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This paper is positioned at the junction between the requirements of the manufacturing industry for a significantly increased number of professionally registered engineers in the UK employment pool and the excellent work which is ongoing in and around the education sector to encourage more young people to follow a career in this field. Higher Education (HE) is a natural stepping stone between these two stakeholder areas of the skills pipeline and has an opportunity to make a unique contribution to ensure an effective HE engineering provision for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) engaged applicants.

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the term intersectional trap. This is defined as the act of saying blanket statements to describe a race or group of individuals without considering variations of experience within the population. The paper will end with recommendations for research focusing on qualitative studies that explore the lived experiences of students as they form their science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) identities. Design/methodology/approach: Researchers and practitioners must focus on how students develop their social, academic and intellectual identities as they become a scientist, doctor or engineer. This includes the development of their core identity--perceptions they have of themselves as well as perceptions of those with whom they work and interact. Findings: One of the main obstacles researchers and practitioners face include how to help students adapt to the norms of STEM-worlds (classrooms and work environments related to STEM) as they proceed through the path to becoming a STEM professional. Originality/value: Knowing that female students of color are underrepresented in STEM is not enough. This paper will discuss the need for an intersectionality lens when considering how to retain talented female students of color in university STEM programs. Researchers and practitioners must focus on how students develop their social, academic and intellectual identities as they become a scientist, doctor or engineer.

This paper addresses the role of engineering PhD education and its relationship to innovation and technology, and the need to reconsider how we educate PhD engineers. Much of the effort on engineering education in the last two decades focused on undergraduate education with a few exceptions that relate to master degree programs. Doctoral education in engineering prepares the next generation faculty, researchers, and technology leaders and warrants our attention. Whilst current education has been largely responsible for technological advances, there is a need for a new model of engineering PhD education that prepares renaissance engineers. This paper focuses on the doctoral education and its role in the USA; however, the issues addressed are universal among the countries that offer PhD degrees in engineering. (Contains 3 tables and 28 notes.)

In the present paper we question how engineering education (and engineering) can support greater participation and inclusiveness in decision making and science and technology. We consider the work "relating" to engineering and society that is conducted by the scholars of science and technology studies, but which is rarely read or considered by the engineering educators who could draw on it. We consider the results of an initial analysis of data collected from interviews with the science, technology and society (STS) faculty across North America and Europe. STS looks at how technology affects society and how society affects technology, while engineers "create" technology. Consequently the current authors suggest that it would be of great relevance to both engineering and STS to join up the thinking across these two arenas by focusing on a question that is not privy to the disciplines: is how can we create a socially just and sustainable future for all? We shall consider questions asked in STS of technology (engineering), e.g. what is its impact on society, who owns the technology, what are the political artefacts of the technology and we consider their influence on engineering (education). Using a phenomenographic approach to the research, 12 categories of description have emerged. Three of these categories are highlighted in this paper: participation; politics and policy; and citizenship, as they reflected themes that are rarely "discussed" in engineering curricula but which appear to be uppermost in the STS arena. Participation was described in a range of ways, from approaches to participation to the case for and against it. In politics and policy much was made of the interplay between scientists and politicians and the power and knowledge games between these two arenas. Citizenship is a hotly discussed topic and is evident in a number of government agendas. Approaches to enhancing citizenship are discussed in a myriad of ventures, e.g. through public participation, being critical of information and through education. (Contains 1 figure.)

Before leaders in technology education are able to identify a theoretical framework upon which a curriculum is to stand, they must first grapple with two opposing views of the purpose of technology education--education for all learners or career/technical education. Dakers (2006) identifies two opposing philosophies that can serve as a framework for technology education, both inspired by ancient Greece, with the works of Descartes and the birth of positivism. Later reappearing in Pascal's writings of the mathematical mind, and finally with Rousseau in the mid 1700s, the theoretical arguments of academic verses vocational were established in education, and thus concluded that the overall purpose of education was to make a man (human being) or a citizen. This dichotomy of views is referenced here to make explicit the underpinnings of a theoretical framework for technology education. The position that the authors take in this dichotomy of views is one that embraces the best of both views by teaching technology education to all students to foster technological literacy while at the same time addressing the needs of a workforce seeking to compete in a global economy. This rationale will be presented throughout the article.

If technology education is to become a vital part of the general education curricula, it must recognize the importance of the humanistic aspects of teaching and learning. Warner states that to achieve this goal it will need to examine the story it wishes to tell. If educators choose the storyline written by Edward Thorndike then they will never be able to teach technology education with the full richness it deserves. An alignment with engineering could limit their profession achieving diversity among the students and narrow the content in their courses. Taking this direction would further enhance the mechanistic and analytical views of teaching and learning advocated by Thorndike. If, however, they choose the storyline written by John Dewey, who advocated the humanistic approach to teaching and learning, they put out the welcome mat to all students in the public schools as they not only talk about, but also live the philosophy of a democratic classroom. In the battle for the heart of American education, Thorndike may be winning, but in the long-term conflict for the soul of technology education educators have to ask, do they want to embrace the machine or the human?

