Dr. Dave Goldberg wants to change 3 major things about engineering: who studies it, how it's taught, and the emotional and cultural experience of engineering education. Dave and a partner have founded Big Beacon to support their mission of transforming engineering education to create "a whole new engineer." Guest host Nancy Lamberton spoke with Dave about his effort to transform his profession on the July 22 episode of Visionary Leader, Extraordinary Life. Read on to learn more about some of the cornerstones of the engineering revolution:

Change #1: Who are engineers?

One of of Big Beacon's major goals is to broaden potential students' ideas of who engineers are and what they do. This is critical for repopulating the pipeline of engineering students that has begun to run dry as students who see engineering as an unfeeling profession choose more and more to study what they see as more "human-focused" disciplines. Dave believes that creating greater diversity among engineers means including diversity of thought in addition to diversity of ethnicities and gender. He is adamant that "engineering shouldn't be limited to a certain personality type of way of thinking. When we say diversity, that means we want people who are linear thinkers as well as non-linear thinkers."

Change #2: How is engineering taught?

Dave is passionate about reframing the educational experience, not just for engineering students, but eventually, for all higher education. Engineering education is currently organized around the process of transforming students from novices without knowledge to experts with all the answers. In the current model, there is a great deal of emphasis on the professor as the leader of the experience and the holder / bestower of knowledge. Big Beacon champions a greater emphasis on the student as the captain of his or her own educational journey. One of the ways to create this shift is to place a higher burden on the student to come up with what she wants to study and place greater trust in the students, though they are still novices. Two of the undergraduate programs who are "beacons" of this type of progress are Olin College and the iFoundry program at Dr. Goldberg's own University of Illinois. 

Change #3: What is the emotional and cultural experience of learning to be an engineer like?  

In the current engineering education culture, the relentless focus on math and science, with their black-and-white, right-or-wrong grading system, doesn't leave much room for students to experiment or be vulnerable- an emotion Dave thinks is valuable for discovering the courage to trust oneself in the educational process. Dave is inspired by Brene Brown's work on vulnerability, in which she describes an affliction suffered by many academics and other experts in their fields who live in constant fear of being exposed as frauds. Dave would like to transform engineering education so it becomes a culture in which it's okay to be vulnerable and without the answer sometimes. Finally, Dave want students to think of engineering as less instrumental - building things for people- and more as a form of self-expression: "We want to ask students, 'What about engineering helps you express your identity?'