Megatrends in Engineering and Technology Education: A Call for the Communicative Imagination

The Communicative Imagination

For us, the defining features of the communicative imagination point to the ability to grasp two pivotal notions. First, that all engineering or technology hard skills while necessary are actually insufficient for professional practice. Second, and consequently, that the available array of expanding forms of multi-modal communication constitutes a critical set of soft skills pivotal to cosmopolitan and socially responsible professional practitioners in the 21^st century. In essence, having the communicative imagination is to appreciate communication no longer as a ‘soft option’ soft skill set for exclusive use within engineering and technology project teams but as a key component of cosmopolitan and socially as well as ecologically and economically responsive engineering and technology education and practice.

A Chapter, Conceptual Mapping, Visualisation and Systems Thinking in Engineering, by Russell illustrates how systems thinking and mapping allows ‘soft’ interpersonal and social aspects of an engineering project to be represented and discussed alongside ‘hard’ technological activities. Any map or model of a complex and dynamic socio-technical system requires simplifying assumptions. Complex adaptive systems theory provides a conceptual framework for identifying the limitations from different types of simplification. This chapter has outlines examples from educational technology and from mining engineering to display how various types of conceptual map can help in clarifying, negotiating and combining different perspectives on technologies in a complex human context – to overcome barriers of specialist language and tacit assumptions.

Coll and Zegwaard in their Chapter contribution, Enculturation into Engineering Professional Practice: Using Legitimate Peripheral Participation to Develop Communication Skills in Engineering Students, argue that communication is seen as a key competency for new graduates and professional engineers furthermore becoming a professional engineer involves learning the mores of the profession and can be seen as a process of gradual enculturation into a community of practice. They further claim that the work integrated learning programs that involve students working alongside professional in a form of legitimate peripheral participation, aid enculturation into the professional community. Such programs are a normal part of the higher education landscape for professional training in engineering, and enculturation may be aided by the use of meta-cognitive strategies such as reflective practice.