Building 21st century skills through development engineering

International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship

The University of Colorado Boulder started its Engineering for Developing Communities Program with a graduate track in environmental engineering in 2004. Over the past ten years, the program has expanded to include undergraduate- and graduate-level certificates and involves approximately twenty percent of the graduate students within the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. This article describes the history and current status of our program including challenges and successes that have led us to where we are today. We briefly describe our undergraduate and graduate certificate curricula, share course descriptions and evaluation methods and results, highlight student employment outcomes, and reveal lessons learned. This discussion should prove useful to faculty and administrators, from department chairs to chief academic officers, who might be considering adding this type of program at a research-intensive university such as ours.

Synthesis Lectures on Global Engineering, 2013

The Global Engineering Series challenges students, faculty and administrators, and working engineers to cross the borders of countries, and it follows those who do. Engineers and engineering have grown up within countries. The visions engineers have had of themselves, their knowledge, and their service have varied dramatically over time and across territorial spaces. Engineers now follow diasporas of industrial corporations, NGOs, and other transnational employers across the planet. To what extent do engineers carry their countries with them? What are key sites of encounters among engineers and non-engineers across the borders of countries? What is at stake when engineers encounter others who understand their knowledge, objectives, work, and identities differently? What is engineering now for? What are engineers now for? The Series invites short manuscripts making visible the experiences of engineers and engineering students and faculty across the borders of countries. Possible topics include engineers in and out of countries, physical mobility and travel, virtual mobility and travel, geo-spatial distributions of work, international education, international work environments, transnational identities and identity issues, transnational organizations, research collaborations, global normativities, and encounters among engineers and non-engineers across country borders. The Series juxtaposes contributions from distinct disciplinary, analytical, and geographical perspectives to encourage readers to look beyond familiar intellectual and geographical boundaries for insight and guidance. Holding paramount the goal of high-quality scholarship, it offers learning resources to engineering students and faculty and working engineers crossing the borders of countries. Its commitment is to help them improve engineering work through critical self-analysis and listening.

2010

This paper discusses how Engineering Science, an undergraduate division within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, has worked to foster engineers that can meaningfully contribute to sustainable development (SD). Specifically, Engineering Science has developed ESC102: Praxis II, a core course required for all first year undergraduate Engineering Science students, which takes both a systems engineering and an interdisciplinary approach to solving complex problems in a local context. All Engineering Science students take Praxis II, and are exposed to sustainable development concepts even if they had no prior interest in sustainable development (SD). The 2010 Praxis II course integrated SD concepts by explicitly requiring students to consider and develop sustainability requirements, using the "DfX" concepts from the "Design for Sustainability" (DfS) and "Design for Environment"(DfE) literature, and incorporate sustain...

International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education Vol. 6 No. 3, 2005 pp. 278-303

Purpose – To show the key points of a development education program for engineering studies fitted within the framework of the human development paradigm. Design/methodology/approach – The bases of the concept of technology for human development are presented, and the relationship with development education analysed. Special attention is dedicated to the role of case studies in engineering courses. After that, the development education program pushed by the Civil Engineering School of Barcelona and Engineering without Borders is explained, focusing on two major contributions: two optional courses about international aid and development and nine classroom case studies about different technologies used in real co-operation projects. Findings – This work provides a conceptual basis for incorporating development education into engineering studies, a general overview of different activities promoted in Spanish technical universities and practical information about optional courses and classroom case studies. Research limitations/implications – The proposal is based on the experience in Spanish engineering curricula (mostly in five-year degrees). Some of the topics covered by the courses and the case studies can be better adapted at postgraduate level in three- or four-year degrees. Practical implications – It is shown that development education can be incorporated into engineering studies through different specific non-expensive activities. Originality/value – This work presents and puts in context the development education activities pushed coordinately between a non-governmental organization and an engineering school. Thus, it can be of major interest for both teachers and workers of the international development field. Keywords - Economic development, Education, Higher education, Sustainable development, Industrial engineering

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

is currently a postdoctoral engineering education research associate with Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Innovation Centre. She completed her Doctoral degree from Teachers College, Columbia University where she studied engineering education. She is the Global Chair and founding director of the National Academy of Engineering Longhorn Grand Challenges Scholars & K12 Partners Program at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. White is also the director of an outreach program called Design, Technology, & Engineering for All Children (DTEACh) which has reached more than 1000 teachers and 85,000 students. She is the lead inventor on a patent for assistive technology. Her current research includes global competencies, innovative design-based pedagogy, humanitarian engineering, and ways to attract and retain traditionally underrepresented groups in engineering education.

2009

This paper will discuss how Engineering Science, a division within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, has developed an undergraduate curriculum to foster engineers that can meaningfully contribute to sustainable development. In particular, Engineering Science has developed Praxis III, a course for second year Engineering Science students, which takes both a systems engineering and an interdisciplinary approach to solving complex global problems and begins to integrate issues surrounding globalism and sustainable development. This paper will describe the broader curriculum context for this course, the content and format of Praxis III as it existed in the 2007 and 2008 academic years, the training in problem-solving that students receive, the lessons learned, and future plans.

Program teamed up with the community-based organization Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, MA to address the problem of wood-fired oven emissions posed by the successful and expanding operation of Nuestras' entrepreneurial project, the El Jardin Bakery 1 . This partnership between El Jardin and the Picker Engineering Program developed in the context of a new course, "Engineering and Global Development," which aimed to achieve such pedagogical goals as: developing an understanding and critical view of globalization and global development engineering; developing analytic and implementation skills related to the design and construction of technological solutions in developing settings; and critiquing the "expert" model learning relationships that operate both in the classroom and in the community. Though global in overall perspective, the course engaged multifaceted challenges of engineering, economic and human development. We found these challenges analogous across communities that are similarly distressed by pressures of globalization and human need, such as those affecting low-income, poorly-resourced communities worldwide. We also found the ambitious marriage among engineering education, development studies, and liberative pedagogies to provide profound challenges equaled by pedagogical, educational, and experiential rewards.

