Towards Human-Oriented Engineering Education: A Model of Empathetic Engineering in the EPS Program at the International Faculty of Engineering, Lodz

Introduction

The precarious times we are living in, characterized by quick and dynamic changes in all spheres of human activity, call for an adequate response from universities and schools in the form of modern methodological concepts, study programs and, even more importantly, philosophical and psychological bases that could direct the future engineers in constructing human-oriented technological solutions for complex problems that societies experience on an every-day basis. The trigger factors for contemporary “wicked problems” (Kolko, 2012) and societal crises are of various nature: economic, political, social, environmental, populational, philosophical and, most recently, of a health-related nature.

Challenges of the globalized world cannot be successfully resolved without engineering technologies that are already deeply “woven into the fabric of our society” (Grasso & Burkins, 2009), and as such may themselves constitute the origin of challenges if not addressed appropriately. The most recent crisis was evoked by the pandemics which caused disruptions in many areas of human activity including education. Remote education resulted in numerous problems; however, the most acute issue at universities was the impossibility to communicate and share through direct contact and develop practical skills in relation with others. Encountering the Other (Levinas, 1969) has again been proven to be a crucial element in the learning process as it conditions human connection, dialogue, the confrontation of ideas and knowledge transference on cognitive, emotional and ethical levels.

The chapter presents the result of a several-year dialogue in a diverse multidisciplinary group of academics representing engineering and non-engineering disciplines, who attempted to identify the most important values for contemporary engineers. These values constitute the pivot of engineering project-organized education aimed at addressing the challenges of dynamically changing environments. The results of this dialogue, enriched with the perceptions of students recorded in reflective writing and collected in student interviews and the opinions of external experts, contributed to the identification of empathy as a core value that may be used in contemporary engineering to enhance its integration with human experience and social contexts. The core value of empathy was, in turn, used as a pivotal value that is to underpin and organize various components of the proposed educational model used in the European Project Semester (EPS) at the International Faculty of Engineering (IFE), Lodz University of Technology (TUL). The model can be characterized as a human-oriented empathy-based model for engineering education exercised in project-organized interdisciplinary and intercultural teams and it constitutes a proposal for an educational paradigm that can help address the challenges of demanding, quickly changing precarious environments, challenges that constitute a real challenge for young people, universities, businesses and societies.

The chapter introduces different theoretical perspectives on empathy¹ that were used as a basis of an academic dialogue at TUL, a dialogue completed with a human oriented empathy-based model for engineering education. The theoretical perspective on empathy originates from literature in humanistic (Levenson & Ruef, 1992), design (Heilighen & Dong, 2019), and engineering studies (Walther et al., 2019; Afroogh et al., 2021). Its presentation explores the ways these perspectives may be utilized in problem solving while keeping the human as the central focus. The theoretical basis is further synthesized in a human-oriented empathy-based model created and utilized in EPS and exemplified in a case study that describes in detail how empathy is implemented in project-organized engineering education using Design Thinking (DT) (Kelley & Kelley, 2013) and Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology. The concept is enriched with qualitative research results exploring the perceptions of students and project mentors on the role of empathy in project work and quantitative research measuring the levels of affective and cognitive empathy in the group of students.