Updating Engineering Education in the Southern Cone: Creativity and Innovation

doi:10.4236/ce.2012.326109

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Creative Education

2012. Vol.3, Special Issue, 733-736

Published Online October 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ce) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2012.326109

Updating Engineering Education in the Southern Cone:

Creativity and Innovation

Ricardo L. Armentano1,2

1Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina

2National Technological Universi t y, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Email: [email protected]

Received August 31st, 2012; revise d S e p t e mber 30th, 2012; accepted October 15th, 2012

Most of our secondary school graduates have poor skills in mathematics and sciences. This negative

handicap makes them refractory to study engineering or science, thus reaching a minimum of aspirants.

The innovation we foresee and wish to promote across our countries will undoubtedly require of the

alumni, who possess solid bases to design and create products with an important added value, in order to

satisfy demands and exceed the expectations in this era, where technology evolves very fast. Creativity

awakens the power of our numbed imagination; it is boldness, adventure, discovering and learning from

change. To provoke creativity, few things are as important as the time that is dedicated to the cross-pol-

lination with other fields. Many countries are revising the programs of scientific education and the appli-

cation of new pedagogic paradigms that tend to revert the downward trend of enrollments. We propose a

palliative measure, consisting of an introductory course that strives for the training of students in the

Stokes diagram, called Pasteur quadrant, seeking to concentrate the scientific task according to the exis-

tent knowledge concepts, in the fact that engineering is the motor of innovation, through increasing and

consolidating the creative process, teaching them to think and stimulating their critical mind by means of

peer teaching.

Keywords: Engineering Education; Teaching for Creativity; Innovation

Introduction

That a nation needs to create wealth to be thriving is a truism.

Cartesian essays and exuberant speeches assert that such wealth

is reached through added value: integrating knowledge to

products and processes, which are later sold worldwide. How-

ever, the key question is: how does research in universities

contribute to the creation of wealth? The excellence in science

and engineering research in universities is linked to the creation

of wealth in the economy of a country in three ways:

 by supplying students who graduate and add up-to-date

knowledge in the top areas of science and engineering, tak-

ing into account that their instructors are creators of

knowledge in those areas themselves;

 through the establishment of joint research partnerships

between universities and businesses, to be able to develop

innovative products and processes, and guarantee their

rapid insertion into the markets;

 through inventions developed by basic research, an indis-

putable element of innovation, which become commercial-

ized throughout the country.

Thinking linearly—and quite naively—a stronger R&D pro-

motion will result in more innovation in all areas of the regional

and national industry, with more international and regional

presence of these local innovations in goods and services. It

would undoubtedly strengthen prosperity by creating wealth,

both individual and collective, thus increasing investments in

support of our values: health, infant welfare, education, envi-

ronment, etc., achieving a higher standard of living in the coun-

try. But reality dictates that this trajectory is as linear and sim-

ple as whistling in the wind.

Bernardo A. Houssay, one of the three Nobel laureates of Ar-

gentina, warned about the three main factors that hinder pro-

gress (Houssay, 1952). He said the first and most powerful was

misoneism: the resistance to anything new, with eagerness to

avoid the innovation that inevitably comes from each scientific

advance. The second was the excessive concern for immediate

application, an idea common to backward societies, or a sign of

decadence in developed ones. Last was the local, professional

or nationalist pride; a mix of ignorance, immaturity and self-

defense of the mediocre.

The great challenge of the present University is to ensure a

microclimate where the best science and technology can be

exercised, and, at the same time, to conduct students to the

complete development of their potential as individuals, citizens

and workers; to put ideas into action; to generate new under-

standings concomitant to the use of technology, the paradigm of

the research oriented to innovation; to pursue the welfare of

society and to improve the life of people through a continuous

advance in quality, cost reduction and the conservation of the

environment. This endeavor is only possible when distin-

guished faculty and talented students are confined under ade-

quate pressure and temperature conditions, incorporating a

hallmark, mens et mania, acting as a catalyst in this reaction

(Keyser, 2011). And fundamentally, assuming individual and

institutional maturity to judge and appreciate a culture that

celebrates rareness, the ability to choose, independence, entre-

preneur spirit, concentration, creativity and passion (Keyser,

2011). But overall, to sustain this culture with a high degree of

tenacity, dealing with the undeniable truth: most of our second-

R. L. ARMENTANO

dary school graduates have poor skills in mathematics and sci-

ences, worsening the uncertainty of teenagers, the weakest link

in the social chain, but nevertheless the strongest in terms of

vital energy. Let us not forget that teenagers carry the troubles

of our civilization in a very intense manner (Morin, 2011). This

negative handicap makes them refractory to study engineering

or science, thus reaching a minimum minimorum of aspirants.

