My hope is that these cases and modules can be used in a wide variety of pedagogical settings, including corporate ones. They should not be limited to special courses like Invention and Design or Engineering Ethics. But these cases and modules do not fit easily into the current structure of university education. As Barry Commoner noted:
The prevailing philosophy in academic life is reductionism, which is exactly the reverse of my approach to things. I use the word holism in connection with biology and environmental issues. But the academic world has changed a great deal since I was a graduate student. It has become progressively self-involved and reductionistic. And I find that’s dull and I’m not interested in doing it.
I had a recent conversation with one of the brightest students I had ever taught. In her first year, she did a brilliant paper for me on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan and Hindu philosophy, showing that there was a connection between his mathematical style and his religious beliefs and practices. By her fourth year, her primary educational concern was publishing a paper so she could go to graduate school in computer science--a noble ambition, but it seemed to close off any interests or projects that would deviate in the slightest from that path. She explained the heuristic a successful computer science student should follow--attach yourself to a lab in your second year, and focus on a set of publications in that domain.
This kind of heuristic is not limited to computer science. I have seen it in psychology graduate students, who identify closely with the dominant paradigm in their laboratory and learn to publish in that area. Working as an apprentice in a lab is one of the best ways to learn the exemplars characteristic of a scientific domain. I think we ought to be producing students who are capable of publishing in fields like computer science and psychology. But I hope this can be done in a way that encourages students to use their expertise in novel ways. Consider Alan Turing and Herbert Simon : the former had the idea of using what we would now call a computer as a model for human problem-solving, and the latter working with teams to create a range of programs that simulated aspects of thought--including discovery. I hope the modules outlined in this chapter show how one can introduce materials that encourage students to work in multi-disciplinary teams on problems that do not fit into current disciplinary pigeon-holes. This sort of work at the boundaries is what leads to new discoveries and the creation of new disciplines like computer science.
There is one sense in which the careers of all creative individuals are similar: They are not careers in the ordinary sense of the term. Most of us join an organization at an entry level, perform a prescribed role for a number of years, and leave at a higher level...In contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives. One could not have been a psychoanalyst before Freud, an aeronautical engineer before the Wright brothers, an electrician before Galvani, Volta and Edison, or a radiologist before Roentgen. These individuals not only discovered new ways of thinking and of doing things but also became the first practitioners in the domains they discovered and made it possible for others to have jobs and careers in them. So creative individuals don’t have careers, they create them. In addition, these pioneers must create a field that will follow their ideas, or their discovery will soon vanish from the culture. Freud had to attract physicians and neurologists to his camp; the Wright brothers had to convincer mechanics that aeronautics was going to be a feasible career. Because careers can take place only within fields, if a person wants to have a career in a field that does not exist, he or she must invent it (.
I hope the ethics cases encourage students to see themselves as independent moral agents who can create a better future-- or a worse one. Computer scientists have to face issues of enormous ethical complexity. In the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, there were serious proposals for software that would determine, based on satellite information, whether the Soviets had launched missiles and respond immediately, with either limited or no human intervention . Students and practitioners need to be able to think through the implications of this kind of a Frankentstein.
Organizations like the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are calling for radical reforms that sound much like the pedagogy embodied in these cases. For example, in a 1994 report, the ASEE called for changes in the curriculum that would include more emphasis on:
(1) collaborative active learning
(2) multidisciplinary perspective
(3) ethics
(4) communication skills
According to the report, "Coursework should feature multidisciplinary, collaborative, active learning and take into account students’ varied learning styles" . I read this report after I was well along in designing active learning modules, but I found it very encouraging.
Similarly, John Prados, editor of the Journal of Engineering Education called, among other things, for placing environmental, health, and safety concerns at the ‘front end of design’, including issues like zero discharge and life-cycle costs. Again, I heard Dr. Prados after my student team and I had designed our environmental ethics cases, but I was gratified to find that others were thinking along the same lines.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999