TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Bouffier, Anna A1 - Gaedicke, Sonja A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Diversifying engineering education: a transdisciplinary approach from RWTH Aachen University T2 - Strategies for increasing diversity in engineering majors and careers N2 - Engineers and therefore engineering education are challenged by the increasing complexity of questions to be answered globally. The education of future engineers therefore has to answer with curriculums that build up relevant skills. This chapter will give an example how to bring engineering and social responsibility successful together to build engineers of tomorrow. Through the integration of gender and diversity perspectives, engineering research and teaching is expanded with new perspectives and contents providing an important potential for innovation. Aiming on the enhancement of engineering education with distinctive competencies beyond technical expertise, the teaching approach introduced in the chapter represents key factors to ensure that coming generations of engineers will be able to meet the requirements and challenges a changing globalized world holds for them. The chapter will describe how this approach successfully has been implemented in the curriculum in engineering of a leading technical university in Germany. Y1 - 2017 SN - 9781522522126 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-2212-6.ch010 SP - 201 EP - 235 PB - IGI Global CY - Hershey, USA ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Social responsibility and innovation - Key competencies for engineers T2 - ICERI 2016: 9th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation: Conference Proceedings : Seville (Spain), 14-16 November N2 - Engineers are of particular importance for the societies of tomorrow. The big social challenges society has to cope with in future, can only be mastered, if engineers link the development and innovation process closely with the requirements of people. As a result, in the frame of the innovation process engineers have to design and develop products for diverse users. Therefore, the consideration of diversity in this process is a core competence engineers should have. Implementing the consideration of diverse requirements into product design is also linked to the development of sustainable products and thus leads to social responsible research and development, the core concept formulated by the EU. For this reason, future engineers should be educated to look at the technical perspectives of a problem embedded in the related questions within societies they are developing their artefacts for. As a result, the aim of teaching engineering should be to prepare engineers for these requirements and to draw attention to the diverse needs in a globalized world. To match the competence profiles of future engineers to the global challenges and the resulting social responsibility, RWTH Aachen University, one of the leading technical universities in Germany, has established the bridging professorship “Gender and Diversity in Engineering” (GDI) which educates engineers with an interdisciplinary approach to expand engineering limits. The interdisciplinary teaching concept of the research group pursues an approach which imparts an application oriented Gender and Diversity expertise to future engineers. In the frame of an established teaching concept, which is a result of experiences and expertise of the research group, students gain theoretical knowledge about Gender and Diversity and learn how to transfer their knowledge into their later field of action. In the frame of the conference the institutional approach will be presented as well as the teaching concept which will be introduced by concrete course examples. KW - diversity KW - innovation KW - social responsible engineering KW - engineering education Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-84-617-5895-1 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2016.0353 SN - 2340-1095 SP - 5967 EP - 5976 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Bouffier, Anna T1 - Facing Future Challenges: Building Engineers for Tomorrow T2 - Conference proceedings : new perspectives in science education : 5th Conference edition, Florence, Italy, 17-18 March 2016 N2 - Future engineers are increasingly confronted with the so-called Megatrends which are the big social challenges society has to cope with. These Megatrends, such as “Silver Society”, “Globalization”, “Mobility” and “Female Shift” require an application-oriented perspective on Diversity especially in the engineering field. Therefore, it is necessary to enable future engineers not only to look at the technical perspectives of a problem, but also to be able to see the related questions within societies they are developing their artefacts for. The aim of teaching engineering should be to prepare engineers for these requirements and to draw attention to the diverse needs in a globalized world. Bringing together technical knowledge and social competences which go beyond a mere training of the so-called “soft skills”, is a new approach followed at RWTH Aachen University, one of the leading technical universities in Germany. RWTH Aachen University has established the bridging professorship “Gender and Diversity in Engineering” (GDI) which educates engineers with an interdisciplinary approach to expand engineering limits. In the frame of a sustainable teaching concept the research group under the leadership of Prof. Carmen Leicht-Scholten has developed an approach which imparts a supplication-specific Gender and Diversity expertise to engineers. In workshops students gain theoretical knowledge about Gender and Diversity and learn how to transfer their knowledge in their special field of study and later work. To substantiate this, the course participants have to solve case studies from real life. The cases which are developed in collaboration with non-profit organizations and enterprises from economy rise the students to challenges which are inspired by professional life. Evaluation shows the success of this approach as well as an increasing demand for such teaching formats. KW - Diversity KW - Engineering Education KW - Gender KW - Higher Education Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-886292-705-5 SP - 32 EP - 37 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Steuer-Dankert, Linda A1 - Berg, Tobias A1 - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen T1 - Breaking the habit – new approaches in engineering education T2 - Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education N2 - Within the framework of the project a genderand diversity-oriented teaching evaluation and modern, media-supported blended learning approaches were used in order to achieve the intended goals. First research results of the literature and status quo analysis were already implemented and tested in newly designed teaching approaches, for example in a multidisciplinary introductory lecture of civil engineering at RWTH Aachen University. KW - teaching KW - engineering education KW - gender and diversity KW - best practice Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-2-87352-012-0 N1 - Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education , Orléans , France , SEFI , 2015-06-29 - 2015-07-02 ER -