Global engineering: What do we mean by it and how arewe preparing our students for it?

Abstract

The Global Engineering Minor was heir to two certificate programs: one, focused on a particular culture and language, and the other a list of courses useful to practicing global engineers. The narrow nationalism of the first and the diffuseness of the second were their drawbacks. They did not provide the students with a perspective at once global and coherent, and they did not challenge the students' own cultural beliefs. The GEM combines their virtues and also exceeds them. It requires language study, but encourages reflection on linguistic difference and its consequences. It requires study of a national culture, but does not allow students to rest in just that one culture; rather, it includes coursework at the local, regional, national, and global levels. The GEM student cannot float as a world tourist, above and equally distant from all cultures; rather, she must negotiate the territory between these levels. The GEM's gateway course systematically challenges students to become aware of their own cultural beliefs and practices, and to see them in relation to the beliefs and practices of other cultures. The Reader's texts, starting with Augustine's silent readings, offered repeated opportunities to come upon oneself by surprise, as it were, and each unit gave students new skills by means of which to scrutinize that newly revealed self. Each unit's skills prepared for the challenges of the next unit, so that, by the end, each student felt equipped to grapple with the complexity of global engineering and also to reflect on its many meanings, consequences, complications, and personal connections. The GEM does not simply push students towards lists of Humanities and Social Sciences courses in the hopes that students will eventually understand their relevance to global engineering. Rather, the GEM offers the gateway course as a means of approaching these fields and exploring their relevance to global engineering. The skills learned in this course will enable students to synthesize later Humanities and Social Science coursework into an increasingly rich and complex "global mindset" (Jesiek et al., 2014). This seems the appropriate outcome for the course, and the right kind of gateway for the GEM as a whole.