: typically scholars argue that multidisciplinarity brings two or more disciplines to bear on a problem but fails to integrate disciplinary components into a seamless whole, whereas interdisciplinarity is marked by a synthesis of disciplinary knowledge and methods to provide a more holistic understanding (e.g., Collin, 20099; Klein, 199610; Kockelmans, 197911; Miller, 198212; O’Donnell & Derry, 200513; Richards, 199614). Although many consider interdisciplinarity to be a product of research or teaching, recent scholarship argues that interdisciplinarity should also be understood as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession… [by] draw[ing] upon disciplinary perspectives and integrat[ing] their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective” (Klein & Newell, 1997, p. 393-394; authors’ italics15). Repko (200816) argues that this process- oriented view of interdisciplinarity is widely accepted in the interdisciplinary studies community (which includes educators who teach in interdisciplinary studies programs such as environmental sciences, neuroscience, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and general interdisciplinary studies programs themselves). As interdisciplinarity gains advocates in the engineering education community, new curricular and instructional approaches to engineering education are emerging in a variety of settings, joining existing general engineering programs which, some would argue, are inherently interdisciplinary. What does interdisciplinary learning look like in engineering programs? What kinds of curricular and co-curricular strategies do programs and faculty use to engage students in interdisciplinary work? And what are the outcomes of these strategies to promote interdisciplinary learning? In this paper, we describe interdisciplinary engineering educational efforts by drawing on data from two studies of how engineering programs in the U.S. are responding to calls to prepare undergraduate engineers to work in the interdisciplinary environments they will encounter as practicing engineers. We then explore the effects of interdisciplinary educational experiences on students’ interdisciplinary competencies. Balancing Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Learning in Undergraduate Engineering The undergraduate engineering curriculum has undergone much scrutiny since the first programs were developed in the U.S. in the 1800s. The four-year curriculum, with its strong scientific, mathematical, and technical focus ran in “parallel” with requirements in the humanities in these early programs (Culligan& Pena-Mora, 201017). The emphasis on mathematical and theoretical foundations of the discipline strengthened in the 1920s as engineering theorists from Russia, Hungary, and Denmark influenced the American engineering community, and again during World War II as the U.S. federal government began to support academic researchers who could contribute to the war effort (Prados, Peterson, & Lattuca, 200518). At different points in its history, the engineering curriculum has been criticized for overspecialization (Jackson, 193919) and for treating non-technical course requirements in the humanities and social sciences dismissively, but the backbone of science, math and technical courses has remained strong (Culligan & Pena-Mora, 201017). Prados (199220) argued that the engineering curriculum at many institutions was indistinguishable from applied science. During the 1980s and 1990s, the shortcomings of this highly technical and theoretical approach to engineering were enumerated in studies and reports by the National Academy of Engineering, the National Science Foundation, the National Science Board, and the American Society for Engineering Education (NAE, 198521; National Science Foundation, 199222; National Science Board, 198623; ASEE, 199424; Willenbrock et al, 198925). Dissatisfaction among engineering employers and leaders in the engineering education community reached the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) during the late 1980s, which was criticized for maintaining accreditation criteria that focused on “seat time” in mathematics,
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