Teaching global engineering in Canada, learning informality of the Global South

Abstract

Globalisation has inspired a wide assortment of curricular initiatives within engineering education in the USA and Europe. This interest could be categorised in multiple directions – international exposure, service learning, or critical understanding and praxis. In Canada, however, there has been far less consideration for integrating globalisation within the engineering curriculum. The recent episode of reform initiated by the Canadian Board of Engineering Accreditation could usher in changes on this front. Situating the development of a course titled Development and Global Engineering within these broader conceptual and organisational impulses, this paper will illuminate a pathway towards understanding globalisation, especially within the Global South, through a comprehension of complexity and informality.

Keywords:

• global engineering
• engineering education
• Canada
• development
• informality

Notes

1. I will refer to the poorer countries of the world collectively as the ‘Global South’ instead of the more common ‘developing countries’ because the term ‘Global South’ conveys better the contemporary nature of transnational relations within the world.

2. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) report of 2003, titled The Challenge of Slums, defines a slum as a ‘heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor’ (UN Habitat 2003).

3. Alternative approaches to development, have in addition, highlighted different values or objectives of development, as well as different methods for achieving these objectives (Nederveen Pieterse 2010). Alternative development seeks to represent the voices and interests of those who have been excluded by mainstream (or immanent processes of) development (Roy 1999).

4. Since the 1990s, with the rapid mainstreaming of techniques such as Participatory Rural Appraisal and Participatory Technology Development, participation has become inseparable with development practice. These techniques were developed as a means of displacing expert-centred constructions of reality with those representative of the multiple versions of reality, thereby ‘putting the first last’ (Chambers 1997). For some recent appraisals of participation see (Cooke and Kothari 2001) and (Hickey and Mohan 2004).

5. See the special issue in History and Technology (Volume 23, Issue 3) for more papers on the national identities of engineering. See also (Kranakis 1997).

6. EWB Canada has a range of service projects in Africa that it is actively involved in. These projects are staffed by African Program Staff (APS) – full time staff persons who are appointed for a period of up to three years. In addition, students are placed in these projects for one or two summers as Junior Fellows (JF) who assist APS.

Additional information

About the author

Govind Gopakumar is Associate Chair and Assistant Professor at the Centre for Engineering in Society at Concordia University. His primary research interest is in understanding the social, technical and policy dynamics of change in public infrastructure in cities of the developing world. His book, Transforming Urban Water Supply Regimes in Cities in India, was published by Routledge in 2012. Govind is also interested in understanding the social process of transformation in engineering education. At Concordia he has developed and taught several courses, including a course titled Development and Global Engineering.