Bridging the Gap: Bringing Context into Engineering Education

Standard engineering education often focuses on disseminating specialized, technical knowledge with the overall goal of training competent designers and decision-makers.Students learn to reach a desired outcome by focusing on improving the efficiency of the object or procedure in question; however, the social, historical and environmental context in which this problem exists is often dealt with marginally or completely ignored.As a result, in engineering practice, unexpected undesired outcomes often arise out of actions that were intended to improve a particular problem.As a student, I have experienced two different engineering programs, each with a unique approach to addressing the lack of context in engineering education and practice.During my undergrad, I took part in the Engineering and Society program at McMaster University, and during my current graduate work, I am a part of the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto.Each program attempts to teach students how to think more broadly, balancing breadth and depth in order to develop a new approach to engineering problems.The Engineering and Society program uses a technique called "inquiry" throughout the curriculum and encourages engineering students to focus on a discipline outside of engineering throughout their undergraduate education.The Centre of Technology and Social Development builds a historical context for understanding the interaction between technology, society and the biosphere through a series of courses.Each program has benefits and drawbacks.This paper will discuss my personal experience in these programs and discuss a way in which the advantages of each one could be combined in order to help improve the overall engineering education experience.