Whereas in China and Japan more than two thirds of university

students choose to study Science or Engineering, in the EU

36% of students do, and in the USA, 24%. According to unof-

ficial data, in Argentina only 8% of students choose Engineer-

ing, IT, Physics or Mathematics degrees, whereas 40% is en-

rolled in Social Sciences, Psychology or Philosophy degrees. It

is said that Argentina produces five times more psychologists

than engineers (Oppenheimer, 2011). In 2010, in Uruguay, 26%

of students chose Liberal Arts related degrees, 19% of students

chose Economics or Business Administration, and only 8.2%

techno-scientific degrees. China, as well as India, is creating a

techno-scientific globalized elite, capable of competing with the

most industrialized countries. Furthermore, there is a great

amount of Asian students in universities in Europe and the

USA. In the meantime, the number of South American students,

studying locally or abroad, is at a standstill or decreasing. It is

noteworthy that this reality occurs as all of the achievements of

the 20th century change our habitat. So many complex accom-

plishments have subliminally become a part of our daily lives,

that engineering and—above all—engineering research are taken

for granted and go unnoticed, although without them, we be-

lieve, the world would be less accessible, poorer and, above all,

less interesting.

Focus on Innovation

What do we understand by Engineering Research? It is sim-

ply the motor of innovation. In a global economy driven by

knowledge, technological innovation—the transformation of

knowledge into products, processes and services—is essential

for competitiveness, for long-term growth of productivity and

for wealth creation. The pre-eminence in technological innova-

tion requires leadership in all aspects of engineering: research

as a bridge between scientific discoveries and practical applica-

tions, the teaching of skills needed to create and exploit

knowledge and technological innovation, and the practice of

engineering to translate knowledge into innovation, competitive

products and services. By combining research with education,

we not only seize the creativity of the young, but also their

training in analytical thinking and in research methodologies,

and their solid knowledge of science and engineering, thus

tacitly generating brilliant young teacher researchers. This is

how we face the great threat of engineering: the aging of the

faculty members’ concomitant with the obsolescence of the

infrastructure. Engineering professors are rapidly aging, and

together with other factors such as the slim financial support of

the last years, the absence of long term commitments, the lack

of interdisciplinary research and curricular innovation, the vi-

cious circle that sets apart young people from engineering

schools strengthens. On the other hand, with the collaboration

of the industries and laboratories, universities can gather ex-

perts in several disciplines, in order to investigate and satisfy

the needs of a certain product or service with a high added

value. At the same time, university students can develop their

scientific thinking and simultaneously gain comprehension

about the forces of the markets through internships and in-

volvement in research projects, development and innovation.

The academia-industry interaction, as well as the support of

governmental agencies, can create enough resources for engi-

neering universities to be able to modernize their facilities, and

by this, making the specialty much more attractive to the new

generations, and to engage students to complete their degrees.

The installation of laboratories with state-of-the-art technology

can enhance the quality of engineering education to a great

extent, and create opportunities for thousands of young creative

people to contribute to the innovation process. The increase in

funding for research in engineering would also create opportu-

nities of attracting talented citizens from all over our countries,

as well as talented students from all over the world, to join our

doctorate programs. The innovation we foresee and wish to

promote across our countries will undoubtedly require of the

alumni, who possess solid bases to design and create products

with an important added value, in order to satisfy demands and

exceed the expectations in this era, where technology evolves

very fast. This is because they posses skills to develop them-

selves in domains that may have not existed at the time they

completed their degrees, and to face a context of global crisis,

but nevertheless of great opportunities.

