Abstract
The main discourses of reform in engineering education in recent years have tended to be “market-driven” and have involved adding on courses and instruction in such areas as business economics, marketing, management, and entrepreneurship, as well as various types of “on-the-job” training in companies. In response, there has been a reassertion among many educators of more traditional “science-driven” approaches to engineering education by dividing engineering fields into “subdisciplines”, developing courses and even entire programs in new areas of specialization, such as sustainability science, product design, and sustainable energy planning. As a result, among different universities, as well as within many of the same ones, there is an ongoing tension or competition between market-driven approaches and science-driven approaches, often at the expense of a more balanced or comprehensive approach to education. In order to resolve this underlying tension in engineering education, this chapter proposes and exemplifies a third approach that seeks to foster a “hybrid imagination” combining a scientific-technical problem-solving competence with an understanding of the problems that need to be solved. Fostering hybridity or a hybrid imagination involves a mixing of scientific education and training in technical skills with an appreciation of the broader cultural implications of science and technology in general and one’s own role as an engineer, in particular. The chapter contrasts the different ways in which matters of “context” are brought into engineering education in the different approaches. It begins with a general discussion of hybrid identities in engineering and then goes on to provide a number of examples from the authors’ experiences in teaching contextual knowledge for engineering students at Aalborg University in Denmark. The chapter has been written as a part of PROCEED, the Program of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark.
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Notes
- 1.
Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science was written to be used as a textbook in these first year courses, and has been used in a wide range of engineering education programs, including biotechnology, medialogy (or media engineering), nanotechnology, architecture and design (Hård and Jamison 2005). After it was used as a textbook for a course at Denmark’s Technical University in 2010, a new book, written together with Steen Hyldgaard Christensen and Lars Botin (A Hybrid Imagination) was produced that has since been used in the first year in our new educational program in Techno-anthropology (Jamison et al. 2011).
- 2.
See Sokal’s book, Beyond the Hoax (Sokal 2008) for the full text of his original article and related essays on science and philosophy and critiques of science and technology studies.
- 3.
Science and technology studies have become popular at many business schools, often in relation to programs in entrepreneurship and innovation. As a possible sign of the times, the 2012 meeting of the European and American societies for science, technology and society (The European Association for the Study of Science in Society, EASST, and the Society for the Social Study of Science, 4S) was held at the Copenhagen Business School.
- 4.
Niels Mejlgaard, who was at the time completing his Ph.D. on scientific citizenship, had been working in the field of public understanding of science carrying out public opinion surveys as part of the so-called Eurobarometer program (Mejlgaard 2007, 2009). He served as assistant supervisors for these groups and could thus offer them first-hand knowledge of the details of survey methodology and data collection.
- 5.
There has been a major reconstruction of the entire Aalborg model during the past 5 years that has meant that there has been a shift in the relative share of time and credits devoted to project work. At the same time, the previous “project-oriented” courses such as the one we gave for the nanotechnology students in 2006–2007 have been eliminated. For the first year students a general course in science, technology and society (STS) is now given in the first semester and contextual knowledge is meant to be included in project work in only one semester, with the help of assistant supervisors. All courses, including the STS course, are now subjected to separate examinations, rather than being evaluated as part of the project examinations. The changes have been motivated by the continuing decline in funding from the government, which has meant that the resources devoted to “peripheral” teaching such as ours has tended to be reduced at the expense of the “core” curriculum.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter draws on material that has been published in substantially different form in Andrew Jamison and Jette Egelund Holgaard, “The Cultural Appropriation of Contextual Knowledge,” in the proceedings of the Engineering Education in Sustainable Development 2008 Conference in Graz, Austria; Andrew Jamison, “The Historiography of Engineering Contexts,” in Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, et al. (eds.), Engineering in Context, Academica 2009; Andrew Jamison and Niels Mejlgaard, “Contextualizing Nanotechnology Education: Fostering a Hybrid Imagination in Aalborg, Denmark,” in Science as Culture, 19, 3, 2010; Andrew Jamison, Steen Hyldgaard Christensen and Lars Botin, A Hybrid Imagination: Science and Technology in Cultural Perspective (Morgan & Claypool 2011); and Andrew Jamison, The Making of Green Engineers: Sustainable Development and the Hybrid Imagination (Morgan & Claypool 2013). We thank the publishers and editors of these earlier publications for their comments and support. The chapter has been written as part of the Program of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark (PROCEED), funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council.
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Jamison, A., Mejlgaard, N., Holgaard, J.E. (2015). Fostering Hybridity: Teaching About Context in Engineering Education. In: Christensen, S., Didier, C., Jamison, A., Meganck, M., Mitcham, C., Newberry, B. (eds) International Perspectives on Engineering Education. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16169-3_14
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