Synthesis Lectures on Global Engineering – serie

Global engineering offers the seductive image of engineers figuring out how to optimize work through collaboration and mobility. Its biggest challenge to engineers, however, is more fundamental and difficult: to better understand what they know and value qua engineers and why. This volume reports an experimental effort to help sixteen engineering educators produce ""personal geographies"" describing what led them to make risky career commitments to international and global engineering education. The contents of their diverse trajectories stand out in extending far beyond the narrower image of producing globally-competent engineers. Their personal geographies repeatedly highlight experiences of incongruence beyond home countries that provoked them to see themselves and understand their knowledge differently. The experiences were sufficiently profound to motivate them to design educational experiences that could challenge engineering students in similar ways. For nine engineers, gainingnew international knowledge challenged assumptions that engineering work and life are limited to purely technical practices, compelling explicit attention to broader value commitments. For five non-engineers and two hybrids, gaining new international knowledge fueled ambitions to help engineering students better recognize and critically examine the broader value commitments in their work. A background chapter examines the historical emergence of international engineering education in the United States, and an epilogue explores what it might take to integrate practices of critical self-analysis more systematically in the education and training of engineers. Two appendices and two online supplements describe the unique research process that generated these personal geographies, especially the workshop at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in which authors were prohibited from participating in discussions of their manuscripts. Table of Contents: The Border Crossers: Personal Geographies of International and Global Engineering Educators (Gary Lee Downey) / From Diplomacy and Development to Competitiveness and Globalization: Historical Perspectives on the Internationalization of Engineering Education (Brent Jesiek and Kacey Beddoes) / Crossing Borders: My Journey at WPI (Rick Vaz) / Education of Global Engineers and Global Citizens (E. Dan Hirleman) / In Search of Something More: My Path Towards International Service-Learning in Engineering Education (Margaret F. Pinnell) / International Engineering Education: The Transition from Engineering Faculty Member to True Believer (D. Joseph Mook) / Finding and Educating Self and Others Across Multiple Domains: Crossing Cultures, Disciplines, Research Modalities, and Scales (Anu Ramaswami) / If You Don't Go, You Don't Know (Linda D. Phillips) / A Lifetime of Touches of an Elusive ""Virtual Elephant"": Global Engineering Education (Lester A. Gerhardt) / Developing Global Awareness in a College of Engineering (Alan Parkinson) / The Right Thing to Do: Graduate Education and Research in a Global and Human Context (James R. Mihelcic) / Author Biographies

Global engineering offers the seductive image of engineers figuring out how to optimize work through collaboration and mobility. Its biggest challenge to engineers, however, is more fundamental and difficult: to better understand what they know and value qua engineers and why. This volume reports an experimental effort to help sixteen engineering educators produce ""personal geographies"" describing what led them to make risky career commitments to international and global engineering education. The contents of their diverse trajectories stand out in extending far beyond the narrower image of producing globally-competent engineers. Their personal geographies repeatedly highlight experiences of incongruence beyond home countries that provoked them to see themselves and understand their knowledge differently. The experiences were sufficiently profound to motivate them to design educational experiences that could provoke engineering students in similar ways. For nine engineers, gaining new international knowledge challenged assumptions that engineering work and life are limited to purely technical practices, compelling explicit attention to broader value commitments. For five non-engineers and two hybrids, gaining new international knowledge fueled ambitions to help engineering students better recognize and critically examine the broader value commitments in their work. A background chapter examines the historical emergence of international engineering education in the United States, and an epilogue explores what it might take to integrate practices of critical self-analysis more systematically in the education and training of engineers. Two appendices and two online supplements describe the unique research process that generated these personal geographies, especially the workshop at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in which authors were prohibited from participating in discussions of their manuscripts. Table of Contents: Communicating Across Cultures: Humanities in the International Education of Engineers (Bernd Widdig) / Linking Language Proficiency and the Professions (Michael Nugent) / Language, Life, and Pathways to Global Competency for Engineers (and Everyone Else) (Phil McKnight) / Bridging Two worlds (John M. Grandin) / Opened Eyes: From Moving Up to Helping Students See (Gayle G. Elliott) / What is Engineering for? A Search for Engineering beyond Militarism and Free-markets (Juan Lucena) / Location, Knowledge, and Desire: From Two Conservatisms to Engineering Cultures and Countries (Gary Lee Downey) / Epilogue - Beyond Global Competence: Implications for Engineering Pedagogy (Gary Lee Downey)

