Uncertain Participation:
Problem Definition and the Global Engineer
Gary Downey
Virginia Tech
I have just finished teaching a semester of Engineering Cultures with Grace Hood, Jongmin
Lee, and Nicholas Sakellariou, graduate students in Virginia Tech’s Science and Technology
Studies (STS) Program. The listed objective of this elective course was “to help students learn
how to work effectively with people who define problems differently than they do, including
both engineers and non-engineers.” Engineering Cultures pursues the objective by helping
students understand how what counts as engineers and engineering knowledge have varied
significantly over time and place. Class modules in the course examine the emergence of
engineers in Japan, Britain, France, Germany, United States, and Soviet Union. Class exercises
and homeworks ask students to trace their trajectories into or around engineering and to practice
adopting and performing perspectives other than their own.1
When viewed optimistically from the trajectory of my career, this course is one step in the
development of curricular pathways for engineers making visible the work they do in defining
technical problems in addition to solving them. It emerged after some earlier initiatives and,
hopefully, before others that will further scale up the effort. It also emerged through overlaps and
entanglements between my trajectory and those of others, especially Juan Lucena. Yet there are
many uncertainties.
My purpose in this chapter is to share with you a map of the pathway I have followed in
collaboration with others to develop and scale up what I now think of as making visible problem
definition in engineering education. The account traces my own movement from the core of
engineering education to its periphery and back . . . possibly.
I have three more specific objectives in this account. One is to persuade readers of the
benefits to both engineers and others of making visible problem definition in engineering work.
A second is to inform and help others who also seek critical participation in engineering
education. To the extent my localized initiatives may be in competition with the localized
initiatives of others, I consider such competition healthy. It is competition to make a difference,
to improve engineering service to society. Third, this account offers one take on what might
count as the global engineer, a negotiation that is underway at this writing.
The next section describes what’s at stake for me in efforts to make problem definition visible
in the formation of engineers. I then turn in subsequent sections to describe four sets of
ambiguities and uncertainties I have encountered along this scholarly and pedagogical trajectory.
The first involves the challenges of the elective course. This section examines how I came to be
offering courses “outside” engineering given my initial training as a mechanical engineer. The
second involves the positioning of a new course purporting to contribute specific practices to
engineering education. In what sense could an outside course be inside engineering education at
1
For more detailed discussions of the contents of Engineering Cultures, see Downey, G. L., J. C. Lucena, et al.
(2006). "The Globally Competent Engineer: Working Effectively with People Who Define Problems Differently."
Journal of Engineering Education 95(2): 101-122; Downey, G. L. (2008). "The Engineering Cultures Syllabus as
Formation Narrative: Critical Participation in Engineering Education through Problem Definition." 5(2): 101-130.
2
the same time? The third pertains to efforts to scale up learning from that elective course, both
within one institution and across institutions. In particular, to what extent do increases in scale
come at the expense of critical effect? The fourth serves as my conclusion. It reports the
struggles involved in scaling up attention problem definition in the context of a rapidly evolving
image of the global engineer.
A general point is that any attempt at critical participation in engineering education
necessarily involves engaging engineering epistemology. Efforts to achieve change walk a fine
line between, on the one side, capture by the terms of a dominant epistemology and, on the other,
rejection as an arrogant outsider who thinks he/she/it bears the new Word others should follow.2
My approach to formulating and scaling up initiatives in the midst of such uncertainties is to
maintain vigilant focus on the implications of localized strategies for the dominant epistemology.
To what extent does a given strategy affirm or deflect the dominance of a core image of
engineering knowledge, in this as mathematical problem solving? Might it be possible to
formulate and scale up an alternative image that competes for the core (or it this just self-limiting
naivete? The work of educational innovation in engineering is both normative in content and
involves questions of fit. Hence it necessarily confronts the dual questions: What does it mean to
be an engineer? What counts as engineering knowledge?
The analysis
For me, calling attention to problem definition in engineering education may help overcome a
crucial limitation in engineering science courses, a tendency to predispose learners to not value
perspectives other than their own. This work is motivated by an analysis of engineering curricula
that finds a core focus on mathematical problem solving to construe engineering service as
technical support.3 What are engineers for? It is important to recognize that engineers have been
designed to serve.4 But must engineering service be blind technical support?
I do not seek to produce Super Engineers who extrapolate existing problem-solving
capabilities to add mastery of social dimensions.5 Indeed, I judge such to be impossible. Also,
the goal is humility rather than mastery. The pedagogical practice involves helping engineering
students bring into their fields of vision and action the presence, perspectives, and forms of
knowledge of others. The learning objective is to make engaging the complexities of different
perspectives an integral part of engineering work. If learning technical problem solving
2
See also Downey, G. L. and J. Dumit (1997). Locating and Intervening. Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological
Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. G. L. Downey and J. Dumit. Santa Fe, N.M., The SAR Press:
5-30.
3
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (1997) Engineering Selves: Hiring In to a Contested Field of Education. G. L.
Downey and J. Dumit. Santa Fe, School of American Research Press: 117-142; Downey, G. L. (2005). "Keynote
Address: Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology?: From “Problem Solving” to “Problem Definition and
Solution” in Engineering Education." Chemical Engineering Research and Design 83(A8): 1-12.
4
Alder, K. (1999). French Engineers Become Professionals; or, How Meritocracy Made Knowledge Objective. The
Sciences in Enlightened Europe. W. Clark, J. Golinski and S. Schaffer. Chicago & London, The University of
Chicago Press: 94-125.
5
Anderl, R., K. Gong, et al. (2006). In Search of Global Engineering Excellence: Educating the Next Generation of
Engineers for the Global Workplace. Hanover, Germany, Continental AG; Lehr, J. L., B. R. Cohen, et al. (2006).
The Ethical Dilemmas of a Critical Engineering Education: On Teaching Engineers to Not Be (Like) Engineers.
Locating Engineers: Education, Knowledge, Desire. Virginia Tech. See also Rosalind Williams discussion of
systems engineering in similar terms. Williams, R. H. (2002). Retooling : a historian confronts technological
change. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
3
predisposes learners to read situations and act in certain ways, then the practice of problem
solving has both technical and nontechnical dimensions. Similarly the perspectives of
engineering problem solvers have both technical and nontechnical dimensions, involving .
Rather than Super Engineers who seek to extrapolate control, engineers who know they are both
problem definers and problem solvers are well aware of just how much they depend on others
and how much is outside of their control.
In addition, making more visible the distinct perspectives at stake in technical decision
making can also have the effect of calling attention to the perspectives of those affected by the
outcomes of engineering work. Such perspectives may not currently have seats at the decisionmaking table. The problem defining engineer may be more likely to ask how they can achieve
representation.
Including problem definition within the boundaries of engineering work is a knowledge
strategy for making visible the stakeholders in technical decision making and enabling engineers
to use their technical capabilities to better mediate competing points of view. At present,
engineers acquire the knowledge to understand the technical contents of different perspectives.
