Faculty approaches to working life issues in engineering curricula

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify faculty approaches to working life issues in engineering education. The paper focuses on faculty attitudes towards working life issues and their integration into the curriculum and on activities related to working life introduced to the curriculum. We used a mixed methods approach and performed a survey and interviews at a single faculty research intensive technical university in Sweden. The results show that faculty members are positive towards integrating issues from working life into the curriculum. The findings show no support for the academic drift hypothesis, at least not as regards staff drift. The findings also show that faculty members with more work experience outside academia are more interested in including work related issues in their teaching, while faculty with less work experience are less interested. Faculty rate critical thinking, problem solving, new solutions and technical knowledge as the most important knowledge, skills and competences in the engineering profession. The most common ways to integrate working life issues are to use examples from their own work experience, guest lectures or case studies, while programs with more extensive connections to industry offer more integrated activities, e.g. projects with industry. Programs with more extensive connections to industry also seem to use professional contacts established through research in their teaching. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.