The book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education is available for pre-order on Amazon or for bulk orders at 800CEOread.com.
See the link here about the making of the book (here), a press release from Olin College (here), and an early review of the book by Gary Bertoline at Purdue University (here).
For more information about the book write to Dave Goldberg (deg@threejoy.com).
Mark Somerville and I are wrapping up production on our book A Whole New Engineer: A Surprising Emotional Journey (see more here), and I was reflecting on large writing projects such as books and how easy it is to underestimate the amount of work required and the amount of learning that goes on in writing one. The tendency is to think, “This will be easy. I’ll just write down what I know about subject X and it will be good.” Of course, you start the project, and find that (a) you didn’t know as much as you thought you did, and (b) you had a lot of learning and figuring out to get to the end. Of course, some of this is the human tendency to underestimate difficulty and overestimate capacity as pointed out in The Invisible Gorilla and related research. If we were more realistic about the scope of such projects, few would start them.
This time, however, with A Whole New Engineer, the misestimation took on an a different flavor. Yes, I both underestimated the task complexity and learning required, but this time I also missed the deeper nature of the task. In the past, what started as largely a textbook or monograph project turned out that way. This time, I thought Mark and I were writing a how-to manual on engineering education reform with some personal anecdotes, but the deeper nature of the project didn’t reveal itself until we were well into the project.
And the subtitle, A Surprising Emotional Journey, starts to characterize the book we found inside of us. As we started to tell the stories of what happened at Olin (www.olin.edu) and iFoundry (www.ifoundry.illinois.edu), we started to recognize that the usual rational code words used to describe educational reform (content, curriculum, pedagogy, learning outcomes, active learning, project-based learning, etc., etc.) were inadequate to describe the underlying experience of authentic reform.
Instead, we needed to admit that the secret sauce to both efforts was profoundly emotional in nature and that words like “trust,” “courage,” “joy,” “connection,” and “openness” (the pillars of Chapter 5) were necessary to convey and understand the experience. And this was excruciatingly hard for a couple of engineers to grok, but once we did, we knew there was no going back. Those distinctions sounded like were talking about the underlying essence of authentic reform in foundational terms in a way that previous descriptions lacked.
And once we reached the emotional floor of the enterprise, we recognized that many of our colleagues would have the same difficulty we originally had in accepting and understanding this emotional language, that the natural tendency would be to reject these terms as “too soft” or “insufficiently rigorous” and to retreat to easy and safe words like “content,” “pedagogy,” “X learning (where X = active, experiential, project-based, etc.). Nevertheless, once the journey had come to this place, we knew that our job was to tell the travelogue as we had experienced it, as we had felt it.
And we hope that this is one of the lasting contributions of the book: to shift a discussion that continues to be held in largely rational terms to one that can unapologetically use the language of emotion in ways that contribute to a more effective and holistic educational system.
A Whole New Engineer: A Surprising Emotional Journey will be ready in Fall 2014. Keep an eye on www.bigbeacon.org/book on twitter @deg511, @threejoy, and @bigbeacon, or write to me at deg@threejoy.com or deg@bigbeacon.org about hosting book-related talks, workshops, and events.
I was a guest on Kate Ebner’s radio show Visionary Leader, Extraordinary Life, on Monday, and my Georgetown University coaching cohort colleague Nancy Lamberton was the guest host. The topic for the show was The Emotional Rescue of Engineering Education and the show abstract is reprinted below:
Humans, with a population of 7 billion people and growing, increasingly depend on engineers for our survival and quality of life. Yet the engineering pipeline is threatened as fewer students choose the profession, in part because they must survive a math-science death march and in part because the journey is viewed as a lonely survival of the fittest. Dr. Dave Goldberg wants to change that. Drawing on a 34-year career as engineer, educator and coach, Dave seeks to rewire engineering education so that it entices young people and motivates them to become whole-brained, -bodied and -hearted engineers. This show explores the surprising path to a whole new engineer that runs through emotional variables such as trust, courage, connection and vulnerability. The result of this shift is a generation of engineers unleashed to face the biggest challenges of our times. Join guest host Nancy Lamberton on July 22 to hear the vision of one of the most cutting-edge innovators in education.