What they fail to gain through their curricula is the capability, and hence the motivation, to
engage in effective mediation. Making visible problem definition within engineering education is
a strategy for making engineering more performative of citizenship.6
This work in making visible problem definition in engineering education overlaps and is
allied with other existing reform initiatives in engineering education. Some of the most
prominent include expanded attention to design, engineering ethics, communications, leadership,
diversity, and the impacts and effects of engineering work. One difficulty encountered by all
these initiatives is they begin as externalities—they have been externalized in an engineering
epistemology focused on problem solving. One outcome is a tendency to judge them as
pertaining to features of the person rather than features of the engineering practice. The emphasis
on problem solving can make effective design appear to be a matter of individual creativity.7 It is
relatively easy to (mis)construe ethical responsibility, effective communication, and leadership
capability as personal attributes that stand apart from one’s identity as an engineer. Diversity
initiatives have typically been extra-curricular in content, involving programs to attract and
retain members of underrepresented groups by helping them achieved connectedness on a
personal level (crucially important but not a curricular activity).8 Dedicated problem solvers
providing technical support can judge the broader impacts of engineering work to be beyond the
scope of that support.
In principle, the strategies involved in making visible problem definition in engineering
learning face not existing externality but existing obscurity or, even, invisibility. Problem
definition is not already defined as outside engineering work. Redefining the core of engineering
6
On the performativity of knowledge, see MacKenzie, D. A., F. Muniesa, et al. (2007). Do Economists Make
Markets?: On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Callon, M., Ed. (1998). The
Laws of the Markets. Sociological review monograph series. Oxford ; Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers/The
Sociological Review.
7
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (2003). "When Students Resist: Ethnography of a Senior Design Experience in
Engineering." International Journal of Engineering Education 19(1): 168-176.
8
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (2007). Are Globalization, Diversity, and Leadership Variations of the Same
Curricular Problem? First International Conference on Research in Engineering Education, Honolulu, Hawaii.
4
learning to include problem defining alongside problem solving could help engineers and
engineering science educators come to see the practices of design, ethics, communication,
leadership, diversity, and impact analysis as internal, not external, to engineering practice.
Problem definition could be a unifying image for a coalition of reform initiatives.
In addition, attention to problem definition could become a vehicle for insisting that the global
engineer be more than a technical support specialist for international environments.
. . . Or not. Another view of my curricular efforts is that they originated in the most external
of external spaces, that occupied by the humanities and social sciences. Also, they are highly
localized, born and raised within one institution with limited spread to others. My sense is that
most critical curricular interventions, both in engineering and elsewhere, live and die with their
passionate founders. Such may be the case here as well.
The comforts outside
I thought I had to leave engineering in order to gain the capabilities I desired. As an
undergraduate student in mechanical engineering during the early 1970s (B.S. 1974 Lehigh
University), I found myself drawn to conflicts over environmental issues, especially nuclear
power. I especially wondered how two groups of people who were highly intelligent, highly
trained, and exhibited high degrees of personal integrity could disagree with one another
systematically and even violently about such things as nuclear power. As I read the popular
literatures from public controversies over new technologies, I found myself understanding the
technical arguments on both sides of this debate. Much hazier was why they were fighting. 9
My interest in understanding perspectives other than my own dated back to high school. One
night in eleventh grade, I had dreamt entirely in Spanish. It seemed I had entered a new world.
The experience shocked me into awareness of the limitations of my own. In this case, the “world
beyond” meant beyond my country, which I judged (incorrectly) to be English-speaking. Finding
the experience seductive, I enrolled in 4th year Spanish my last year and then continued into
literature classes for two years in college. At the end I added a year of introductory French.
Not until I was enrolled in graduate school in cultural anthropology and sitting in a kinship
theory class did it dawn on me that my pathway into engineering had involved anything more
than an exercise of deliberate, individual judgment. I realized it was also the product of
assumptions I carried about such things as gender and class. Despite elite status in one maternal
strand of my ancestry, I was raised with working class expectations. The goal was white-collar
work and a house in the suburbs. By that time, only Uncle Bill the civil engineer had achieved
white collar status. On my mother’s side, all my male cousins, including my older brother, had
started college aiming for engineering while all the females, including my younger sister, had
aimed for teaching or nursing (save the one who became a hospital nutritionist).
How was it that engineering was both definitely and exclusively for men? I remembered a
confusion from a conversation with my high school physics teacher, Dr. Speer. When I shared
with him my quandary over whether to pursue mechanical engineering or chemical engineering,
he had asked, “Are you sure you want engineering?” I could not critically analyze the fact I saw
For elaboration, see Downey, G. (2006). It’s Not about Us. Teaching Excellence at a Research-Centered
University: Energy, Empathy, and Engagement in the Classroom. E. S. Geller, , and P. K. Lehman. Boston, MA,
Pearson Custom Publishing: 69-77.
9
5
no other available pathway. Uncle Bill provided the model and everyone in my family echoed
support. Based on both need and record, I received a full scholarship to pursue engineering.
Engineering courses were clean and clear. I knew when solved problems were correct and
when they were not. I knew when I understood and when I did not. The engineering sciences all
appealed to me. Each offered a distinct mathematical world to explore.
In a first effort to link my trajectory within mechanical engineering to a growing interest in
environmental debates, I persuaded Dr. Sarubbi, the associate department head, to allow me to
bypass the required Heat Transfer course in order to build a cluster of environmental courses.
Environmental engineering did not then exist. The cluster included Air Pollution Engineering
and Waster Water Control in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Theory of Internal
Combustion Engines and Nuclear Reactor Engineering in my home department. Dr. Sarubbi
agreed only because I was a top student. Yet from that day forward, I have struggled with the
nagging sense I’m incomplete as a mechanical engineer because I lack Heat Transfer. Today I
find this felt inadequacy to say more about the engineering curriculum than it does about me.
Rearranging engineering science classes was not enough. A key reason was the limited vision
I had of life as an engineer. One summer I had worked at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New
York, formally as an apprentice design engineer. I had responded to a bulletin board ad. I spent
the better part of ten weeks in a huge room of drawing boards in which a hundred or more
engineers at all stages of their careers, and all male and white to my recollection, huddled day
after day over their drawings. I projected forward a life at the board, unaware of the rich panoply
of potential trajectories I actually confronted with a punched ticket as a mechanical engineer.
Although I loved the fact that engineers did things—they accomplished and contributed--I could
not bear the thought of contributing through a life at the drawing board. To somehow participate
in public controversies over technology, I had to cross the boundary and venture beyond
engineering. After all, the courses were easier there, weren’t they?
I quickly got my comeuppance when I confidently enrolled in a 4th year literature course on
the 20th century novel and then found I could not complete a novel a week or even begin to
follow classroom discussions. I gravitated toward the social sciences, including anthropology
and linguistics, searching for help understanding different points of view. The new anthropology
professor, Dr.Barbara Frankel, generously took me under her wing, making me feel I had
something to offer. I decided to stay an extra year to earn a liberal arts degree (B.A., Social
Relations, 1974) and then took a flying leap into graduate school in cultural anthropology (M.A.
1977, Ph.D. 1981, University of Chicago). The choice of cultural anthropology was specifically
to learn how to make visible and map different perspectives about controversial technologies,
with a goal of doing something with that knowledge. What became a lifelong commitment to
studies of science and technology in society was actually formalized on the day of graduation
when I saw an advertisement for a fall lecture series by that name. I didn’t know a philosopher,
Steve Goldman, and a historian, Steve Cutcliffe, were working to establish an STS program at
Lehigh. I met them only years later.
