Getting Context Back in Engineering Education

Abstract

Discussions about reform in engineering education have mainly centered on issues of curriculum and didactics but these discussions rarely address fundamental questions about the nature and character of knowledge and learning. This neglect has led the discussions down the wrong track and failed to critique implicit and inadequate conceptions of knowledge and learning. Our discussion will draw upon John Dewey’s philosophy of human experience and inquiry as a resource that can remedy the neglect. This chapter thus focuses on learning and by example proposes ways that engineering knowledge and skills can be contextualized, taught – and learned.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room;

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass, 1900