Over a quarter century of research and teaching, the PI and his colleagues have developed an approach to engineering education at the introductory level that reconnects engineering to the liberal arts and attracts new groups of students to engineering. The core of the approach is the idea that efficiency, economy, and ethical and aesthetic choice are all intrinsic to engineering design, not separate considerations superimposed from without. Students come to understand that engineering is not mere technical work but is a creative activity that combines discipline, imagination, and responsible choice. While other approaches that try to link engineering and the humanities have engineering students take more liberal arts courses, the approach that the PI and his colleagues have developed brings out the humanistic potential in engineering itself. Teaching in introductory courses is reinforced through visual understanding, numerical work, and expository writing.
The aim of this project is to disseminate this work nationally through scholarly publication, a structured series of symposia, public lectures, and traveling exhibitions.
The NSF Award, along with other grants, is enabling the basic scholarly foundation of the courses to be completed. A textbook is being written that completes a three-volume series on the historical development of major American engineering innovations from 1776 to the present. An important article-length work on the transfer of foreign technology to the United States in the twentieth century is also being written, as is the second of two books on the great public works of the twentieth century United States.
The NSF Award is also supporting an annual symposium and exhibition that will bring about thirty faculty from other colleges and universities to Princeton each spring. During this project, the PI plans to lecture at schools and in professional gatherings, such as the annual meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, as a plenary speaker.
The broad goal of the project is to help other schools attract non-traditional students to the engineering profession and to improve the engineering education of all students by teaching its modern tradition of outstanding works.
