Abstract
Engineering education institutions often struggle with issues of enrollment and retention, despite ongoing educational transformation efforts. A Whole New Engineer, by David Goldberg and Mark Somerville, attempts to address this issue. A former tenured professor at the University of Illinois, David E. Goldberg is the president of Big Beacon, a nonprofit for the transformation of engineering education; and Mark Somerville is a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Olin College. Although the authors do not provide transformation and change methodologies, their arguments offer certain educational reform philosophies that can be valuable to the practitioner.
The book recounts an unlikely and unusual journey of experimentation in educational change, and details events surrounding the founding of Olin College of Engineering, a small upstart in Massachusetts, iFoundry, an unfunded incubator pilot in educational change at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and an improbable partnership between the two. The authors narrate their direct experiences of the two separate initiatives and the Olin–iFoundry joint venture from conception to maturity, which yields objective lessons in engineering education transformation.
The authors tie the motivation behind the founding of Olin, iFoundry, and the Olin–iFoundry partnership to the educational reform push considering historical events of the 20th century as well as technical, economic, political, and social drivers of change in engineering education. They mention how the educational system missed reform lessons from three key historical revolutions that modernized the technology industry.
Next, the authors present Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, Carol Dweck’s mind-set theory, Daniel Pink’s call for a whole new mind, and other influences to discuss the “six minds” of the Whole New Engineer: analytical mind, design mind, linguistic mind, people mind, body mind, and mindful mind. The six minds offer a combination of confidence and courage necessary for inspiring creativity and lifelong learning in the 21st-century engineers. Their reflection on some key outcomes of an experimental activity among students of the Olin–iFoundry led to the articulation of the “five pillars” of a new educational structure: joy, trust, courage, openness, and connection.
According to the authors, intrinsic motivation in students, coaching practices by faculty, organizational culture, and change management philosophy are key to transformation of engineering education. They believe that mainstream educational reform initiatives fail despite sophisticated planning and implementation due to the lack of these five pillars at the foundation of any change effort. The authors found that the five-pillars approach worked wonders for the corporate world and that highly successful private firms tend to thrive with restructured organizational cultures that emphasize the humanistic element of change focused on personal fulfillment, resourcefulness, and independence that results in a sustained culture of innovation.
The authors raise some important concerns regarding the present state of engineering education in its inability to address the workforce and innovation needs of the industry. There is a need for courageous and creative engineers who do not conform to the obedience or fixed mindset expected of traditional engineers. To cultivate courageous engineers, there is a need to democratically shift the culture of educational institutions from that of control to a one that established trust among students, administrators, and the faculty. It is vital for educators to assume the role of coaches who exercise emotional intelligence in teaching and are compassionate about student educational needs.
The authors contend that social psychology principles, such as coaching and positive psychology, along with organizational sciences (i.e., change management techniques and culture theory), have worked reliably for the private sector and can be applied to the educational reform efforts at universities and colleges. However, meaningful changes are inherently complex and, therefore, require effective collaboration among both the internal and the external stakeholders of academic institutions. Particularly, collaboration among educational institutions may be challenging due to inherent mutual competition, nonetheless holds unprecedented importance for long-term survival of the university. It is true that certain internal competitive characteristics of academic institutions have served them well; however, a siloed approach to the educational paradigm shift will be ineffectual. The authors support this argument with the phenomenon of disruptive innovation in the industry that has the potential to wipe out the market leader overnight. They want academic institutions to notice the warning signs before open universities and for-profit online platforms, such as Khan’s Academy, edX, Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, and others, come along and begin to sweep away their existing market positions.
This book is well written and the insights it offers are particularly relevant to the engineering and technology educators who wish to shift their instructional design and pedagogical techniques to address the education needs of the present-day aspiring engineers. Administrators considering program improvement and cultural change will find this book most useful in updating their understanding of the current engineering education environment, the drivers of reform, and the means of achieving enduring organizational improvements.
