2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How should global competency and communication be perceived and taught in a continuously divided world coupled with the ongoing technological sanctions and arms race caused by Russia-Ukraine war and the ongoing US-China-Taiwan frictions? How should the engineering instructors imagine, design, and teach ethics and humanities when more and more engineers are involved in what Giroux (2007) called military-industrial-academic complex due to the geopolitical tensions between the Global North and South? This paper discusses a novel teaching experiment, “Science, Technology and Global Communities: Taiwan-Korea Global Classroom”, to address these questions. Guided by the critical pedagogy research (Giroux 1988), this paper analyzes what and how the official knowledge (Apple, 2014) in traditional Eurocentric engineering education are challenged, and teases out the transformations both instructors and students developed along with the progress of the course.
The paper is divided into three parts. First, we illustrate the process of curriculum design as boundary negotiations among instructors from different cultures. The course is a cross-border collaboration between the University of Science and Technology, Korea, and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, hosted by four instructors from Taiwan, Korea, and the US. Using “Cold War”, developmentalism, innovation and governance as the core concepts, we co-designed the course structure, ethical and theoretical frameworks, and learning modules from our situated perspectives, helping engineering students to unpack the colonial histories, political ideologies, national building, different innovation models, and forms of governance underneath the development of technology and society in the postwar era. Second, we explain how the curriculum was implemented in an extremely diverse classroom. Several academic and pedagogical attempts have been made to teach global engineering ethics, such as the use of particularist/universalist or top-down/bottom-up approaches. (Zhu and Jesiek 2017; Luegenbiehl and Clancy 2017) In comparison, given a diverse student body from 18 countries in the “Global South” including India, Taiwan, Philippines, and Ecuador, and others, this course hopes to go beyond the existing dichotomic approaches with several pedagogical tools implemented. Third, we discuss the transformation occurring to instructors and students. Using the method of collaborative autoethnography (Heewon, Ngunjiri, and Hernandex 2016), this paper captures the intense dialogues, reflexive moments, as well as disputes, joys and transformations of instructors and students. In addition, data collected from weekly meeting recordings, minutes, and emails, instructors’ reflective journaling, transcripts from interviews with the instructors, and other class materials will also be analyzed to illustrate the trajectories and formation of this joint course, with a particular focus on curriculum design of what a “global engineering classroom” could and should be like. We conclude this paper with some lessons learned for possible teaching and learning alternatives in responding to the growing fragmentation of global order.