Global Competency in Engineering Education: Emergence, Strategies, and the Problem of Scale Workshop at the National Academy of Engineering

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Engineering - Other (59)The project is organizing a two-day workshop on the theme, Global Competency in Engineering Education: Emergence, Strategies, and the Problem of Scale. The main outcome of the workshop is a book in three parts. The first part is a short historical ethnography of the emergence of existing efforts to prepare engineering students to work in global environments. The second section of the book is a collection of narrative accounts by 21 pioneers in the development of international education for engineering, documenting the strategies they have designed and enacted to achieve the scales of activity that are currently in place. The third part is an account of the problem of scale, including the presentation of potential strategies for substantially scaling up efforts to help engineering students achieve global competency. The organizing methods of research in this project consist of (1) identifying key potential authors, (2) conducting a background historical ethnography in order to map the present, (3) guiding authors in the preparation of narrative accounts of their experiences, (4) conducting reviews of the narrative accounts and background ethnography prior to the workshop, (5) conducting the workshop itself, (6) conducting an evaluation of the project, and (7) preparing the published output. The workshop intends to (a) clarify the range of ways in which existing efforts in international engineering education define global competency, (b) map existing strategies to achieve it, and (c) call explicit attention to the difficult problem of scale in order to better define it and identify potential solutions. The broader impacts of the proposed project lie in its primary mission, motivating and empowering prospective providers of global engineering education to think and act at larger scales of operation. Two other important aspects are the dissemination of the workshop results through the proposed book and the special effort to examine connections between the problems of global competency and the under-representation of minorities in engineering education.