Barbarians at the Gate: Curricular Challenges in Chemical Engineering Education
The title is not to suggest leveraged, private equity buy-outs of chemical engineering! … but a much more ancient metaphor about foreign or unfamiliar voices being heard outside the city gates before the invasion!
Engineering education and particularly chemical engineering education has been, is, and will be subject to many unfamiliar voices from a range of disciplines. It is part of chemical engineering's historical development as seen in the "foreign" voices of systems science, product design, bioscience, nano-science, genetics and the like. How do we respond to such barbarians in terms of curriculum development? The potential solutions pose serious questions for academe, industry and professional societies.
In this presentation I want to raise and discuss what I believe are some of the key characteristics of chemical engineering that help us address curriculum challenges. In addressing reform, there are significant opportunities as well as impediments to change and diversity in curriculum design and development. We need to understand the design and development principles at work in curriculum innovation. We also need strategies to grasp the opportunities as well as address barriers in order to generate curricula that adequately prepare graduates for productive and satisfying professional careers. These will be highlighted in this presentation.
A serious, on-going dialogue in this area is needed - one that in the past has generally occurred in a piecemeal fashion leading to curricular overload, driven by many vested interests that are often detached from the focus on the student cohort, experience and outcomes.