Focus on Creativity

We are convinced that many findings in the field of Engi-

neering and Science in general, which have had great impact in

humanity, are the result of serendipity, i.e. the receptive ability

to discover, unexpectedly, something valuable. Creativity awak-

ens the power of our numbed imagination; it is boldness, ad-

venture, discovering and learning from change. Creativity may

seem to be magic, a supernatural power, denied to many mor-

tals and granted to a few, for them to imagine what has never

existed before. But creativity is not magical; it is not a genetic

attribute or a blessing of the angels, it is ability! Anyone can

learn to be creative and to benefit the most from it. The science

of creativity is a relatively new concept. Years ago, imagination

was compared to a superior act. To be creative meant to have a

direct link with the muses. Even in this modern era, scientists

have paid little attention to the sources of creativity; however,

during the last decade, it has started to change. Nowadays, the

word creativity is used as a generic term to name several cogni-

tive tools, each applying to certain issues, conditioning the

action in a particular way. New researches also suggest that

creative thinking is the best way of approaching the most diffi-

cult problems. We tend to assume that experts are creative gen-

iuses in their fields. However, the great advances often depend

on the naïve audacity of the profane. To provoke creativity, few

things are as important as the time that is dedicated to the

cross-pollination with other fields. Many countries are revising

the programs of scientific education and the application of new

pedagogic paradigms that tend to revert the downward trend of

enrollments. A key factor of this trend is the public perception

that science does not involve a creative effort. The attempts of

reformulating the public perception tend to center themselves in

the primary and secondary education, but they do little to face

the continuous drop in quality and originality of the intellectual

production further than secondary school (Schmidt, 2011). The

overcoming of the systematic devaluation of science requires

valuing the complex, dynamic and stochastic interaction of the

sociocultural, psychological and cognitive factors that drive

734

R. L. ARMENTANO

human creativity. Looking at creativity from this point of view

highlights the constraint that exists between perception and

practice, which limits the opportunities for students, science

professors and scientists (Schmidt, 2011).

Techno-Economic Development vs. Prosperity

Let us agree that a new Trinity (Morin, 2011) governs the

social paradigm that welcomes our fresh graduates today: glob-

alization, westernization and development. The techno-eco-

nomic development is supposed to be the driving force of

prosperity and welfare, the general improvement of quality of

life, the reduction of inequalities, social harmony and democ-

racy. Growth is conceived as the evident and infallible motor of

development, and development is conceived as the evident and

infallible motor of growth (Morin, 2011). However, let us agree

that development is a complex, ambivalent process, both posi-

tive and negative. Its most irreducible defenders state that it has

drawn prosperity to diminished areas across the whole planet,

giving them access to the western life standards, allowing them

to have individual autonomy free from the unconditional au-

thority of family, access to marriage by choice and not by force,

freedom of sexual orientation, consumption of goods unknown

to them until then, all result of the approach of technology. On

the other hand, detractors of development state that the con-

sumer intoxication and the imaginary component of wishes

have grown, as well as insatiable needs are constantly renewed.

Undoubtedly, development has exacerbated the dark side of

consumerism: self-centeredness, self-justification and eagerness

for profit. Development establishes a way of organizing society

and minds, where hyper-specialization compartmentalizes peo-

ple; the whole, the global and solidarity are lost of sight. Fur-

thermore, hyper-specialized education replaces old ignorance

with a new blindness; it maintains the illusion that rationality

determines the development, which confuses technological

rationalism with human rationalism (Morin, 2011).

Current Paradigm of Engineering

The key is to adhere to the current paradigm of engineering,

where projects more than disciplines define the terms of the

engagement, and the limits between science and engineering

become fuzzy (Armentano, 2012). A big part of current biology

projects force biologists to think as engineers, testing systems

and mechanisms, worrying about quality control and building

large technical systems. This space is a circle of exchange, an

intermediate domain where procedures can be locally coordi-

nated and techno-science exchange is produced, eliminating

boundaries, developing interfaces and flowing in both direc-

tions. It is where discovering—the paradigm of science—and

solving problems—the paradigm of engineering—are blended,

fundamentally because the mission of engineering has been

transformed since the dominant issues do not involve conquer-

ing nature, but the creation and management of an already-

existing habitat (Armentano, 2012).

