Engineering Students Can Do X (Chennai Engineering Colleges - huffingtonpost)

These experiences have given me some insight into today's engineering students and have helped me see that no matter where we live, we're not so different after all.

Chennai Engineering Colleges

While cultures vary greatly from place to place, I've found that at the individual level engineering students are more similar than dissimilar. My colleagues elsewhere don't necessarily see it that way, however.

Engineering Graduation

Prior to engaging students overseas, I'm often surprised when a colleague pulls me aside and says quietly, as if telling me a secret, "Dave, you need to understand something. You're not in the United States anymore. You're in __________ (fill in the blank), and students here don't do X," where "X" is the particular thing that these students supposedly don't do or aren't capable of doing. For example, I have been told various times and in various locations that engineering students aren't curious, don't answer questions, don't ask questions, can't talk about emotions, aren't creative, and so on and so forth across a litany of supposed inadequacies and incapacities.

As an outsider in all these situations I was sensitive to my role, yet a part of me was always curious to observe students for myself to see if they really don't do X. I have been privileged and blessed to be able to listen to engineering sons and daughters around the world in a way that is quite compelling, and I want to share what I've heard from some of the brightest young engineering students in the world. My hope is that by sharing my observations I can help us all seriously think about educational reform and transformation. The remainder of this article tells three stories of what I found to be true of engineering students worldwide.Engineering Students Do Answer QuestionsOver recent years, my style in the classroom has shifted from traditional lectures to a more Socratic question and answer style, and I was warned by my colleagues not to expect too much in the classroom with engineering students when you ask questions. "Engineering students are shy." "They don't answer questions." "They will sit in silence," I was told, and so I set out to find out whether this was true. In particular, on August 11th 2011, while I was working in Asia, I helped run a series of large-classroom pilot seminars for first-year engineering students entitled Mastering the Missing Basics of Engineering, and the first session was on Noticing, Listening, and Questioning. About 200 students showed up.The first part of the session was on the power of awareness and noticing, and we started with the whole class standing and performing an active meditation exercise to increase their mindfulness and focus the class on the work ahead. Thereafter, the students paired up and were requested to tell each other stories about what they noticed during their previous day. In the exercise, one student tells a story, they switch and the other person tells a story. Thereafter, the class comes together and is debriefed by asking teams to report back and answer the following question: What did you notice about your noticing?