Leaving engineering was not only not easier but also introduced whole new sets of
entanglements. Learning anthropology at Chicago turned out to have uneven value for
understanding and engaging problems involving technology and society. I had chosen Chicago
for the same reason I had chosen Lehigh, for the scholarship support. I was surprised to find out
no one, save perhaps Milton Singer the South Asianist, had any interest in technology. Indeed, to
6
express an interest in technology was to invite condescension, especially from students. Mr.
Singer, as I was to call him, was willing to guide me in independent study of scholarship on
technology and society. The department was dominated by variations on the theme of symbolic
anthropology, where differences turned on alternative approaches to mapping the semiotics, or
symbolic structures, of social life. It was a given in this “structure-oriented” context that human
action was a manifestation of underlying, shared structures, in the same sense that this sentence
could be described as one concrete manifestation of the grammatical structure of English.
I was interested not in deep, underlying sharedness, but why people fight. In the nuclear
debate, one could find American assumptions about individualism on both sides. Scholarly study
of the assumptions underlying a debate could not account for the debate itself.
I did consider studying engineers. I just couldn’t figure out, however, how to squeeze
everything I’d learned in class and on the job as constituting a “culture of engineering.” To focus
on deep underlying sharedness would do too much violence to differences. I knew many
engineers. What good would it have done to show that engineers were, in some sense, alike, if
one simultaneously obliterated the differences among them? Also, the differences among
engineers were not patterned in ways that could be captured by the term “culture” unless cultures
came in exceedingly small packages.
I turned to the concept of ideology. I could show that conflicts over nuclear power included
distinct ideological perspectives. People who joined such conflicts did so through a variety of
pathways and with a range of motivations, and yet also said and did things in patterned ways.10
The shift to ideology helped make me a good candidate for a postdoctoral fellowship at the
National Research Council to work with a panel studying the “social and economic” dimensions
of radioactive waste management. Those dimensions included conflict. I was a student of
conflict engaged to assist in a project that was taking place in the midst of passionate debate.
I began to think about engineers and engineering education again when I found myself before
engineering students in class. My work on controversies over nuclear power and radioactive
waste disposal had made me a good faculty candidate for a new undergraduate program in
science and technology in society at Michigan Tech (1981-1983) and then a planned graduate
program in science and technology studies at Virginia Tech (1983-present).
What did I have to offer engineering students in elective courses? In later years, I came to
think of the elective course as the microcosm for the academy as a whole. In courses required for
a major, instructors can comfortably attempt to reproduce themselves in their students. The
students want to become what the professor is. Not so in the elective course. Instructors have to
persuade students that the forms and practices of knowledge they have to offer have value. This
problem is particularly difficult in humanities and social science courses, which engineering
students consider to be “opinion” courses rather than knowledge courses. In an opinion course,
the challenge to students is to figure out how they want to position themselves in relation to the
opinions of the instructor, with the goal of increasing, or at least not decreasing, one’s gradepoint-average.
My Ph.D. defense nearly collapsed when one of the faculty, the Marxist Manning Nash, asked incredulously, “Are
you saying people choose their perspectives in this debate?” George Stocking, the resident historian of
anthropology, later told me my dissertation defense “marked a turning point” in the department, the beginning of a
shift in orientation to a “focus on agency.”
10
7
A unique difficulty of the elective course is the diversity in the trajectories of students. From
my location in a Department of Social Sciences or Program in Humanities, Science, and
Technology, I was not engaging only engineers, but also students from the physical sciences,
social sciences, humanities, and, occasionally, business. Students arrive not as empty vessels but
as developed theorists of everyday life and would-be travelers along diverse career paths. How
does one develop pedagogical practices that challenge different students in different ways and
yet still fit their lives? How can a single course become many courses, as many as there are
students enrolled?
The analogy with the academy as a whole is that the academy has to persuade constituencies
beyond it that the forms of knowledge it creates and distributes have value. The world of popular
theorizing is not populated by empty vessels waiting to be filled.
I was not thinking this way, however, during the 1980s. Rather I wondered how I could help
engineering students extend themselves past the boundaries of mathematical problem solving,
giving them the benefit of my own learning without attempting to reproduce myself in them (or
was I?).
My strategy at both Michigan Tech and Virginia Tech was to bring to students, especially
engineers, into contact with the non-technical dimensions of issues and problems involving
technologies. The specific topics varied in courses with such titles as Nuclear Power and Public
Policy, Development of Radioactive Waste Management, Technological Change in Developing
Countries, Computers and Cultural Values, Technologies under Fire, Science and Technology in
Modern Society (in three versions focused on institutions, values, and decisions, respectively),
and Origins of Technological Man: The West and the Rest (the gendered title was in place; I
tried to teach against it). I developed a number of reading and classroom strategies for calling
attention to the social, political, cultural, ethical, and other value dimensions of technological
developments.
My favorite was to bring students into the hearts of controversies. I would require them to
study and demonstrate an understanding of a range of positions in a given controversy. In
classroom reports, debates, and role-playing exercises, they had to practice performing a range of
different perspectives, including those with which they likely disagreed. The goal was to help
them develop a more critically-informed understanding of their own commitments by gaining the
ability to locate them in the context of other, differing commitments.
I lived with the hope that engineering students, in the end, would appreciate and even come to
value extending themselves past their boundaries. They would leave my class with a better
critical awareness of what they were learning, and becoming, through engineering. This hope
was fueled by what struck me as decent writing in classroom assignments and positive student
evaluations, despite the fact I was challenging them to examine their own assumptions. Student
evaluations averaged higher than 3.6 on a 4.0 scale and I was awarded two certificates of
teaching excellence (with a required seven-year hiatus between them).
I was also comfortably in control of course contents. I was in charge of what students would
read and what they would be responsible to do. My responsibility was to make sure a course fit
its catalog description, but catalog descriptions of elective courses frequently permitted much
flexibility. The comforts in such control are not insignificant.
8
The problem that nagged me, however, was I was giving engineering students nothing to take
back with them. I had left engineering and was now teaching outside, in the margins. When
engineering students left my classes or concluded semesters with me, they returned to
engineering courses and resumed trajectories within engineering curricula. I had convinced
myself I was helping engineering students to see differently. But was helping them to see
differently also helping them to act differently as engineers?
When they returned to engineering courses, students would still have to solve problems
correctly. No one would ask them what the nontechnical dimensions of those problems were or
invite them to critically analyze the assumptions of their classes. How could the skills in critical
analysis acquired in my classes be sustained in the midst of the barrage of problem solving
practices? Any contributions my courses made to the subsequent work practices of students
would have to be the product of their own will and ingenuity. I pictured students reporting that
mine was an interesting course but then having no way to integrate its practices into their
practices.
How could such learning survive? How could my classes leave any lasting traces? Was my
work worthwhile if all it produced was good student evaluations and teaching awards? It’s not
about me . . . is it?
I ruminated for many years over ways of offering an elective course to engineering students
whose practices they could take with them.
Still outside?
This past semester was not my best teaching Engineering Cultures. I changed the curriculum
significantly by placing greater emphasis on engineering formation across the five countries we
considered: Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia/Soviet Union, and United States.11 During
the semester, I frequently wondered if I was making the course more about my own intellectual
interests in STS than about the learning of my students. The average score students awarded my
teaching this semester was a 3.3, the lowest since I allowed enrollments to expand to 150 in
1998, took to the stage, and added teaching assistants, all increasing my distance from students.
