Developing teamwork skills beyond cross-cultural barriers: a case study for engineering students in higher education

In 2013, our university has implemented a new educational model that puts team projects at the core of all BSc programmes, requiring that students develop teamwork skills. On top of this, in 2018, our Chemical Science & Engineering BSc has become an English-taught, international programme. In consideration of this challenging transition, we have developed additional training to facilitate students' acquisition of knowledge, skills, tools, and attitudes to aid conscientious intercultural teamwork. For this, it is paramount that students become aware of, and learn to appreciate, differences in the educational and cultural backgrounds of themselves and their peers. Concurrently, students should practice what they have learned and adjust their behaviour when appropriate. In this paper, we share our experiences, best practices, and lessons learned. More specifically, our study: i) explores which factors are key to a successful intercultural team, ii) investigates how diversity in teams can be cherished and used for the benefit of the team, its members, and its goals, and iii) how these teamwork skills can effectively be taught in engineering programmes. Building on this, the paper describes how the new curricular education has been designed, what is taught, and how an inclusive, regardful, and pleasant atmosphere has been created for the intercultural project teams

Teaching design engineering in an interdisciplinary programme

ATLAS, the Academy of Technology and Liberal Arts & Sciences, is an interdisciplinary three-year Bachelor of Science honours programme for talented students that opened its doors in September 2013. This international programme uses the concept of project-led education to teach students to integrate both technical and social perspectives into a new engineering approach. It aims to educate the so-called ‘new engineer’: a generalist who can combine technological and societal approaches with design solutions that can be implemented in a range of technical, social, and cultural contexts. The programme has a thematic structure, in which a large project is the foundation of every semester. At the start of the semester the students write their own personal development plan framed by three domains (Engineering, Mathematics and Social Sciences) and six learning lines (Research, Design, Organization, Communication, Learning Capacity and Interdisciplinarity). In an interdisciplinary programme like ATLAS students have to learn to use knowledge from different disciplines and integrate it. This is also demanded by the project description, which is always a complex open-ended interdisciplinary problem. Design models from both engineering and social sciences are combined to develop new solutions for boundary-crossing problems. In this paper we will describe the programme and its underlying educational principles in detail. We will show the interdisciplinary design-engineering model that we use in our programme. We will reflect upon our first experiences with the programme and define a set of challenges for teaching design engineering in an interdisciplinary programme

Conceptual Modeling Enables Systems Thinking in Sustainable Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

This study aims to equip students with conceptual modeling skills to address compelling 21st-century challenges in chemistry and chemical engineering education. System-based concept mapping is a critical competence for analyzing global, often complex, problems. We examined how conceptual modeling could scaffold practical experimental design, transitioning from problem identification to testable hypotheses. We set up a project in which first-year undergraduates in chemical engineering work in groups of 5–6 students. Their task was to develop concrete hypotheses for assignments that center on finding sustainable solutions for polluted environments. A set of educational roles (i.e., lecturers, tutors, learning assistants, educational specialist, and project coordinator) were implemented to ensure that students could accomplish their main learning outcome; that is, to become familiar with the academic way of thinking and apply critical thinking skills as a team. Interviews were conducted after the project was finished and revealed that, while conceptual modeling helped students to structure their ideas (i.e., to learn how to design research questions, incorporate interventions, and test models), developing hypotheses remains a challenging task. Our findings brought us to the recommendations for teaching conceptual modeling in the curriculum rather than at the project level, allowing students to progressively transition from understanding and applying concept mapping in their first year into creating solutions within the context of solving complex real-world problems in the final year of their bachelor’s degree. The collaborative learning environment and project format employed in this work could spark new ways to teach science that facilitates systems thinking in chemistr