In the search for the future engineer: the EELISA disciplinary broadening workshop experience

Abstract

The emerging adhocracy of sustainability in every field of life, do also claims its legacy in the field of education, particularly in the discipline of engineering. Institutions necessitate to adapt their curriculums to the possible changes so that the engineers of the future are ready to address interdisciplinary and evolving challenges in their careers. As a European University Alliance aiming to define and implement a European engineering model, EELISA project has a dedicated work package to explore and propose various approaches to address this challenge by deploying disciplinary broadening workshops. This paper scrutinizes the initial outputs of the first full-day workshop organized by three partner universities of the alliance under the theme of “Cities and Communities” in October 2021, and opens it to a broader discussion. This paper is structured in four parts while deploying qualitative research methods to analyze the collected data. Initially, it expresses the role of EELISA University, the state-of-the-art skills of today’s engineers and the challenges for enriching them to materialize the vision of European engineering, including bridging and expanding disciplinary domains. The second part explains the workshop structure that was organized under four interdisciplinary subtopics related to the theme to increase the involvement of various engineering and non-engineering academics and professionals. Then the workshop outputs, the participants’ brainstorms about the skills, competences, proposals to overcome challenges and barriers are conveyed. The final part summarizes the workshop results and introduces valuable inputs to the search for the European engineer profile and the roadmap of the EELISA.