Infusing the Liberal Arts in First-Year Engineering: A Module on History, Professional Identity, and Courage

The global workplace and professional practice require engineers to tackle complex problems and decisions by functioning effectively on multidisciplinary teams, weighing factors across social and political considerations (along with technical facets), communicating with diverse stakeholders, and requiring a lifelong learning approach to every project. Grounded in a rich liberal arts tradition, Wake Forest University (WFU) launched a new engineering program in 2017 with a strong commitment to this practice of authentically integrating engineering fundamental knowledge to rich liberal arts knowledge. Together, we believe this combination of knowledge leads to better engineers. After all, four out of the seven ABET Student Outcomes that every accredited program must meet is inherently connected to liberal arts knowledge. In this paper, we describe a semester-long module within one of our required, first-year engineering courses that was co-designed by an interdisciplinary team to embody this strong liberal arts tradition. In this first year WFU Engineering course, students are introduced to the study and practice of engineering with an emphasis on the human-centered design process. Within this course, a semester-long module called "What is Engineering?" showcases (1) the intersection of history and engineering to emphasize global and societal contexts, (2) foundational knowledge to support the development of one's engineer identity (with historical contexts and engineer exemplars), and (3) the importance of courage as a virtue that is foundational to the practice of engineering. Within this module, which has been under development the past four years, engineering, history, philosophy, and professional identity come to life. Engaging lectures are followed by interactive learning activities and engaging assignments outside of class solidify the learning and students' understanding of key concepts. The driving motivation for this module, developmental approach to the learning activities, and lessons learned are described in this paper. The paper offers the potential to serve as a framework for development of similar collaborations between engineering and humanities, including an emphasis on character virtues within first-year engineering courses and how scalable projects like this are beyond a single course.