I’m working on an STS book on the emergence of engineering formation across different
territories. It maintains that to understand the specific pathways of engineering formation that
came to dominate across different countries one must understand the highly localized
responsibilities educators felt to pursue social progress. Engineers, in this view, have been built
to be servants of progress. Understanding this is important because it helps account for why
engineering education appears to be in a perpetual state of reform. Also, understanding how
specific educational pathways became dominant across different countries can shed light on the
pressures advocates of engineering formation are facing in the present.
The tension I felt this semester between advancing student learning and working on a research
project illustrates a continuing uncertainty in an elective course built for engineering students.
How much of it really is within the boundaries of engineering formation?
See Juan Lucena’s contribution for discussion of a continuing EuroAmerican centrism in Engineering Cultures.
The term “engineering formation” is regularly used in Europe to cover both formal education and informal training.
I find it useful because it keeps one from assuming that formal education is the sum total of engineering preparation.
It allows one to ask: how do specific practices of education contribute to formation?
11
9
In 1991, a fortuitous encounter with a prospective STS graduate student visiting campus
initiated a fruitful collaboration and a fast friendship that continue to this day. In that encounter,
it quickly became clear Juan Lucena and I shared similar concerns about our experiences in
engineering education and he found attractive my plans to explore them in an NSF research
project. During the first three semesters of Engineering Cultures, Spring 1995, Fall 1995, and
Spring 1996, Juan was technically a graduate assistant in the course but he functioned as coinstructor. We began then what would become innumerable conversations and unsortable
entanglements. His commitment to making visible perspectives from the South was manifest
early. In the second semester, he led a class on engineers in Colombia, and in the third a module
called “Latin American perspectives.”
Our collegial collaboration continued across universities when Juan took Engineering
Cultures to Embry Riddle Aeronautical University (1996-2002) and Colorado School of Mines
(2002-present). We regularly shared information, readings, stories, and anxieties, and twice
received NSF support to improve the quality of its contents and extend its purview.12 In order to
share the content of this work and promote the effort, we delivered presentations at ASEE
(1999), Global Engineering Exchange (2003), International Association for Continuing
Engineering Education (2004), and an ASEE Global Colloquium.13 We also taught a short
version at the Ecole d’Ingénieurs in Paris (2001; for women engineering students) and offered
workshops at the European Association for Engineering Education (SEFI; 2003) and American
Society for Engineering Education (ASEE; 2006, with Brent Jesiek and Sharon Elber). A joint
fellowship at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Center for the Advancement of
Scholarship in Engineering Education provided a platform for further promoting the course
(2005-2007). Joint research on learning in Engineering Cultures offered some limited evidence
of its benefits to student learning.14
Prior to developing Engineering Cultures, I had twice taken steps away from the study of
technologies and toward the study of technologists. But it did not feel legitimate to focus
exclusively on engineers in an elective course. The Technologist in Society (Spring 1989 and
Spring 1990) explored “what it has meant to be a technologist in American society” by
examining the emergence of engineering in relation to a broader shift in attitudes toward
technology from “thrill” to “ambivalence.” 15 The course’s middle third, “From Heroes to
Employees,” traced the changing statuses of engineers through classes titled “colonial
National Science Foundation Grant #, 2003-2005, “Engineering Cultures: Building Global Engineers through
Multimedia Technology”; National Science Foundation Grant #, 2003-2005, “Engineers and Engineering Education
in the Middle East.” Juan Lucena developed and taught Engineering Cultures in the Developing World as well as
other courses designed especially to confront engineering students with perspectives from the South.
13
Lucena, Juan C. and Gary Lee Downey. 1999. “Engineering Cultures: Better Problem Solving through Human
and Global Perspectives.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education,
Charlotte, North Carolina, June; Downey, Gary Lee and Juan C. Lucena. 2004. “National Identities in Multinational
Worlds: Engineers and ‘Engineering Cultures.” Proceedings of the 9th annual World Conference on Continuing
Education for Engineers, Tokyo, Japan, May; Downey, Gary Lee, Juan C. Lucena, Barbara Moskal, Thomas Bigley,
Chris Hays, Brent Jesiek, Liam Kelly, Jane Lehr, Jonson Miller, and Amy Nichols-Belo. 2005. “Engineering
Cultures: Expanding the Engineering Method for Global Problem Solvers” Proceedings of the ASEE/AaeE 4th
International Colloquium on Engineering Education, Sydney, Australia, September.
14
Downey, G. L., J. C. Lucena, et al. (2006). "The Globally Competent Engineer: Working Effectively with People
Who Define Problems Differently." Journal of Engineering Education 95(2): 101-122.
15
Downey, Gary Lee. 1990. Course syllabus: HUM 3854: The Technologist in Society. Blacksburg, Virginia:
Virginia Tech (available at [Downey website under construction).
12
10
technology and the European transfer,” “the civil engineer as Lone Ranger,” “cognitive
authority,” “engineering knowledge,” “changing context,” “value judgments,” “independence
within public corporations,” and “decline.” Discussion emerged from close reading of David
McCullough’s account in The Great Bridge of the engineers John and Washington Roebling and
would-be engineer Emily Roebling. The final third of the course examined contemporary
engineers as “corporate technologists.”
The NSF project added crucial force to the idea of an elective specifically for engineers. The
award supported Juan, Shannon Hegg, a recent engineering graduate pursuing a master’s degree in
science and technology studies, and myself to conduct participant-observation research in and
around engineering courses and interviews with students and faculty members. Juan embraced the
project with characteristic vigor, not only fulfilling his ethnographic responsibilities but also
sometimes identifying and resolving problems before I was aware they existed. In watching and
talking with students and teachers, we were struck in particular with how engineering science
courses “impact[ed] students with a demand for uniformity, challenging diverse people to fit their
bodies and minds to a uniform method for isolating and solving problems.”16 How might it be
possible to intervene critically in this process? Rapidly expanding interest in engineering education
at NSF made this an increasingly legitimate question.
The biggest blindness in engineering science pedagogy appeared to be those who defined
problems differently than students were learning to do. How to persuade students learning that
answers were either right or wrong that a diversity of knowledge-based perspectives existed out
there that just might be deserving of consideration and respect?
A possible solution was to put them into contact with other engineers. The Technologist in
Society had called attention to French and British engineers and began to plot differences among
civil and mechanical engineers. How about an entire course mapping differences in what it meant
to be an engineer in different parts of the world, as well as how differences among engineers had
emerged in the United States? Engineers could not dismiss the importance of differences among
engineers. Perhaps attention to those differences would enhance engineers’ interests in the
positions and perspectives of non-engineers? An unusually cosmopolitan figure himself who had
circled the world at age 13, Juan wholeheartedly embraced the concept and joined me in reading
for a potential course.
At the end of the new course’s second semester, the final exam included the fill-in-the-blank
question: “Gary Downey's approach to Mapping Engineering Problems through Humans involves
asking questions in the three categories he calls _______________, _______________, and
_______________. [note: knowing the exact words is not necessary; but try to approximate the
concepts].” The three words were “location,” “knowledge,” and “desire.” These words were
worthy of a fill-in-the-blank question because in the class they had become a mnemonic device.
