Investigating Interdisciplinary Engineering Education
The 3TU.CEE-project 'Investigating Interdisciplinary Engineering Education' looks into the current state of affairs around interdisciplinarity at the three universities of technology. Interdisciplinary engineering education is currently seen as a fruitful way to prepare contemporary students to become engineers of the future. The first question that immediately comes to mind is about the definition of 'interdisciplinary'. And also, how does interdisciplinary relate to notions of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary?
Literature on engineering education makes a sharp distinction between these three concepts: multidisciplinary refers to disciplines brought together within a course or project, without a clear connection. Transdisciplinary projects strive for entwining existing disciplines into a new domain or discipline. Interdisciplinarity is somewhere in between: multiple disciplines brought together, trying to connect and exchange, yet while keeping their own identity.
The 3TU.CEE project 'Investigating Interdisciplinary Engineering Education' looks into the current state of affairs around interdisciplinarity at the three universities of technology. This project builds to a certain extent on the advice by Ruth Graham for educating engineers of the future (see the 3TU blog by Sonia Gomez). Graham's advice is to provide students with engineering fundamentals as a large part of their curriculum. This should be combined with project-based experiences.
The current bachelor programme at Eindhoven University of Technology reflects this advice. However, interviews with courseleaders revealed that the interdisciplinary character comes into play most often in projects. A closer look shows that in reality these projects are multidisciplinary; the disciplines co-exist and students are expected to make the connections themselves. This is a challenge for students, because it requires them to learn (at least) two things at once: the disciplines' content and context, as well as possible relations between those disciplines. And because teachers involved in those projects often assess their own discipline, educating them to be able to guide students towards interdisciplinary engineering appears a challenge for universities of technology.
The results of the current project will consist of a practice-based framework to evaluate and (re)design engineering education aiming at integrating an interdisciplinary approach.
Antoine van den Beemt
Assistant professor at Eindhoven School of Education