HST 2054: Engineering Cultures

Development of engineering and its cultural roles in historical and cross-national perspectives. Explores roles of engineers and engineering in popular life, development of national styles, changing values in engineering problem solving, and effects of evolving forms of capitalism.

This course is taught every semester and most summers in a face-to-face or online classroom. It fulfills:

Core Area 2: Ideas, Cultural Traditions, and Values
Core Area 7: Critical Issues in a Global Context

The main goal of this course is to help engineers learn to work with people who define problems differently than they do. The course travels around the world, examining how what counts as an engineer and engineering knowledge has varied over time and from place to place. Students gradually become 'global engineers' by coming to recognize and value that they live and work in a world of diverse perspectives. Minimally, participants gain concrete strategies for understanding the cultural differences they will encounter on the job and for engaging in shared problem solving in the midst of those differences. When the course works best, it can help students figure out how and where to locate engineering problem solving in their lives while still holding onto their dreams. The title of the course is a pun: it both compares the cultures of engineers at different times and places and explores how engineers participate in and contribute to everyday cultural life.

Gary Downey and Juan Lucena jointly developed Engineering Cultures at Virginia Tech in 1995. Downey has taught the course the course at Virginia Tech nearly every semester since 1996, and . Lucena has been teaching the course at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott Campus since 1997. During summer 2001, Downey and Lucena taught a two-week version of the course at the International Institute for Women in Engineering in Paris, France.

For more information on this course, and for a samply syllabi, please go to:

http://www.cyber.vt.edu/hst/2054/

Choices and Challenges Project
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
Virgina Tech, Mail Code: 0227
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
Phone: 540 231-6476 Fax: 540 231-7013
Email: choices@vt.edu