2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The future of engineering education requires engineering faculty, schools and programs to enact change in the curriculum to respond to the complex challenges in our world today and to recognize the socio-enviro-technical nature of engineering practice. Engineering leadership education is premised on the principle that developing strong leadership competencies is essential to effectively and appropriately enable the contextual application of the traditional technical competencies that are often the primary focus of undergraduate engineering programs. In our 2023 paper entitled Engineering Leadership: Bridging the Culture Gap in Engineering Education [1] we argued that a major barrier to change in engineering education, including the incorporation of engineering leadership into the curriculum, is the culture that exists in our institutions. We proposed that the elements and dynamics of this culture can be examined in the form of co-contraries (or opposites that need each other) and that the relative emphasis in these co-contraries reflects the engineering educational culture in a department, an institution or in engineering education as a whole. Example cultural co-contraries identified include: the power distance dynamic between the student and the professor; the nature of the distribution of effort between teaching and research; and the tension between technical and non-technical content emphasis and delivery.
In this paper we aim to look more deeply at cultural constructs associated with engineering education through a targeted literature review and integrative analysis of engineering education culture, the engineering culture of professional practice, the general theoretical constructs of culture and cultural dimensions in societal and organizational contexts with the explicit purpose of developing a foundational understanding of the cultural co-contraries observed and discussed in our 2023 paper. This foundational understanding can then be used to build a model for characterizing engineering education culture and evaluating positive cultural change and resistance to change in engineering education. We believe that capturing and understanding the cultural constructs associated with engineering practice and engineering education will not only be helpful in effecting change in engineering education, it will also support the need for engineering leadership and followership education to be explicitly taught as core concepts at both the undergraduate and graduate level to support the requisite systemic changes in engineering practice and education to address the complex socio-enviro-technical challenges that engineering must address.
The paper supports LEAD division priorities of “Inform” and “Explore”.