They named a practice for engaging people who defined problems differently than one does.
Location, Knowledge, and Desire: How were such people located? The word location could
refer to a country, an employer, a job status, or even a political position. What did they know? The
presumption was they knew something; the only question was what. What did they want? If one
were going to seriously engage others, it was crucial to try to understand their points of view.
16
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (1997). Engineering Selves: Hiring In to a Contested Field of Education. Cyborgs
and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. G. L. Downey and J. Dumit.
Santa Fe, School of American Research Press: 117-142. p. [ ].
11
The practice named by these words constituted the key move in attempting to position an
elective course within the engineering curriculum.17 In 1995 this practice carried the name
“Mapping Engineering Problems through Humans.” This name was an argument that something
beyond problem solving was nonetheless important to engineers as people working with other
people. By 1998 the name had become “Problem Solving with People.” This name signified that
the practice lay not outside the core of engineering work but was somehow integral to it. In 2005 it
became a practice for “Collaborative Problem Definition,” part of an ambitious effort to redefine
the core practice of engineering as “Problem Definition and Solution (PDS).”
I had positioned Engineering Cultures in the Virginia Tech curriculum with the explicit goal of
maximizing its attractiveness to engineering students.18 One strategy was the name itself. Using the
word “cultures” would feed students’ interests in the exotic. One difficulty is that it also fed a
common presumption that the world can be divided into distinct cultures, cultures that map onto
countries in a one-to-one relationship. Early on, for example, it was clear many students
considered Japanese engineers to all be alike in some essential sense. Using the term was also risky
for me professionally in anthropology and STS, for in both arenas it signified an anachronistic
attachment to outdated theories. To anthropologists it was associated with a tendency to understand
cultures as membership groups. To STS researchers, especially European colleagues, it was
associated with a structuralist determinism, the criticism of which formed the intellectual
foundation for the field itself.
But it worked with students. The complementary pedagogical strategy within the course was to
challenge them with an alternative image of cultures as sets of dominant images. While engineers
shared challenges from dominant images, they didn’t exhibit the same responses to those
challenges. The study of dominant pathways of engineering formation and work became a study of
patterns that emerged over time as engineers responded to challenges from dominant cultural
images, especially images of human progress.
A second strategy was to gain approval for the course to count in two areas of the University’s
core curriculum: Ideas, Traditions, and Values, the humanities, and Critical Issues in a Global
Context.19 Engineering students who enrolled in Engineering Cultures could “get rid of,” as some
students have put it, two unsavory opinion requirements in a single course.
A third strategy was to cross-list the course in both Science and Technology Studies (formerly
as Humanities, Science, and Technology) and in History (STS/HIST 2054). I knew engineering
students were required to fulfill a “depth requirement” in the humanities and social sciences
electives to insure they gained more than a superficial sampling of distribution electives. They met
this requirement by enrolling in two courses from one department. Cross-listing the course gave
students two pathways for putting it toward this requirement.
Enrollments in the course grew quickly, from 22 in 1995 to more than 250 requests (150
accepted) in 1997. From interactions with students, I became persuaded that roughly half arrived
after hearing it was a good course. For the other half, it was the least irrelevant humanities class
See Juan Lucena’s contribution for discussion of some of its limitations as learning device for students.
Note the freedom I had to develop a new undergraduate course in an interdisciplinary unit focused on graduate
education in science and technology studies. Contrast this with Juan Lucena’s location in an undergraduate unit in
which faculty disagreed about its identity and mission.
19
In 2007, the Core Curriculum was changed to Curriculum for Liberal Education. See
http://www.undergradcatalog.registrar.vt.edu/0809/acapolicies/corrcur.html (accessed June 15, 2008)
17
18
12
they could find, double-counted in two areas of the core curriculum, fulfilled a depth requirement,
and/or nicely fit their time schedule.
In 1999, I once scheduled the class in a large lecture hall and accepted all students who
requested it. It became clear that in a large lecture class I was training them to be silent. How could
they accept a challenge to examine their own assumptions about engineering if no one knew their
names and forced them to speak?
The experience led me to limit enrollments to 150 and then teach the course with graduate
assistants who would manage discussion sections. I would mentor them and they would learn
students’ names and adjust the course to fit individual student trajectories. One benefit was to
establish a routine for reaching a substantial number of students. Perhaps graduate assistants might
even someday teach versions of the course themselves, especially in summer sessions. A cost was
to separate me from enrolled students. I became a sage on the stage.
Although the sage on the stage repeatedly asserted that learning in the course was a requirement
for quality engineering work, it was clear Engineering Cultures was an elective course. This issue
became salient, for example for the non-engineers who enroll, who number 10-15%. I have never
successfully resolved this issue. Non-engineers are free to adapt written assignments to fit their
particular cases (e.g., “I never wanted to be an engineer”; “I was an engineering student before
switching”). They are required, however, to complete the same readings and exams as the
engineering students.
The elective course also had limited scope. It was reaching only a maximum of 150
engineering students per semester at a single institution admitting 1,000 engineering students each
year. Juan Lucena’s version reached only an additional 25 students per year.
The only way for the course to become more about engineers and less about a couple of
instructors and a collection of assistants was to scale it up. How could it reach every student at my
institution who wanted it? How could it reach students at other institutions, as well as working
engineers?
One model that appeared rather recently, in 2007, was for a given department to require the
course for all its students and then pay for its delivery to them. The initiative came from Mary
Kasarda, associate professor of mechanical engineering and member of the ME Department’s
curriculum committee. The cost of hiring sufficient assistants to serve this population would be
$40,000 per year, seemingly a manageable amount. But Engineering Cultures is not within the
Department or even the College of Engineering. What Department is likely to shift funds to
another unit beyond its boundaries? The $40,000 is at present an unattainable figure.
During the late 1990s I had become aware of expanding initiatives in distance education, both at
my institution and elsewhere. My reaction had been that such would likely remove me from
students even further than retreating onto a stage. Engineering Cultures required intimate contact.
But having reached an absolute limit of 150 students per semester, I decided it was better to reach
large numbers of students imperfectly or incompletely than not at all. I took the plunge into
distance education.
Localized scale-up
While teaching Engineering Cultures this semester, I was also working with programmers at
Virginia Tech and Purdue University to make nineteen multimedia lectures from the course
13
publicly available at the Global Hub (www.globalhub.org). Founded in 2007 by Purdue’s Daniel
Hirleman (see his contribution, this volume), the Global Hub is a clearinghouse of resources for
the global education of engineers. I had delivered these lectures in the studio of Virginia Tech’s
Video Broadcast Services (VBS) earlier in the decade. In the cases of the introduction and
modules on engineers in France and Germany, the lectures were the products of written scripts.
For the modules on engineers in Japan, United Kingdom, Soviet Union/Russia, and United
States, I delivered the lectures on camera after conducting a regular class, and the resulting
content was then transcribed and edited.
Making Engineering Cultures content available for free at an NSF-supported hub would
appear to be a great opportunity, for both the course and potential learners. But what will make
this content attractive to engineering students and working engineers? And will learners who
sample material from the course actually integrate it as a step toward making visible the work
they do in defining technical problems in addition to solving them?
