Preparing teachers in culturally diverse engineering classrooms

Other conference contribution, 2023

An important aspect of working as an engineer is working in a global environment. Engineering education needs to equip students with this competence as ASEE, EURANEE and FEIAP have repeatedly stated (Handford et al. 2019). In addition, engineering campuses are increasingly international, both in terms of faculty and students. While there have been a number of pedagogical projects linking students with other countries either physically or online (through for example, COIL projects), which typically involves a relatively small number of students, there has been little research into maximizing the possibilities between ALL students on the home campus (Van Maele et al. 2021). This workshop aims to assist participants in formulating their own activities for the culturally diverse engineering classroom using inspiration from current tried and tested practices.

For educational success and well-being, it is important that both domestic and international students can be integrated into campus activities, both inside and outside the classroom (Bergman et al. 2023). This purposeful integration can give students the intercultural competence skills that are much sought after in engineering graduates by companies (Hundley 2015). It is also a key objective of an internationalization-at-home strategy, commonly defined as “the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments” (Beelen and Jones 2015, 69). While diversity can refer to a range of aspects (see SEFI n.d., Van Maele et al. 2023), this workshop focuses particularly on the culturally diverse student population. While this naturally involves the students’ nationalities, this workshop sees nationality as only one aspect of a student’s identity and acknowledges that other aspects can play an important part in students’ interactions.

Teachers play a crucial role in the successful integration of these engineering students into the formal and informal curriculum, yet there is a lack of training provided for teachers in working with these culturally diverse groups in the classroom (Gregersen-Hermans and Lauridsen 2021). This workshop is thus part of a STINT funded project on educating the educators aiming to map existing professional development initiatives at Swedish higher education institutions and critically evaluate their effect for Internationalization at Home.

By the end of the workshop, participants:
-participated in a survey on their own and others’ current internationalization-at-home activities;
-listed possible future activities to facilitate the culturally diverse engineering classroom applicable to their institutional setting;
-reflected on and discussed these activities in small groups.