Engineering better engineers
Engineers bear a responsibility to contribute to “a healthier, cleaner, safer, more competitive and sustainable Canada,” according to the Declaration completed at the end of the National Engineering Summit held last May in Montreal.
To achieve this ambition, engineers must be socially aware and committed professionals who bring their expertise not only to healthcare technologies, environmental innovations and global competitiveness but also to social engagement.
This includes influencing policy and supporting socially and professionally marginalized groups, such as Aboriginal peoples.
As a result, the new engineer’s professional toolkit has to contain compartments for technical skills, of course, but also for the capacity to think critically, understand the social impact of engineering and information technology and communicate ideas effectively. As the declaration points out, meeting these responsibilities will call for the transformation of engineering education and practice.
For students in Concordia’s Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, the metamorphosis is already well underway, thanks, in large part, to the work being done in the modestly named General Studies Unit (GSU).
“We cannot give people technical skills without a moral compass about where to go with their knowledge,” says Deborah Dysart-Gale, the GSU’s associate chair. “We want students to be concerned with what constitutes good and bad engineering; we want them to think about what they are doing and why. So this means we need to be interested in ethics, questions of social impact and how the work of an engineer or computer scientist can make a better world.”
Dysart-Gale takes Aristotle’s notion of “the good citizen speaking well,” or the skilled rhetorician who uses his or her powers of persuasion to benefit his community, and applies it to a contemporary professional environment. “The good engineer or computer scientist is someone who understands what’s at stake in his or her work and has the communication tools to achieve these objectives,” she points out. “It’s someone who cares to ask how the new technologies he or she is developing can be used.”
Thinking ahead
Since its creation in 2004 by former Engineering and Computer Science dean Nabil Esmail, the GSU has sought new ways to have students embrace its goals. “The notions of professionalism and ethics, the social impact of technology, engineering economics, sustainability—all of these things are becoming more important,” says Thiruvengadam Radhakrishnan, professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering and the GSU’s chair since 2006.
Indeed, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board is also stressing the importance of non-technical skills for an engineering education. While writing courses have long been a mandatory part of the national engineering curriculum and generations of engineering and computer science undergraduates have had to take the faculty’s Professional Communication course, there is an increasing focus on these classes and subjects are being added to the mix.
The GSU offers courses in professional communication and computer programming fundamentals, as well as those addressing the list of concerns identified by Radhakrishnan, including economics, sustainability, social impact of engineering and information technologies, and ethics.
While these areas are often designated “soft skills,” they’re also resilient. “I take my students back to the Greek words episteme, or knowledge, and techne, an embodied way of doing and knowing,” says Jessica Mudry, a specialist in rhetoric and the social impact of technology who was also the first GSU faculty member hired in 2004. “For many students, their GSU classes will be the only ones that do not become obsolete over their careers. In 10 years, software engineering books will be obsolete; knowledge in this field will keep moving along. But the ability to craft a good argument or think critically about an issue—that skill will always be useful,” Mudry points out.
Mathieu Mourez agrees. Returning to school to complete a degree in computer science after a dozen years in the workforce has given Mourez a clear sense of the value of effective communications and critical thinking skills. “I’ve found that many people may have a good technical understanding of the principles of their field but cannot communicate them.
The ability to do both seems extremely rare,” Mourez laments. “But if you look at any position being advertised today, you’ll see that strong communication skills are critical.” Like all students, Mourez completed the mandatory professional communication course, which he says, prompted him to take the subsequent elective course on Innovation and Critical Thinking by the same professor, Rob Danisch. “He’s a fantastic teacher!” Mourez enthuses.
While professors are getting good reviews from students, the praise is reciprocated. “The great thing about engineering students, which people don’t always realize, is that they’re really smart and will do the work. You can keep setting the bar higher and they will keep reaching it,” says Mudry, who includes philosophers from Aristotle to Karl Marx on her reading lists. Meanwhile, Danisch’s Innovation and Critical Thinking course draws on interdisciplinary research from history, psychology and sociology, as well as science and technology. “We’re not reticent about presenting our students with the big names and the big ideas. They rise to the challenge,” Mudry says. “Consequently we’ve developed a truly robust program; these courses have teeth.”
Actionable theories
GSU courses present challenges that simulate those found in their professions. Issues of social impact, sustainability and effective communication come into play whenever engineers and computer scientists develop new technologies or introduce existing ones to new environments.
For example, last summer, Dysart-Gale travelled to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts with one of Radhakrishnan’s graduate students, who was there to design a database for a local, social-service agency that kept paper-based records only. However, social-service staff refused to collaborate with the student for fear that automating these records would undermine their relationships with clients.
In an unrelated project, Dysart-Gale held a writing seminar for the social-service workers about how to create a proposal to improve food services for the elderly.
“After some discussion, the social-service workers lit upon the notion that because some people with diabetes have a poor diet, they end up in hospital, which then costs money,” Dysart-Gale recounts. “But to prove this, they would need to assess the cost of patients hospitalized for diabetes and they were discouraged by the immensity of the task of going through paper files to collect the necessary information,” she reveals.
“Of course, you don’t have to do this if you have a database! So one of them jumped up, ran down the hall, grabbed the graduate student and demanded, ‘Why didn’t you tell us your database could do these things?’ They needed a clear sense of how the technology would be useful to them—not simply imposed upon them.”
This example brings home a common yet oft-overlooked point: without relevant frameworks and contexts, people cannot use technology. These concerns are influencing new research carried out by GSU faculty members. For instance, one of Radhakrishnan’s projects deals with working with farmers and fishermen in India to determine how they can take advantage of inexpensive, accessible cell-phone technology to help improve their livelihoods. While this versatile technology can provide information on everything from weather patterns to market prices for crops, it also assumes the end user is technically savvy.
“We have always considered our audience to be literate, highly skilled, technically sound people but what happens if we relax these criteria?” asks Radhakrishnan. “Adapting this technology for semi-literate societies poses fascinating new challenges. And these questions of development and communication, including sensitivity to culture, are attractive to graduate students. So we’re developing graduate courses that focus on engineering and technology for global development. That’s our next plan.”
It’s an ambitious plan to be sure. But if engineers and computer scientists are ever to become the enablers of dreams envisioned by the Canadian Engineering Leadership Forum, they will be have to pay more attention to the issues taught by the GSU so they can become intrigued by the social and intellectual challenges—as well as the technical ones—that confront them. And the “new engineer” described in the Montreal Declaration will come into being.
—Patrick McDonagh, PhD 98, is a Montreal-based freelance writer.
Related links:
- General Studies Unit
- Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science