Stand-alone U of M engineering-education department first of its kind in Canada

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This article was published 01/01/2025 (612 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The University of Manitoba is now home to the first stand-alone department of “engineering education” — an up-and-coming discipline in academia — in Canada.

A decade after it was established, U of M’s Centre for Engineering Professional Practice and Engineering Education is winding down operations and being transformed into an academic department.

The centre has supported curriculum delivery and research on how engineers in training are taught to better prepare them for all areas of the workforce since 2014.

Its scholars of “engineering education” have studied the profession’s culture, its role in truth and reconciliation and newcomer integration into the workforce.

An overhaul inside Manitoba’s only dedicated faculty of engineering — what its dean calls a “natural evolution” of the centre — is slated to be complete by the spring.

Engineer-academic Marcia Friesen noted Manitoba is an outlier in that it has a single engineering school; its next-door neighbour to the west has two options offered at the University of Saskatchewan and University of Regina.

“We can’t be niche. We can’t say, ‘We’re only going to focus on this discipline’ or, ‘We’re only going to be research-intensive.’ We have to be everything for everybody in the province. That’s both a responsibility and a privilege,” said Friesen, dean of the Price Faculty of Engineering.

U of M’s unique position forces it to be nimble, she said, adding her faculty’s flexible nature has allowed the post-secondary institute to become a national leader in the emerging discipline that is “engineering education.”

Backed by support from 70 per cent of her faculty council, Friesen tabled a proposal at the start of the school year to set up a new department dedicated to it.

The academic administrator cited “engineering education” as an interdisciplinary area that “warrants visibility and credibility” in a request penned to university secretary Jeff Leclerc on Sept. 12.

“Over 20 years, the momentum established internationally has solidified engineering education as a discipline with its unique and defined body of knowledge, questions of inquiry, standards of evidence, and a community of practice,” she wrote in a letter.

Both the university’s senate and board of governors approved the pitch in late 2024.

The new department will take on many of its predecessor’s projects and begin delivering required core courses across accredited undergraduate programs in five types of engineering — civil, mechanical, computer, electrical and biosystems — over the winter term.

Professors will support the introductory year for all bachelor’s degree candidates, but there are no plans to establish another undergraduate degree. Instead, its instructors, engineers-in-residence and staff members will launch micro credentials and develop graduate programs.

The $1.8 million in baseline operating funds for the centre, which is currently being phased out, are being transferred to run the department.

Friesen stressed that the latest addition to her faculty will not take anything away from its “strong core disciplines” and related skills that industry partners expect.

At the same time, there will be opportunities to further collaborate with the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 sector — in which STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) is a buzzword — to develop age-appropriate exposure to engineering, she said.

“You don’t go to your engineer once a year the way you go to your dentist,” the dean added.

“(We need to) find natural ways to expose students to the uniqueness of engineering as distinct from math or science.”

She noted that deans across Canada — who have long been watching colleagues south of the border dabble in the emerging discipline — were excited about the initiative when she briefed them on it at a recent stakeholder meeting.

Virginia Tech and Purdue University have both made names for themselves as global leaders in “engineering education” studies.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca