Salt Lake City, Utah
June 23, 2018
June 23, 2018
July 27, 2018
According to the National Academy of Engineering, a core need for engineers today is to be able to work with a diverse, multinational, multidisciplinary workforce. Accordingly, colleges of engineering must develop strategies to graduate engineers ready for this global and diverse job market and society. The literature shows a broad agreement in the sense that global competency is needed for the engineers entering today’s job market and society. However, less agreement exists as to what this skill is about, what to call it, and how to prepare our students. By identifying the intercultural maturity level of students in the College of Engineering enrolled in the ENGR 410 Global Engineering Design course during Fall 2014, this study contributes to the body of knowledge of how students come to appreciate cultural differences to interact effectively with different others is important.
This qualitative study used the Intercultural Maturity Framework developed by King & Baxter Magolda (2005) and followed the Naturalist inquiry paradigm using the interpretive method relying on information from interviews, documents and reports. The results of this study showed that this global course had a positive impact on students’ intercultural maturity development. The course had three key components (engineering project; global competency concepts and the virtual participation of Brazilian students) that together, seemed to positively affect the intercultural maturity of the students. The engineering project the company provided linked their cultural learning to the engineering workplace reality. The cultural assignments and the work with the Brazilian students awakened the global interest of the students who had not traveled abroad, and it deepened the cultural understanding of the students who had traveled abroad. Overall, after the Global Engineering Design class, students were able to articulate, when describing the experience, their learning and what they will bring to the work environment and lives from this experience.
Alves , M. C. (2018, June), Preparing Engineering College Students for a Culturally Diverse Global Job Market Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/30885
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