Engineering education faces significant challenges as it seeks to meet the demands on both, the engineering profession and the engineering educator profession in the 21st century [1, 2]. Engineering educators are expected to search for new approaches to teaching and learning and to opt for new curricular pathways to address calls of change and challenging crossroads. Recommendations on the need to "re-engineer" engineering education have become increasingly widespread over the last years. That this re-engineering is closely related to the emerging profile of the engineer of the 21st century is not debated; nor is it debated that the said profile is largely determined by the state-of the art or, else, by the attributes of the profession in the real world - existing, perceived, pursued or simply desired. Following this line of thought, much of the rhetoric in the field has tended to emphasize the impact of both engineering students' and engineering educators' perceptions on engineering education and practice in the 21st century. The question, though, remains: If such perceptions are important, how more important would the perceptions of prospective engineering teachers be, i.e. those of undergraduate engineering educators?
展开▼