You can listen to the program by accessing the show page and listening at the link here or on iTunes here.
I’m hosting a twitter chat on Holistic Engineering and Holistic Engineering Education on Wednesday. Join me and others interested in this important topic at 8pm by listening in to #BigBeacon on twitter. More information is available here.
María Teresa Morresi from AGIBTA Magazine (here) sent me a list of interview questions regarding engineering education. I shot back a quick reply, and I thought the spontaneity of my answers gave them a force that was worth sharing. Here is a somewhat edited version of her questions and what I wrote:
AGIBTA: I became aware of your work in engineering education through the 2nd Engineer of the Future meeting (EotF2.0) at Olin College in 2009 (here). Tell me a little more about your involvement in engineering ed transformation before and since that time.
AGIBTA: Which are the innovations to improve engineering education and transform classrooms?
AGIBTA: Which are the best e-learning strategies?
I went to a small reception for a staff member in my former department and met quite a few of my now-retired colleagues. It was really a pleasure tripping down nostalgia lane with them, and the surprise of all of us showing up for the same fifteen minute period (in a 3 hour reception) did not go unnoticed by one of my colleagues. He said, “Dave, you know that the chance of all of us showing up in this way is highly unlikely and is difficult to explain rationally.”
I said, “Yes, I know. It’s a mystery,” and a I meant it in a authentic way as I’ve been contemplating the things we don’t know, different ways of knowing than we teach in engineering school, and even the things that we can’t know.
He said, “There must be some deterministic explanation. To think otherwise is surrender.”
His use of the word “surrender” rocked me back on my heals, but it seems to me the bias revealed by the word, a bias that all can be known, and that all is subject to rational explanation, although expressed somewhat extremely, is held by many who teach engineering today.
This attitude is increasingly a problem. Many who would make successful engineers shun or leave an engineering education because (1) it treats students as (left) brains on a stick, (2) anything non-cognitive, actually anything not subject to logical scrutiny, is treated as nonsensical, and (3) emotion, body sense, and any form of intuition are not permissible topics of discussion, let alone subjects of study and learning.
Increasingly employers and students alike want more wholeness as part of the engineering educated and educational system. The medical profession has struggled and is struggling with similar issues, and one might think that the pretense of objectivity might be easier to drop in a “naturally” caring profession, but this has not been the case. Rachel Naomi Remen has written two books that tell stories from her journey as pediatrician to cancer counselor, and the lessons she shares are possibly applicable to engineering education.
Take a look at Kitchen Table Wisdom (here) and My Grandfather’s Blessings (here) for moving accounts that might help us achieve a more whole, human approach to engineering education.
In the year 2023. The year is 2023, and engineering has become the education of choice for an increasing number of college-bound high school seniors. Where once top students aspired to business, law, or medicine, engineering is now seen as both a prestigious and balanced liberal education in a human-centered age dependent upon scientific and technological advance. With an increasing emphasis on engineering as a people profession, larger numbers of women now join their male counterparts to take a growing number of opportunities at engineering schools around the country to the point where gender parity is all but achieved. Furthermore the broader appeal and nature of engineering education has encouraged what used to be called underrepresented minorities to increasingly find their way into engineering colleges.
From the basics to the missing basics. The change is a startling one, and engineering remains an education where science, math and engineering science remain important elements, but widespread reforms adopted in 2018 now teach an engineering canon that respects reflective thinking as applied to technology, human organizations and society, and lifelong learning alike. These missing basics (here and here) helped engineering educators early in the century to stop thinking of the great gifts of Greece and the Western tradition as soft skills, and to start thinking of them as a way to bring conceptual rigor to the mathematical and scientific kind (here and here). Education historians trace the rise and diffusion of these innovations to the Big Beacon movement of collaborative disruption, the diffusion of courses such as Olin College’s (here) User-Oriented Collaborative Design (UOCD), Design Nature, and Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship (FBE), and the adoption of practices such noticing, listening, and questioning (NLQ) by an increasing number of faculty and students alike.