The multimedia version of Engineering Cultures did not start out as videotaped lectures linked
to a textual outline, with support from other presenters and occasional supporting images. Rather,
if I was going to make a commitment to distance education, I was going to use its main
compelling feature—the potential for interactivity.
I took advantage of an administration move to position Virginia Tech on the forefront of
instructional technology. In 1999, I received a substantial grant from the new Center for
Innovation in Learning to support development of an Engineering Cultures CD ROM, to be
called “ECCD.” That summer three graduate assistants and I would complete “the majority of
the design and development work” on ECCD. During Fall 1998, Krista Gile and Jane Lehr, STS
graduate assistants in Engineering Cultures, had audio-taped 39 classes from Engineering
Cultures. Prior to the summer work, work-study students would prepare transcriptions of those
classes. During the summer, Jane, along with Wyatt Galusky, a former graduate assistant, and
Heather Harris, as STS Ph.D. student, would work with me to edit transcriptions and then
prepare the multimedia content.
Each CD module would include “detailed notes and commentary on readings through both
text and audio files; class lectures on short video clips (5 minutes) and longer audio files (30
minutes); textual and audio reviews of relevant bibliography in the area to guide further reading
and research; a database of old exams and homework assignments; bibliographies of interesting
and appropriate web links; and links to other course-wide reference material, such as a multidimensional timeline helping students compare what was going on in different countries at
similar points in history (e.g., Henry Ford and assembly lines in the United States; revolution,
Leninism, and Stalinism in the Soviet Union).”
It was hubris. I had selected Macromedia Director as the authoring software we would use,
not knowing a novice user would need a month or more to complete an animated presentation of
one small bit of course content. To collect and organize a vast array of pieces would require a
clearer definition of purpose. What was the organizing frame of Engineering Cultures? What
portion of given transcriptions was necessary to keep and what could be dropped? How could 39
days of recorded classes built around questions and answers be broken into pieces, transformed
into related video, audio, and animations, and then reassembled along with resources for students
and instructors in a clear, easy-to-use package? The transcriptions were not content. Converting
14
to interactive multimedia would require a completely different instructional design. Our progress
in building that design was minimal.
During the following year, I recruited assistance from instructional design specialists,
especially Jason Lockhardt, [ ], and Mark Harden, Director of the University’s main video unit,
Video Broadcast Services (VBS). To increase my own technical knowledge, I also enrolled in
short courses in Photoshop, Basic Web Site Design, Instructional Web Design, Dreamweaver,
Video and Audio Streaming, Flash, Quicktime Virtual Reality, and Freehand. Jason was full of
interesting ideas about planning, content development, integration, debugging, design, and
storyboarding. His position prohibited him from actually doing any of the programming work.
After two months of regular meetings, Mark took me aside at one point and said, “I’ll make sure
this gets done.” These were the words I was waiting to hear.
Video Broadcast Services was responsible for managing video classrooms and organizing
video productions in support of classroom activities. Development of an Engineering Cultures
CD fit their mission because it was for undergraduate students. Mark initiated weekly meetings
with himself and, especially, Jeff Dalton, producer/director, and Lance Huff, production
specialist with knowledge of Macromedia Director.
They needed “content.” We had to produce it in sessions taping video in the VBS studio.
Much of my classroom technique involved drawing out of students insights from their reading
and then molding these together into clear themes and ideas. Producing content from these
interactions meant figuring out and writing down after class and then presenting on videotape
exactly what I expected students to learn from every reading and in every class. We did it 28
times.
For each taping session, I prepared in 22 point type a 25-30 page outline of what I intended to
cover. This was projected onto a teleprompter through a document projector, where it served as
the guide to my presentation. My task was to deliver presentations with great enthusiasm under
bright lights and to no audience, all the while sitting down and not moving my hands (movement
increased file size!). Each session required four people in production support, all of whom had
extensive responsibilities. I quickly learned I occupied a role of minimal importance, called the
“talent,” as in “The talent should sit here,” or “The talent can’t wear any blue if the bluescreen is
going to work well.”
After six months of videotaping, we spent another six months in editing the video files and
designing the interface. You say things in a class environment that would embarrass you if they
appeared in print. Transcripts were like draft manuscripts. How was it possible to cut errors,
missteps, and unnecessary material without introducing jerky movement and audio? How could
we encourage and support student note-taking? What about search tools? Will there be a scroll
bar? (no). Should there be a glossary of terms? Where might we get images to support particular
presentations? What about the relation between presentations and useful films from the semester
version? How big will the files be? We were relieved to learn we’d need roughly 100 MB per
hour of video. That meant we would need roughly one CD per module. How will students link
use of the video to the online course manager? (then CourseInfo, predecessor to Blackboard)
Should there be a method for synchronous communications between an instructor and students?
(that became CentraOne). I was devoting at least 25% of my time to the project.
The most nagging problem continued to be instructional design, figuring out how to break up
content into pieces and then reintegrate the pieces into interactive, online learning experiences.
15
Continuing support from the Center for Innovation in Learning kept the project going,
significantly in response to my promise to test a prototype module in Spring 2001 and run a beta
version of the course in Fall 2001.
In late 2000, I modified the instructional design in a fit of panic. We had spent months
figuring out how to deliver a single class, let alone 28 classes. Not only would we not have CDs
ready by fall, we wouldn’t finish a module by spring. In addition, it has slowly dawned on me
that the course content would be absolutely rigid. Unlike a classroom version, an interactive
online version could not be updated as my knowledge in particular areas extended or deepened. I
called a meeting and announced we needed to follow a simpler route.
Mark and Lance suggested a model that included video presentations in their entirety—a
talking head--linked to outlines of the content. Students could search the content by opening up
the outline and clicking on entries. Occasionally supporting images would appear in an
additional box. This became and remains the model, although it took much longer for me to let
go of the vision of interactive role-playing exercises and timelines.
The final steps in developing the prototype course involved preparing a student handbook for
using the CDs in relation to CourseInfo and CentraOne and building a database of 600 multiplechoice questions covering 20 class periods of online lectures. We worried that students who were
not required to attend class might not actually view and complete the modules. Randomized
quizzes became our method for insuring that students both stayed focused and completed the
material in a given day’s work. Brent and Amy completed the majority of this work.
Perhaps the most significant discovery in the prototype experience was that the CDs were a
multimedia textbook. The only regular synchronous meetings students had were Brent and Amy
as teaching assistants (although we did schedule two get-acquainted meetings with me for
anyone who was interested). With the CDs, the so-called “star professor” had become a text for
students to “read” and discuss. The recitation instructors remained in crucial roles pedagogically,
for they still gave grades. But intellectually they found themselves in roles subordinate to the
talking head on the screen.
VBS had contributed staff time to the project as integral to its mission, but if the course ever
scaled up beyond Virginia Tech the organization would have to be paid for its time in new
content development. Students in the prototype version received the CDs for free. Future
students would have to buy them ($45). Achieving this transaction was no easy matter. If the
University Bookstore were going to sell CDs to students, it needed a vendor as supplier.
Establishing a company (Engineering Cultures, Inc.) to serve as supplier would require gaining
licensing access to the CDs as intellectual property. Over a two-year period and through many
meetings, I negotiated a reasonable license agreement with Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties
in which the CDs were deemed to be owned jointly by the University and any authors of course
contents. Also, the authors retained authority to publish the content elsewhere.