The creation of physical and material infrastructure is the cornerstone of human development; not surprisingly, engineers and designers are often motivated and inspired in their practice to improve the world around them, to make things better for others, and to apply their knowledge for the good of mankind. These aspirations often get translated into engineering and design curricula where students and faculty work on development related projects usually under the category of community or service learning. This book presents an overview of such an education and outreach program designed to empower stakeholders to improve their lives. The project described here was an international multi-institutional undertaking that included academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private firms. Within the academic setting, an interdisciplinary set of actors that included engineering and industrial design students and faculty worked on the project. We concretize our work by presenting a design case study that illustrates how different approaches can help guide the works of engineers and designers as they create global infrastructures and localized artifacts. We emphasize the importance of developing long term relationships with organizations on the ground in order to ensure appropriate design as well as successful transfer and long term use of designed artifacts. We discuss the life trajectories of the authors to provide a grounded perspective on what motivated us to undertake this work and shaped our approach with the intention to demonstrate that there are multiple paths toward this goal. Table of Contents: Introduction / Development of the Program: Personal Trajectories Meet Professional Opportunities / Intellectual Positioning of the Program: Sociomaterial Infrastructures and Capable and Convivial Design / Case Study: Quick Response (QR) Code Based Immunization Solution / Design for Development Course and Outreach Initiative / Conclusion: Lessons Learned

At the University of Rhode Island over 25% of engineering undergraduates simultaneously complete a second degree in German, French, Spanish, or Chinese. They furthermore spend an entire year abroad, one semester as exchange students at a partner university and six months as professional engineering interns at a cooperating company. With a close-to 100% placement rate, over 400 graduates, and numerous national awards, the URI International Engineering Program (IEP) is a proven path of preparation for young engineers in today's global workplace. The author of this volume, John Grandin, is an emeritus professor of German who developed and led the IEP for twenty-three years. In these pages, he provides a two-pronged approach to explain the origin and history of this program rooted in such an unusual merger of two traditionally distinct higher education disciplines. He looks first at himself to explain how and why he became an international educator and what led him to his lasting passion for the IEP. He then provides an historical overview of the program's origin and growth, including looks at the bumps and bruises and ups and downs along the way. Grandin hopes that this story will be of use and value to other educators determined to reform higher education and align it with the needs of the 21st Century. Table of Contents: How I became a Professor of German / My Unexpected Path to Engineering / Building a Network of Support / Sidetracked by a Stint in the Dean's Office / Reshaping the Language Mission / Struggling to Institutionalize / Partnering with Universities Abroad / Going into the Hotel and Restaurant Business / Taking the Lead Nationally / Building the Chinese IEP / Staying Involved after Retirement / The Broader Message for Higher Education / Conclusions

This book follows the fraught attempts of engineers to identify with Korea as a whole. It is for engineers, both Korean and non-Korean, who seek to become better critical analysts of their own expertise, identities, and commitments. It is for non-engineers who encounter or are affected by Korean engineers and engineering, and want to understand and engage them. It is for researchers who serve as critical participants in the making of engineers and puzzle over the contents and effects of techno-national formation.

This book deals with the simultaneous making of Portuguese engineers and the Portuguese nation-state from the mid seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. It argues that the different meanings of being an engineer were directly dependent of projects of nation building and that one cannot understand the history of engineering in Portugal without detailing such projects. Symmetrically, the authors suggest that the very same ability of collectively imagining a nation relied on large measure on engineers and their practices. National culture was not only enacted through poetry, music, and history, but it demanded as well fortresses, railroads, steam engines, and dams.Portuguese engineers imagined their country in dialogue with Italian, British, French, German or American realities, many times overlapping such references. The book exemplifies how history of engineering makes more salient the transnational dimensions of national history. This is valid beyond the Portuguese case and draws attention to the potential of history of engineering for reshaping national histories and their local specificities into global narratives relevant for readers across different geographies.

The identity of Taiwan is a matter of intense local and international debate. This book shows how engineers helped produce two distinct visions of the land of Taiwan and its people, elevating the value of engineering as a career path in the process. The book describes how the technical work of engineers, which typically avoids partisan politics, can actually contribute to partisan differences and conflict. In most countries, the rise of engineering is about the emergence of a single dominant vision of the country. In Taiwan, two distinct visions of the land and its people emerged, owing to the presence of two distinct geographical identities—islanders and mainlanders.The distributed mode of production in the electronics industry proved to be transformative and created an “abnormal boys’ club” of engineers, as one group called themselves. Because the two communities were influenced by contrasting geographical identities, they felt as though they were working for different Taiwans. "What a book. Engineers and the Two Taiwans traces how engineers creatively crafted professional identities and pathways in the cracks of multiple, shifting empires – and in so doing helped create Taiwan as a thing-unto-itself. In showing how engineers shaped and were shaped by geopolitics and the birth of a new electronics industry, the book opens up fresh perspectives on longstanding questions about who engineers are, how they are trained, where they ought to work, and ultimately what engineering is for. These engineers did politics through their material commitments even as they avoided partisan politics."Jessica M. Smith, Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies, Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department, Colorado School of Mines"This book explores Taiwan’s dynamic industrial evolution over the past century through the lens of different engineers’ social dynamics, identity, values, and compelling narratives. It offers insights into Taiwanese own perceptions in the electronics industry and prompts reflection on how countries navigate domestic and international technology policies and social progress. You will come to appreciate how engineers in Taiwan today bear continuing responsibilities to connect their technical work to its land and people, even when their own commitments differ from one another."Minn-Tsong Lin, Deputy Minister, National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan, Distinguished Professor, Department of Physics, National Taiwan University