Content of review 1, reviewed on January 28, 2018

In a very interesting paper the author discusses the two current cultures concerning sustainable development that shape engineering education. The analytic one and the policy/management one. In a very insightful manner the paper starts remembering the Western culture divide between science and humanities pointed in the book of Charles Percy Snow “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. Still has odd as may seem he choose not explore for instance how do engineering courses perform in respect to the number of course in the field of Humanities/Social Sciences-H/SS. For instance at UCBerkeley civil engineering, that in 2017 rank the first place between the civil engineering programs in the US (US, 2017) has a minimum of 6 H/SS mandatory courses. The same formation in the Imperial College has just one and in Portugal it is even possible to find a graduation in civil engineering without a single course on H/SS (Cachim, 2015). Zhou et al. (2014) compared civil engineering undergraduated curriculum on thirty relevant universities in China, US and Europe concluding that on what concerns H/SS courses China decided to follow Europe instead of US. That Europe/China approach seems to be a strange one because its humanities especially in the form of novel and tragedy, which highlights how people cope with ethical dilemmas. And this is especially important in the context of climate change which raises many questions with ethical dimensions rooted in the human condition. The author also decided not to address the historic routes of the hard knowledge in engineering curriculum “The intensive mathematical training in eighteenth and nineteenth century French engineering schools was deemed not only instrumental for refining engineers’ analytical faculty, but also essential for cultivating engineers’ characters of precision and discipline” (Tang, 2014) and how they may hinder engineers creativity. In fact the paper did not mention creativity even once which is a strange option because creativity is crucial for engineering (Cropley, 2015) and is especially needed in the 21st Century in order that we may be able to solve the complex problems faced by Humanity. In the last section of the paper it’s a pity that the author also did not mention the importance of the Grand Challenges of Engineering (Mote et al., 2016) in the context of problem based and project based learning. Because one of the vertices of creativity is motivation, the two others being expertise and creative thinking. And of course it is widely known that it is not easy to instil what Amabile (1998) call “inner passion” for pursuing a goal or solve a problem. That´s why Grand Challenges of Engineering could foster such passion because according to Mote et al. (2016) women and underrepresented minorities say they are especially attracted by the idea of both doing something for people and having the potential to change the world Amabile, T. M. (1998). How to kill creativity (Vol. 87). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Cachim, P. (2015). An Overview of Education in the Area of Civil Engineering in Portugal. Procedia Engineering, 117, 431-438. Cropley, D. H. (2016). Creativity in engineering. In Multidisciplinary Contributions to the Science of Creative Thinking (pp. 155-173). Springer, Singapore. Mote, C.; Dowling, J.; Zhou, J. (2016) The Power of an Idea: The International Impacts of the Grand Challenges for Engineering. Engineering 2, 4-7. Tang, X. (2014) Engineering Knowledge and Student Development: An Institutional and Pedagogical Critique of Engineering Education. Doctoral dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute https://search.proquest.com/openview/2557a1847c902e7394392cb9663d3c37/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y US (2017) Best graduate civil engineering Zhou, Y.; Zhang, J.; Li, L.; Liao, S.; Fang, Z. (2014) Comparison analysis of civil engineering undergraduate curriculum among universities in China, US and Europe. Applied Mechanics and Materials vols 638-640, pp. 2402-2408.

Source

    © 2018 the Reviewer (CC BY 4.0).

References

    F., M. K. 2017. Strategic competences for concrete action towards sustainability: An oxymoron? Engineering education for a sustainable future. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.