The system worked, in a sense. From 2002 through 2008, eleven STS graduate students
taught a total of 32 online sections of the course to more than 800 students (Tom Bigley, Sharon
Elber, Tom Faigle, Grace Hood, Brent Jesiek, Gouk Tae Kim, Jane Lehr, Jonson Miller, Liam
Kelly, Rob Olivo, Deanna Spraker). Four students/former students, Tom Bigley, Brent Jesiek,
Jane Lehr and Sharon Elber, all taught their own classroom versions.
16
Yet the online version remained an elective totality, an online alternative to a classroom
course. All else remained the same. Year-long negotiations with McGraw Hill and, especially,
Pearson Publishing came up empty as acquisitions officers could not find a way to fit CDs into
their business models (2003-2004). A two-year negotiation and working arrangement with the
Continuing and Professional Education Division at Virginia Tech failed to produce a workable
model in which working engineers could enroll in and complete short courses, earning CEU
credit (2005-2007). Occasional discussions with Continuing and Professional Education at the
University of Wisconsin has of yet failed to produce a model in which I am not teaching an extra
course on the side for working engineers.
The decision to port the 19 lectures this spring to www.globalhub.org was designed to take
advantage of two significant changes in web-based delivery of multimedia content. One is the
massive shift of users from dial-up modems to broadband access through cable, DIS, and satellite
connections. The second is ready availability of commercial software for linking video to text,
significantly reducing the cost of new production. As long as new Engineering Cultures content
is made available to undergraduate students at Virginia Tech, VBS staff time is justified in
producing web-based content. On the Virginia Tech side, Joe Schottman and Andrew Tweedt
reprogrammed the Macromedia Director movies into web-based content. On the Purdue
University side, Joe Cychosz configured the Engineering Cultures material for the globalhub site.
Virginia Tech students access the material on a local server, and the material is available to
others for free.
Will teachers, students, and working engineers access the Engineering Cultures content?
Prism, the ASEE magazine, will run a brief article about the course in Spring 2009. Will that be
helpful in advertising the content and building a user base?
Also, for those who access and use the material, how many will view only one or more
country-based modules and how many will actually view the introductory material explaining the
course as a step in making visible problem solving in engineering education and work? In
December 2007, seven members of a transformation team at the French-owned Michelin
Americas Research Center viewed the three-class module on engineers in France and invited me
in for a two-hour workshop. The committee chair later told me the experience led them to
substantially alter a new production plan for a new tire. He said they formulated it in “French
terms” as the development of “a new research method” to be applied in production. The home
office, he said, “loved it.” There was no talk of collaborative problem definition.
Must “global” be an adjective for “economy”?
Contrast two images of the so-called global engineer. In 2006 my co-authors and I published
a paper in the Journal of Engineering Education titled “The Globally Competent Engineer:
Working Effectively with People Who Define Problems Differently.” It was a long time in
coming. We’re told it was a finalist for the William Wickenden award for the best paper of the
year.
The paper offers and tests an approach to conceptualizing the global competency of engineers.
It begins by showing that the often-stated goal of working effectively with different cultures is
fundamentally about learning to work effectively with people who define problems differently.
It then offers a criterion and three learning outcomes for global competency. The criterion
emphasizes collaborative problem definition: “Through course instruction and interactions,
17
students will acquire the knowledge, ability, and predisposition to work effectively with people
who define problems differently than they do.” The learning outcomes distinguish the
achievements of knowledge, ability, and predisposition:
1. Students will demonstrate substantial knowledge of the similarities and differences
among engineers and non-engineers from different countries.
2. Students will demonstrate an ability to analyze how people’s lives and experiences in
other countries may shape or affect what they consider to be at stake in engineering work.
3. Students will display a predisposition to treat co-workers from other countries as people
who have both knowledge and value, may be likely to hold different perspectives than they do,
and may be likely to bring these different perspectives to bear in processes of problem definition
and problem solution.
The analysis then uses the criterion to establish a typology of established methods to support
global learning for engineering students. It introduces the course, Engineering Cultures, as an
example of an “integrated classroom experience” designed to enable larger numbers of
engineering students to take the critical first step toward global competency. The paper
concludes by offering a test application of the learning criterion and outcomes, using them to
organize summative assessments of student learning in the course. Although limited, findings
from the test suggested that students in this classroom course at their home institution were,
nonetheless, taking an important first step toward global competency.
Might it be the case, however, that the learning criterion for global competency in this paper,
working effectively with people who define problems differently, is significantly out of step with
the image of the global engineer now scaling up to dominance among engineering educators in
the United States?
For me, contesting the meaning of global competency was the outcome of a long process that
started elsewhere. When Engineering Cultures first appeared in 1995, its purpose was “to
improve students' abilities to understand and assess engineering problem solving in historical
perspective and a global context.” Note the use of the term “global context” in the singular. It
was part of the recruiting strategy. The singular implemented a common American usage of
“global” to refer to things “beyond the United States.” This class would help them understand
that which was beyond the United States. Once inside, they would find this tendency to
homogenize the United States and contrast it with equally homogenized Others out there by
gaining knowledge of localized specifics. They would learn how dominant pathways of
engineering formation emerged in different places at different times. The global would break up
into an interesting diversity, to which their experiences constituted one significant contribution.
The course was, in fact, resisting the word “global.”
By 1998, the strategy of populating the non-U.S. with different perspectives was recognized
more formally in the syllabus. The course’s purpose now was “to improve students' abilities to
understand and assess engineering problem solving in historical and global perspectives.” Here
“global perspectives” in the plural referred to the course’s interest in how engineers and their
advocates in different parts of the world have identified themselves in the world. In other words,
the U.S. tendency to emphasize the contrast country/world is not shared elsewhere. A simple
example is Europe in which engineers grapple minimally with the three-fold contrast
18
country/European Union/world. Again, the course was resisting the dominant American image of
the word “global.”
Beyond the course, acceptance of the word “globalization” as a label for the present had
expanded rapidly. A key moment in engineering education came with approval of EC2000, new
criteria for the accreditation of engineering programs issued by the U.S. Accreditation Board for
Engineering and Technology. Criterion 3H took the dramatic step of introducing the word
global: "Ability to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global context.”
Note again the singular. The criterion is ambiguous. For some, including me, it suggests a
new interest in the conduct of engineering work in, especially, international contexts. It suggests
the importance of understanding the diverse experiences and perspectives of co-workers and
those affected by the outcomes of engineering work.
It could also mean sales. Understanding the impact of engineering solutions in a global
context could also mean understanding markets around the world well enough to insure that
corporate employers of engineers meet sales objectives and enhance stock values. Here
understanding the “impact of engineering solutions in a global context” does not call for change
in engineering practices per se. Engineering problem solving can go on as always. The change is
to pay attention to making sure users out there in the world beyond the home country are willing
to pay for the solutions engineers here devise. The key issue is American economic
competitiveness.
Publication in 2005 of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the TwentyFirst Century became a major vehicle for scaling up attention to globalization by engineers and
engineering educators. The book documented especially the successes of companies that had
built divisions in India and China. Just as Japan had been positioned as an economic threat to the
United States during the 1980s, so the contemporary successes of India and China pose
economic threats to the United States in the present. By 2006, sales of the book had exceeded a
million copies. It was prominently displayed in airport bookstores throughout the United States.
