Search

Suellen Shay's work on higher education curricula foregrounds the importance of professional curricula which face inwards to disciplines and outwards to practice. This paper builds on her framing of professional curricula, distinctive in the differentiated knowledge base and the social relations which legitimate them. I extend Shay's work deeper into the internal governance structures underpinning curriculum decisions in engineering. Two dimensions of governance are explored: central control from the Faculty of Engineering over its departments; and the authority of individuals in department-level curriculum and accreditation roles over their colleagues. The empirical focus is on curricula reform towards 'graduate attributes' in engineering education, through a comparative study of eight universities in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Singapore, and Australia. The findings show that research-intensive universities are shielded from the full implications of accreditation requirements, while teaching-intensive universities are more likely to invest in developing the governance processes and systems demanded by professional bodies.

Background: A body of literature has arisen analyzing and legitimating the emerging field of engineering education research (EER). Using concepts from the sociology of knowledge, EER can be described as a region because it has relationships both to other academic fields and to its field of practice. Of interest is the strength of boundaries between these fields, described by the sociologist Bernstein's concept of classification. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study addresses the research questions: (1) How, when and by whom are arguments made to strengthen or weaken the boundaries, first between EER and other academic fields and second between EER and engineering teaching? (2) How do these arguments change across time and national contexts? Design/Method: Drawing on a survey of 21 EER experts, this sociological discourse analysis focuses on a purposive dataset of 17 papers from 2000 to 2020. Results: The study identified three main arguments in this literature, favoring: (1) strong classification (a singular in sociological terms); (2a) a region linked outward to teaching practice; and (2b) a region linked inward to other social science disciplines. Conclusions: The argument for EER as a strongly classified field has served value in establishing legitimacy and associated resources in some contexts but has not yet delivered a unique knowledge base for such legitimation. An alternative framing holds together the productive tension between two directions in which EER as a region can face: Looking inward to parent disciplines for theoretical and methodological direction and looking outward to the world of practice for meaningful problems to guide its studies.

Engineering leadership education has become increasingly popular over the past decade in response to national calls for educational change. Despite the growing popularity of the movement, however, reform efforts continue to be piecemeal in their delivery, driven largely by the priorities of program leaders who established them (Graham, 2012). If we as engineering educators wish to more systematically develop leadership skills in our students, we should begin by empirically examining and defining our phenomenon of interest: engineering leadership. Our article takes up this challenge by investigating how 82 engineers in five organizationally distinct roles define leadership and how their respective insights are shaped by their diverse organizational locations. After weaving together the perspectives of engineers in industry, human resource professionals, entrepreneurs, politicians and interns, we propose a poly-vocal definition of engineering leadership and identify practical implications for engineering leadership educators.

This paper analyzes the curriculum of engineering leadership offerings in Canadian universities. We operationalize an adapted version of Lattuca and Stark's (2011) academic plan framework to analyze key documents of engineering leadership offerings embedded in the engineering curriculum in six different universities. In the process, we generate relevant categories for comparison that are specific to engineering leadership curricula, leading to a preliminary taxonomy for leadership education in a professional field. Using the process and taxonomy developed, findings show a range of purposes, content and sequencing, with a common core of instructional processes and resources. We also explore how accreditation, labour markets, internal resources and relationships shape curriculum decisions. This paper highlights changing trends in engineering education related to leadership skill development and provides insights for professional education more broadly on the influences and practical implementation of these changes.

Engineering is developing extensive leadership education, supporting future professional engineers to engage with others in solving complex sociotechnical problems. A contemporary challenge is to integrate leadership learning into foundational coursework requirements.

New institutionalism predicts a global convergence in how higher education is organized. This convergence might be expected to intensify in professional education given accreditation requirements of professional bodies. Engineering presents an opportunity to study how international mobility agreements facilitate the development and normative diffusion of global norms in accreditation. This paper investigates how changing logics of accreditation influence the academic organization of engineering schools in Canada. Using three case studies of Canadian universities, we show how regulative and normative institutional pressures influence decisions by engineering schools to take visible action to demonstrate their conformity to global norms, while still pursuing local missions. Our findings contribute to understanding the complex mediation processes between professions and universities, and they represent a critique to dominant rationalist perspectives on quality assurance mechanisms in higher education.

In a Fall 2019 editorial, I JEE i editor Lisa Benson reflected on the "gladiatorial atmosphere" in academia that can be amplified by the peer review process (Benson, 2019, p. 311). CONCLUSION In this guest editorial, we discuss the impact of the I JEE i Mentored Reviewer Program on our identities as engineering education researchers and reviewers. [Extracted from the article]