No more dancing with lone wolves. The lone wolf student of the late 20th and early 21st century is also a thing of the past. Teamwork pervades engineering education from the first day a freshman steps foot on campus. Research showed the socialization advantages of such arrangements (here), but it wasn’t until some practical experiments earlier in the century showed how to (a) include such teamwork scalably and low cost and (b) in a way that respected student aspirations for helping others, entrepreneurship, and the design of cool technology (here) that schools around the country were able to integrate such pervasive teamwork into the education of young engineers at low cost with modest administration. In 2023, engineering schools and engineering education, more generally, are themselves, more innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial. Engineering education earlier in the century was a stodgy affair, where strictly disciplinary professors talked confidently about “the basics” of engineering as though they were handed down from Mount Sinai by the almighty himself, but now curriculum/programmatic incubators are de rigueur in all the best schools, and continuous and discontinuous innovation is carried on perpetually within a spirit of perpetual novelty, interdisciplinarity, and innovation.
Innovation & entrepreneurship as more than a chrome cognitive hubcap. A primary change is that innovation is no longer an add-on or an option. Where once schools innovated because of the public relations value of jazzy freshmen programs or industrially sponsored senior design courses, or because NSF infused large amounts to create curriculum coalitions, today engineering schools are connected to one another in rich collaborative networks that encourage pervasive and immediate sharing of best practices. Many respectful structure spaces for innovation (RSSIs) connect the departments and colleges of yesteryear, helping them to continue innovating within and between schools. Change artifacts (CAs) are regularly posted on a diverse network of public and privately maintain social and digital media. Moreover, a rich network of bloggers and digerati covers the fast-moving world of engineering education innovation in a way that contrasts with the dearth of coverage that existed as recently as 2012.
Motivated students through autonomy, mastery & purpose. Particularly important to the attraction of innovative students and faculty alike as of late has been the replacement of a carrot and stick approach of traditional extrinsic motivation with a inner-directed sense of intrinsic motivation. Books earlier in the century such as Dan Pink’s Drive helped to focus attention on two decades of research by such pioneers as Deci & Ryan (here) and Dweck (here). These led to an understanding of the explosive potential for emotional engagement by students and faculty. Earlier in the century, schools learned the value of respecting student aspirations, thereby helping them develop initiative, confidence, and engineering identity in activities and projects of meaning to them; this opened up the possibility of converting other courses to intrinsically motivated pedagogical style in which students take a significantly large role in mastering traditional course material, relatively autonomously, and for their own purposes. This transformation in student motivation and treatment led to a second transformation in creating a more intrinsically motivated faculty and faculty evaluation.
To hasten this not-too-distant day in engineering education, contact deg@threejoy.com and learn about ThreeJoy Associates, Inc. and coaching, training, and smooth change consulting services.
CNNMoney reports that of the 15 top college majors, ten are in disciplines of engineering or engineering technology. Here’s the list and the associated salaries:
Even the non-engineering disciplines in the top 15 are quantitative in nature. Read the full article here.
Students in developed countries want to be A.B.E, anything but an engineer. The deck below considers this difficulty.
[slideshare id=13393593&doc=abe-anything-but-an-engineer-pptx-120620093031-phpapp02]
It considers also the way in which the Big Beacon (here) may be a way to overcome this difficulty.
Dan Pink’s RSA Animate video from his bestseller Drive is a terrific way into the potential for intrinsic motivation in engineering education transformation.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
8.7 million people have seen it already, but even you have, its worth watching again. Better yet, read the book (here).