Since 2005, engineering educators attending to globalization have regularly invoked the book
as a source of legitimacy and to frame their initiatives and recommendations. The development
of global engineers has become about is about educating students to participate in a diaspora of
companies moving divisions from the country to the globe.20
At its 6th Global Colloquium on Engineering Education held in 2007 in Istanbul, Turkey, for
example the ASEE pointedly distinguished between breakout and plenary sessions. In the three
tracks of breakout sessions, educators presented their initiatives in global education. The plenary
sessions, including meals, were all sponsored by and included keynote presentations from
companies underwriting the meeting. These included Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, and The MathWorks. My point here is not to contest the use of sponsorship
funds to seek marketing opportunities. It is rather about the ASEE. The premier professional
organization for engineering education in the United States was comfortably conveying through
its meeting structure the strong message that globalizing engineers is fundamentally about
20
In 2005, the President of YKK Corporation of America, the Japanese-owned manufacturer of zippers, described
the departure from the United States of manufacturing plants for Levi and Lee blue jeans. Between 1999 and 2005,
the number of Levi plants in the United States declined from 33 to 1 and the number of Lee plants declined from 32
to 0. [note: double-check numbers].
19
preparing them to follow the territorial spread of multi-national companies.21 It has been
conveying this message in different parts of the world annually since 2001.
Another example is the new ASEE initiative [Educating Engineers for the Global Economy].
How do advocates of the global economy engineer understand the connection between
educating engineers to help both industry and the country at a time when industry is becoming
increasingly multinational in scope, orientation, and personnel?22
In 2004, Engineering Cultures began claiming to help produce global engineers. Rather than
resisting the image of the global or view it as somehow equivalent to “international,”23 the course
instead took possession of the term “global engineer” by framing it in terms of collaborative
problem definition The “main goal” of the course was “to help engineering students and
working engineers learn to work better with people who define problems differently than they
do.” Course modules would “travel around the world, examining how what counts as an engineer
and engineering knowledge has varied over time and from place to place.” In the process,
students would “gradually become 'global engineers' by coming to recognize and value that they
live and work in a world of diverse perspectives.” That is, “[i]n addition to better understanding
the origins of their own perspectives, participants gain concrete strategies for understanding the
cultural differences they will encounter on the job and for engaging in shared problem solving in
the midst of those differences.” The course description concluded hopefully that “[w]hen course
modules work best, they help students figure out how and where to locate engineering problem
solving in their lives while still holding onto their dreams.”
The Engineering Cultures project thus shifted to construe the global engineer as a means for
scaling up the performance of citizenship in the workplace. The 2006 JEE article also carried this
message, emphasizing it in the title.
But is it too late? Has the image of the global engineer already been settled in a frame that
treats the word “global” as an adjective for “economy”? Is such necessarily the case?
Despite the efforts Juan Lucena and I have made to Engineering Cultures a critical participant
in engineering education, one that uses significant local interest and multimedia strategies to
scale up attention to problem definition in engineering formation, might the course and the
project still be functioning outside, in the margins? Despite its recognition in a recent Carnegie
Foundation report as an innovative pedagogical initiative that achieves transformative learning
through a focus on practices, might its transformations be highly localized and limited to small
populations of students at two institutions who find their way into an unusual opinion course and
then accept what it has to offer?
Perhaps it is essential to develop strategies for scaling up problem definition within existing
engineering courses. Would such even be possible, however? In 2005, I delivered a keynote
address to the World Congress of Chemical Engineering titled “Are Engineers Losing Control of
Technology.” The real purpose of the address and subsequent publication lay in the subtitle:
21
Note that SEFI meetings do not include corporate sponsorship.
Downey, G. L. and Juan C. Lucena (2005). "National Identities in Multinational Worlds: Engineers and
‘Engineering Cultures." International Journal for Continuing Engineering Education and Lifelong Learning 15(3/4):
252-260.
23
See Spring 2003 syllabus
22
20
“From ‘Problem Solving’ to ‘Problem Definition and Solution’ in Engineering Education.”24 The
effort was an attempt to formalize the integration of problem definition within engineering
education as a redefinition of its core practices. It was advocacy for a PDS model of engineering
formation.
The supporting analysis offers a number of strategies for integrating attention to problem
definition within existing engineering curricula, at the levels of both courses and curricula. What
would it take to develop these? Could they really gain critical participation inside? Or is it more
likely that efforts to transform engineering curricula by making visible the work engineers do in
problem definition will live and die with their passionate founders?
Downey, G. L. (2005). "Keynote Address: Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology?: From “Problem
Solving” to “Problem Definition and Solution” in Engineering Education." Chemical Engineering Research and
Design 83(A8): 1-12.
24
21
Alder, K. (1999). French Engineers Become Professionals; or, How Meritocracy Made
Knowledge Objective. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. W. Clark, J. Golinski and S.
Schaffer. Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press: 94-125.
Anderl, R., K. Gong, et al. (2006). In Search of Global Engineering Excellence: Educating the
Next Generation of Engineers for the Global Workplace. Hanover, Germany, Continental AG.
Callon, M., Ed. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Sociological review monograph series. Oxford
; Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review.
Downey, G. (2006). It’s Not about Us. Teaching Excellence at a Research-Centered University:
Energy, Empathy, and Engagement in the Classroom. E. S. Geller, , and P. K. Lehman. Boston,
MA, Pearson Custom Publishing: 69-77.
Downey, G. L. (2005). "Keynote Address: Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology?: From
“Problem Solving” to “Problem Definition and Solution” in Engineering Education." Chemical
Engineering Research and Design 83(A8): 1-12.
Downey, G. L. (2008). "The Engineering Cultures Syllabus as Formation Narrative: Critical
Participation in Engineering Education through Problem Definition." St. Thomas Law Journal
(special symposium issue on professional identity in law, medicine, and engineering) 5(2): 101130.
Downey, G. L. and J. Dumit (1997). Locating and Intervening. Cyborgs and Citadels:
Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. G. L. Downey and J.
Dumit. Santa Fe, N.M., The SAR Press: 5-30.
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (1997). Engineering Selves: Hiring In to a Contested Field of
Education. Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and
Technologies. G. L. Downey and J. Dumit. Santa Fe, School of American Research Press: 117142.
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (2003). "When Students Resist: Ethnography of a Senior Design
Experience in Engineering." International Journal of Engineering Education 19(1): 168-176.
Downey, G. L. and J. C. Lucena (2007). Are Globalization, Diversity, and Leadership Variations
of the Same Curricular Problem? First International Conference on Research in Engineering
Education, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Downey, G. L., J. C. Lucena, et al. (2006). "The Globally Competent Engineer: Working
Effectively with People Who Define Problems Differently." Journal of Engineering Education
95(2): 101-122.
Lehr, J. L., B. R. Cohen, et al. (2006). The Ethical Dilemmas of a Critical Engineering
Education: On Teaching Engineers to Not Be (Like) Engineers. Locating Engineers: Education,
Knowledge, Desire. Virginia Tech.
MacKenzie, D. A., F. Muniesa, et al. (2007). Do Economists Make Markets?: On the
Performativity of Economics. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Williams, R. H. (2002). Retooling : a historian confronts technological change. Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press.