Educating the educators – why the UK’s engineering teachers need reskilling too

Reskilling and upskilling the engineering workforce is frequently discussed in conjunction with topics like AI and sustainability, both of which were highlighted during the recent World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) held in Monterrey, Mexico.

But this is not a new conversation; indeed, the IET reported in 2021 that of 1,000 UK engineering companies with a sustainability strategy, only 7 per cent have staff with the skills to fulfil it. So it’s clear we need engineering practitioners with new and different knowledge, skills, and attitudes to tackle these complex issues. This therefore relates to higher education, where students, too, have been increasingly vocal in their demands that courses and programmes prepare them with the skills they need to contribute to and shape globally responsible and sustainable engineering practice. However, what’s less visible is the need to up- (and in some cases re-) skill engineering educators in order to create, deliver, and/or foster learning environments where these competencies can be developed.

In many cases, this means that engineering educators will have to get comfortable engaging with topics that they might feel sit outside their range of expertise. It’s not their fault—the structure of traditional engineering education usually emphasises ever-increasing technical specialisation which may not require engaging with a social, cultural, political, or ecological context. But it’s that context that is absolutely essential for engineering education in the 21st century, as some programmes and institutions are starting to recognise. At the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE), for example, the vision is for students to engage with real-world industry and community-based challenges where communication in multiple modes with various stakeholders, ethical and sustainability considerations, teamwork, and creativity are essential to the process of developing a solution. But teaching engineering in this model can be daunting for educators who have been accustomed to focusing on technical fundamentals—and incorporating any additional content within an already packed curriculum can seem nearly impossible.

These were the arguments that faced me when I began working in engineering education over a decade ago. My background is in the humanities and in the first few years of my first job in the USA at an engineering-focused university, those of us on the faculty that weren’t engineers were sometimes viewed with suspicion at best and derision at worst: what could we possibly offer to our technically focused students? But this attitude has changed quickly alongside the emerging acknowledgement that topics like communication, ethics and sustainability are crucial components of engineering, and experts in these areas are needed to provide that content. Academics that value interdisciplinary collaboration and new styles of learning and teaching are being hired across the sector, and leadership that encourages and rewards these efforts is now more common.

Students, too, have changed. The first-years in a required module on communication and ethics went from being openly hostile toward the topic and telling me my modules were a waste of time and had nothing to do with being an engineer to describing it as their favourite class and an inspiration to their future work. And they also began to seek a more holistic approach to their education—for instance, one of the programs I started was designed to attract a different kind of student to the engineering-focused institution, students that didn’t want to give up their identities as artists, writers, and musicians when they began to study their technical courses. I was unsure what I would experience in the UK when I took the position of Founding Professor of Liberal Studies at NMITE, but in this country too I have found sociologists, poets, artists, fashion designers, and philosophers working within engineering education, and these folks tell me they generally feel genuinely welcomed and seen as contributing something valuable—and needed—to the field.

Institutions want students to come out of the end of the educational pipeline as creative, responsible, ethical, and collaborative engineering practitioners. That means, however, that the inputs during that learning journey have to support that approach. And many lecturers have highly specific disciplinary backgrounds—they themselves weren’t taught about these topics and weren’t taught how to teach them with pedagogies like discussion, role play, and active learning. So even if they want to, even if they’re passionate and see the value, there is a confidence gap stemming from several fears: that their students won’t like it, that their administrators won’t appreciate it, or that it will be seen as detracting from the always-important curriculum in their disciplinary field. These issues are structural and operational to be sure, and they reflect the way that higher education is organised and managed. But they cannot be excuses, because this is an emergency: mitigating and adapting to climate change by developing sustainable, responsible, and regenerative systems is no longer optional for 21st century engineers. These things ARE engineering today, whatever else it has been in centuries past. And universities MUST educate students for the professional and civic reality that they will enter.

This means that engineering educators, no matter their disciplinary background, must also find ways to engage with people and topics that they might be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable with. I’ve worked for the past three years managing the development of the Engineering Professors’ Council’s Ethics and Sustainability Toolkits, specifically to help educators understand, integrate, assess, and collaborate around these subjects. And next year’s WEEF Conference will be focused on “Learning for Life,” where I hope educators will realise that this means their own learning, as well as their students’.