International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship

Global engineers must be taught to consider the historical and present causes of persistent poverty and systematic barriers to prosperity. Such training will better inform the choices engineers make and help move the engineering sector away from a product and community-level focus towards working to address the root causes of poverty. A framing for Global Engineering has recently been proposed by the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, building on over 15 years of curricular efforts. Global Engineering, as taught by the Mortenson Center, positions the field as a complement to Global Health and Development Economics while further embracing a historically contextualized and anti-colonial training.

2000

The first fundamental canon of the Engineer's Code of Ethics is to 'Hold Paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.' This dissertation explores the role of engineering in increasing the 'safety, health, and welfare' of impoverished citizens of the developing world from a systems thinking perspective. It explores the functioning of technology and education in improving the lives of those who lack access to the most basic human physiological needs, particularly access to clean water and adequate sanitation. The approach taken is to move from very broadly considering normative scenarios of human flourishing to proposing increasingly specific approaches to reaching this normative state of being. Global aid is a ubiquitous phenomenon: organizations across the planet undertake efforts to help alleviate the suffering of the poor, but rarely is the macroscopic outcome of our aid efforts considered. To address this and to provide a motivation for continuing global aid, the first section of this dissertation seeks to develop a normative scenario, or a paradigm, for human development. Drawing on, critiquing, and assimilating a number of modern paradigms proposed by thinkers, organizations, and initiatives-EF Schumacher, Amartya Sen, the Washington Consensus, the Millennium Development Goals, Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly, and others-I develop a new paradigm for human development and provide a motivation for continuing to conduct aid efforts, tempered with cognizance of the unknown impacts of our actions. In light of the paradigm developed, and those discussed, the dissertation focuses on finding ways to empower local communities, through education, to organically develop technologically and locally appropriate forms of infrastructure to provide for their essential physiological needs, with a focus on clean water and adequate sanitation technologies. Access to such infrastructure is addressed as a necessary, but not sufficient, step towards attaining human development. Vocational Education and Training (VET) is seeing a resurgence across the developing world as a viable aid/development approach; using the core concept of VET, but adapting it for the needs of the world's poorest to help them locally gain access to water and sanitation, the novel concept of Low-Tech Vocational Education and Training (LTVET) is proposed and developed through a literature review. As a practical extension of LTVET ideology, the concept of the Community Infrastructure and Empowerment (CIEI) initiative is proposed and explored. The CIEI aims to implement LTVET ideology in impoverished developing communities by empowering marginalized, disenfranchised youth with technical and engineering training suitable for these youth to simultaneously improve their own future employment prospects and to benefit their local community through the infrastructure they will develop. A structure for this program, along with important considerations for it, such as pedagogy, funding, and purpose are presented. Cambodia is explored as an ideal location for the implementation of this program. A systematic ethical guide to bribery in developing work is provided, as it is assumed that aid workers will likely be required-or at least, requested-to pay a bribe in the course of their work. Drawing on historically accepted ethical theories-utilitarianism, rights ethics, and Kantian ethics-the guide finds that there are times when paying a bribe is the most ethical of a set of unethical choices. Finally, a discussion of the entire dissertation is provided through the lens of systems thinking, drawing on 20 Lexical Components of Systems Thinking and the works of C. West Churchman and Donella Meadows. The CIEI is further modeled and explored from a systems perspective, and a caution against rampant technological development, without regard for intangible human values is given, drawn from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. everything I know. Thanks also to my five siblings, for being a community of peers and friends, teaching me the values of both diversity and unity. Thanks to the Breaults, for being my Charlottesville family, and to Jonathan and Julie Baker, for teaching me that "still waters run deep" and helping me plot my future course. Thanks to Laura for helping me sort through complex theories and the emotions that accompany them. Thanks to my late grandfather, Papa Jack, for instilling kindness-to humans and animals alike-in me during my childhood. My deepest thanks to Dr. Mark Houck and Dr. Tomasz Arcizewski, for teaching me in my early years of engineering to think beyond the technical models and to incorporate creativity, even stories, into engineering. Thanks to Dr. Esther Obonyo, for planning and hosting my first overseas experience, overseeing my research in Nairobi, Kenya; you set me on a path I had no idea I was to head down but am so glad that I did. Thanks to Dr. Liza Durant, for being an example of a joyful, committed, hard-working teacher and human. Words cannot suffice to express how grateful I am to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation for their consistent support, both financially and relationally; through you, I have developed friendships with people that forced me to think much more broadly than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Dean Pamela Norris in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, for her support and joyful encouragement over the years. My deepest thanks to Jayne Weber and the SIE staff, for making sure we students stay in line and have everything that we need. Thank you to Professor Yacov Haimes for his care over several years. Finally, thank you to my committee. To Dr. Tomlinson, for venturing over from the world of education to the world of engineers. To Suzanne Moomaw, for taking your personal time to talk with me about business, growth, and life. To Mike Smith, for helping me to think broadly and introducing me to Wendell Berry. To Bill Scherer, for driving home the value of common sense and for being a practical guide through my entire doctoral experience. Finally, to Garrick Louis, my adviser, for being an example of a patient and powerful man, and for becoming both a mentor and a friend. In the interest of not writing an entirely separate dissertation to thank everyone who has positively influenced me, I offer a resounding 'thank you' to all of you unnamed influences. I hope and pray that I, both through this dissertation and the work to follow, can reinvest what you've given to me back into the surrounding world.

Journal of International Development, 2020

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