Abstract

Engineers today cannot meet their professional obligation to the welfare of society if they do not have a broad, multidisciplinary vision, and yet a multidisciplinary vision is becoming enormously difficult to obtain. A new curriculum must emerge that can integrate a focused, discipline-based scientific approach with an integrated approach. To do this, we must recognize that there is already a structure that is deeply embedded into the current pedagogy, which values performance ratios such as efficiency as paramount. Current trends indicate a call for a broader, reflexive, and preventative curriculum, but like many other calls for change, these will fail if the focus continues to be on wrong values. A model for an adaptive engineering curriculum is developed that strives to maintain a scientific approach as well as a broad “culture-based approach.” A new way of thinking about engineering curriculum must involve a “resymbolization” in which experience, context, community, and certain nonmeasurable principles are valued.