This paper moves beyond the competence focus of mainstream value engineering training (e.g. Miles 1989, "Techniques of Value Engineering and Value Analysis"; Kaufman 1990, "Value Engineering for the Practitioner"), such books achieve their training goal well but lack the pedagogic aim we argue in this paper. This paper achieves our aim by describing the philosophical linkage between value engineering, function analysis and innovation and the economic imperative businesses bring to modes of engineering consideration. This philosophical underpinning uses Heidegger's attack on Descartes' "I think therefore I am" and the assumptions such logic brings to the central question of an individual existence among the existences of everything else. Rather than singularly focusing on "what" or "that", Heidegger calls upon us to consider "how and why" as a product of ontological functioning. However, we do not seek to replace Cartesian rationalism with Heidegger's phenomenological methods, as the latter does have several aspects we disagree with. We argue for their mutual inclusion, something Heidegger would argue against, to enable systematic modes of considering "know-that" and "know-how" in an informed and objective approach to managing innovation and engineering epistemology. Value engineering is offered as a means to enhance the way we teach our students how to innovate and make them aware of the dangers of thinking man-made or artificial-technology is superior to an all-embracing natural or ontological-technology. (Contains 1 note.)

A cautionary tale has become something of a cottage industry in the past decade. To be sure, there has been plenty of material for these publications: Bhopal, Chernobyl, "Exxon Valdez," Three Mile Island, and "Challenger" have entered the lexicon as virtual synonyms for "disaster." Cautionary tale scenarios involve a different kind of causality. In analyzing technology-related disasters after the fact, one may find himself/herself examining causal sequences that had no apparent connection to one another. In this article, the author discusses the epistemic value of cautionary tales and provides an illustration of a cautionary tale from his own field of fire protection engineering. In cautionary tales, what people see is a causal sequence in which many unrelated factors seem to converge to bring about an unexpected and undesirable result. Here, the author stresses that people need to learn new ways to approach the causality reflected in the cautionary tales and argues for a new approach to the managing of technological risk, one that can identify a dangerous condition caused by factors that may appear on the surface to be unrelated.

To mark New England Board of Higher Education's (NEBHE) 50th anniversary year, "Connection" invited a small group of visionary commentators to submit short "statements" on the future of New England's economic and civic development, tomorrow's technologies and the changing shape of higher education. This article includes the following "statements": (1) In Search of New NEBHEs (Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson); (2) Demography Is Still Destiny (Peter Francese); (3) New England's Going to Do It Again (James T. Brett); (4) The Human Development Gap (James P. Comer); (5) A Future in Concrete? (Seymour Papert); (6) Teaching Expert Thinking (Chris Dede); (7) Affordability and Opportunity (Sandy Baum); (8) A Plan for Higher Education Access (John F. Tierney); (9) Diversifying Academic Knowledge (Esther Kingston-Mann); (10) Close the Latino Education Gap (Marilda L. Gandara); (11) Attracting Students to Science (George M. Langford); (12) A Regional Resource for R&D (Andrew G. De Rocco); and (13) A Tall Order for New England (Robert E. Miller).

This concluding commentary takes the perspective of research on practicing scientists and engineers to consider what open areas and future directions on relational thinking and learning should be considered beyond the impressive research presented in the special issue. Areas for more work include (a) a need to examine educational applications of relational thinking in divergent reasoning, rather than primarily in convergent reasoning; (b) considerations of when to "not" focus on relational reasoning in learning; (c) more research on the distributed nature of relational reasoning across students in a class, and to embedded physical, social, and historical contexts; (d) treatment of the hot components of relational reasoning including motivational and emotional processes; and (e) more attention to how relational reasoning is changed by the details of modalities rather than treating all contents as abstract symbols.

People who practice engineering can make a difference through designing products, procedures, and systems that improve people's quality of life. Literacy, including the interpretation, evaluation, critique, and production of texts and representations, is important throughout the engineering design process. In this commentary, the authors outline texts and interpretive frameworks that are common to each stage of the engineering design process as it is defined by the Next Generation Science Standards. The authors describe how disciplinary literacy can also account for students' home languages and local bodies of knowledge, in addition to these engineering design standards. Finally, they conclude with a vision of disciplinary literacy as a tool to promote equity by rigorously supporting diverse students through the process of critiquing designs in society and creating ethical and equitable designs.