Liberal Studies in Engineering - Workshop Report
Support for this event was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Under- graduate STEM Education program (award no.1451399 made to MIT), by the Teagle Foundation, and by the Deans of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Educational Studies.
Editor's Introduction
How does liberal studies contribute to the education and training of engineers? How might scholars in engineering studies and its environs participate critically in positioning liberal studies learning within engineering formation – the making of engineers? What might scholars learn from such active participation? Might we be able to formulate alternative images and practices that make visible liberal-studies dimensions of engineering education that the dominant image of engineering-science-problem-solving-for-technological-design tends to hide? Which alternatives have a chance of traveling beyond circles of like-minded educators? How and why? In this double, theme issue of Engineering Studies, Louis (Larry) Bucciarelli and David Drew provoke such questions by proposing a novel approach to the US-based BA (Bachelor of Arts) in engineering degree called ‘Liberal Studies in Engineering’. As described in their article, the program’s core idea is to ‘take exemplary, substantive content of the traditional undergraduate engineering program – the engineering sciences, the laboratory tests, the design project – and subject this to study from the perspectives of the humanities, arts, and social sciences as well as engineering’. They want a degree that attends simultaneously to the existing technical ‘fundamentals’ in engineering degree programs and ‘dramatically transforms’, or redefines, the ‘content and form’ of those fundamentals. Their article highlights, in particular, historical and philosophical forms of knowledge and modes of inquiry. It also recognizes that localizing the degree to fit specific departments, colleges, and schools would necessarily foreground differing configurations of knowledge and analysis. Such is particularly important given that they hope to local the degree in humanities and/or social science departments. After circulating several drafts of a conceptual design for the degree program, Bucciarelli and Drew secured support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Teagle Foundation, MIT, and Claremont Graduate University for a January 2015 workshop at the US National Academy of Engineering to debate its contents. They organized panels to address the ‘challenges of integrating the liberal arts and engineering education; lessons learned from prior attempts at integration; alternative programmatic strategies and structures; and challenges faced by any initiative [that] challenges the status quo in higher education’.1 Notably, the 50–55 attendees at the workshop actually performed the juxtaposition of, and mutual listening among, engineering educators from both engineering and the humanities–arts–social-sciences that the proposal asserts as essential to its goals. Participants included ‘faculty from engineering, faculty from the humanities and social sciences, deans, provosts, leaders from national [U.S.] organizations, and scholars from [outside the United States] (Ireland, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Singapore)’.2 Disciplinary chauvinisms rose to the surface from time to time, and recurrent differences in what Liberal Studies in Engineering could mean certainly appeared. At the same time,
Professions and Institutional Change: Towards an Institutionalist Sociology of the Professions
Beginning with this article, our special issue advances the understanding of the role of professions in processes of institutional change and through this it proposes a retheorization of contemporary professionalism. Using institutionalist lenses in professional settings, we highlight the relationship between professionalization and broader institutionalization projects. We start by critically reviewing existing approaches in the sociology of the professions, identifying a functionalist and a conflict-based approach. Then, we build on and further elaborate an institutionalist perspective on professional work. Such a perspective affirms the importance of studying professions as institutions and connecting professionalization to broader patterns of institutionalization; it highlights the role of professions and professionals as agents in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions, and recognizes the importance of accommodating contemporary patterns of professionalization within the organizational context. We also illustrate how, empirically, the eight papers in this issue advance our understanding of professional agency in contemporary change and, theoretically, contribute to the reconceptualization of the study of professionalism. Finally, we briefly summarize our contribution and identify a series of directions for further research.