Transdisciplinary variation in engineering curricula. Problems and means for solutions

Abstract

An essential difficulty in solving practical problems that are not like the ones a student has solved before is discerning the core of the problem. It is claimed that discernment has to be trained by variation—by varying the context of the assignments in which students have to identify and grasp their “underlying form”. A decisive challenge in engineering education—and also medicine, veterinary and pharmacy—is that there are many and very different kinds of subjects students study, some with thoroughly scientific content, others centred on more practical knowledge. How to provide a coherent program keyed on discernment? Another challenge is what's required to apply theory to practice; i.e. theory needs to be restructured and often integrated with parts of other theories and with more practical knowledge before it can be applied in real-life problem solving. What we propose is to let the variation of assignments transcend subject borders. Give assignments in the same subject that vary in context, e.g. from theoretical and “closed” to practical and “open”. And give assignments in different subjects embodying the same concept, principle or method, thus training discernment and at the same time demonstrating relations between theoretical and more practical subjects.

^†The ideas presented in this article originate to a large extent from discussions of the results of investigations at the Technical University of Denmark into engineering competence and education. A large part of the article was written during L.L. Bucciarellis' stay at the University during the spring of 2006.

Keywords:

• Discernment
• Polyparadigmatic curriculum
• Restructuring
• Transdisciplinary variation

Acknowledgements

The change in the course Waste Water Treatment is made by the teacher associate professor Jens Ejbye Schmidt, Environment and Resources, Technical University of Denmark.

Notes

^†The ideas presented in this article originate to a large extent from discussions of the results of investigations at the Technical University of Denmark into engineering competence and education. A large part of the article was written during L.L. Bucciarellis' stay at the University during the spring of 2006.

^†This understanding is behind the thinking related to taxonomies for educational objectives—most often Bloom's taxonomy for the cognitive domain (Bloom et al. 1956). In spite of much elaboration (Anderson and Kratwohl 2001) this thinking seems not to have included problems of polyparadigmatic curricula and restructuring.

^‡Students have real difficulty in to seeing through different ways of representing the same phenomena—e.g. to see that there is an identity between a process represented in physical, material terms and the same process formulated in idealized mathematical form. And it is a challenge for teachers to recognize this—even teachers otherwise qualified in pedagogical planning.