Engineering students and professionals as co-learners: epistemic practices and positioning

Journal article, 2025

A significant turning point in the discourse on interdisciplinarity is marked by the growing interest in non-disciplinary perspectives. This paper explores the potential of a model for engineering education where students and non-academic stakeholders are co-learners in project-based learning. The context is an interdisciplinary project-based course on battery technology open to both engineering students and engineering professionals. Interviews were used to explore what epistemic practices groups of students and professionals mobilise, and how they position each other and the project. A key finding is that students and professionals were positioned in complementary ways, with the latter perceived as valuable sources of industrial knowledge and the former as sources of academic knowledge. Additionally, group composition was found to have an effect on their epistemic practices. Based on our findings, we discuss three models for involving non-academic actors in engineering education.