An important tool is the increasing role of information tech-

nology in the construction of a language, common to both dis-

ciplines. A large number of engineers work with symbols and

models, and currently machines work by processing informa-

tion rather than matter. Engineering is no longer an applied

science. It has developed its own theory, with practitioners who

never build objects and researchers who go further than the

usually known experiences. To be able to achieve this adapta-

tion, we engineers must reinvent ourselves to work in a hybrid

world where technology, science, humanism and other tenden-

cies fuse and interconnect. Consequently, engineering becomes

a profession whose limits are not specified, and where technol-

ogy becomes science, art and management, widening the scope

of its institutional mission (Armentano, 2012).

Discussion

In order to strictly define the strategic ideas that have led to

innovation, we turn to the analysis of the upper-right quadrant

of the Stokes diagram, called Pasteur quadrant (Stokes, 1997),

seeking to concentrate the scientific task according to the exis-

tent knowledge, centered in innovative projects that reset the

paradigms and the manner of deal with the different disciplines,

i.e. to approach issues in a way that generates a new under-

standing as well as a new usefulness, which is how current

research engineering should be understood, as opposed to the

old paradigm of basic sciences vs. applied sciences. In this

master idea, innovation has a central dimension (Armentano,

2012). This is a holistic challenge, which consists in a new way

of learning, innovating, communicating and shearing with a

creative attitude that represents quality of perception; and intel-

ligent action that allows us to overcome conflicts with a rich-

ness of alternatives that each situation offers us.

Proposal

Our ideas are summarized in Table 1. We are proposing to

modify the format of introductory courses, in strictly methodo-

logical terms, by making them more interactive than the regular

conference-like course (Mazur, 1997). This methodology has

been applied for the last 5 years during the initial or introduc-

tory courses, in which, through a neosocratic approach, fellow

students become professors (Mazur, 1997), who are encouraged

to develop their creative minds and are oriented towards inno-

vative thinking. The method is to teach asking rather than stat-

ing facts, because what is important is the reasoning that leads

to the answers. Students should be taught to think. Frequently,

the effort of retaining the words of the Master conspires against

analysis, logic and reasoning (Brahic, 2012). A university edu-

cation that does not stimulate the analytical mind and that does

not teach how to think is not higher education, but training to

submission.

Table 1.

Current methods in engineering and science teaching vs. proposed

modified format.

Current Method Proposed Method

Retaining words Analyzin g , using logic, reasoning

Conference-like courses Interactive courses

Stating facts Asking questions, reasoning the answers

Training to submit Teaching h ow to think

Memorizing equations Acquiring know ledge

Manipulating sym bols Understan ding the m eaning of symbols

Passing exams Learning

R. L. ARMENTANO

736

Any person who is formed in scientific education cannot be

sensitive to sectarian propaganda or to any kind of intolerance:

religious, political or administrative. In our short experience

and probably as a result of the reigning culture, most students

do not learn, they only memorize equations, data and proce-

dures. The essence is that students learn to manipulate symbols

but they do not know what they mean. They are not taught to

think, but to pass exams. We think that this is one of the most

important reasons of the crisis science schools in general and

engineering in particular are going through: low amount of

interested people and trouble in understanding and withholding

of the students. Professors blame each other. University tells us

to blame the Secondary School, Secondary School tells us to

blame Primary School. We all can and must contribute to mak-

ing education better.

Conclusion

We propose a palliative measure, consisting of an introductory

course that strives for the training of students in all of the

above-mentioned concepts, but mainly in the fact that engi-

neering is the motor of innovation, through increasing and

consolidating the creative process, teaching them to think and

stimulating their critical mind by means of peer teaching. They

should experience the most relevant aspects of the complemen-

tarity towards joint ef for t, under the precept th at each individual

uses a small part of their human potential. By approaching the

concept of creative society between peers at an early age, stu-

dents can expand, refine, change or rediscover their individual

means, under the umbrella of dignified interdependence. It is

true that some collaborations collapse under the weight of indi-

vidual habits (John-Steiner, 2006). Others bloom under the

dynamic and productive pressure of ideas.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sandra Wray for her help in editing and

commenting upon this paper.

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John-Steiner, V. (2006). Creative collaboration. New York: Oxford

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