Conducting the instrumentalists: a framework for engineering liberal education.

This short paper comments upon a concern repeatedly voiced by would-be engineering education reformers, namely what to do about the profound instrumentalist orientation to education prevalent across engineering. Especially among promoters of engineering and liberal education integration, great anxiety arises in response to today's slide toward instrumentalist rationales for higher education generally and their acute manifestation within engineering programs in particular. This paper reviews one program's strategy for responding to this instrumentalism. Rather than merely augment the existing technical core with liberal education content, our program strives to frame the entire educational experience of our students: It seeks to provide the curricular, conceptual, and pedagogical frameworks to situate students’ engineering coursework (i.e. the technical core) as well as their identities within a more expansive vision of engineering in society. The paper reviews three mechanisms through which we embrace our students’ pragmatic impulses and then leverage them to help students reflect critically on the role of education in advancing their personal, educational, and career goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]