2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This effort explores the challenges of addressing complex global sustainability issues, known as Wicked Sustainability Problems, emphasizing the need for engineers to take and understand interdisciplinary approaches to navigate stakeholder disagreements and dynamics through the development of intercultural competence. The Humanitarian Engineering (HE) minor program at X University is designed to equip future engineers with skills beyond technical expertise to prepare them to address such challenges was the foci of this effort. A multi method approach was taken to explore to investigate potential impacts of student curricular pathways and experiences in the HE minor program on students' intercultural competence, using quantitative data provided by pre and post student results from the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and qualitative insights from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and course artifacts. While a longitudinal research effort is underway, the preliminary findings presented here highlight that students completing the HE minor experienced increased intercultural competence, fostering their ability to understand stakeholder values and navigate societal complexities, but that further research efforts are required to correlate specific drivers of intercultural competence development in engineering students. A conceptual framework, the Formation of Engineers to Address Wicked Problems (FEW) Model, is proposed to highlight pedagogical structures that integrate the desired educational outcomes effectively and is built on prior literature and similar conceptual frameworks within the Engineering for Sustainable Development and Intercultural Competency domains. This paper highlights the importance of preparing engineers to address multidimensional challenges from an interdisciplinary approach while positioning Humanitarian Engineering as potentially an effective pedagogical process to prepare engineers to address sustainability related challenges.