How Duke Engineers are Building Character from Day One
Engineering courses are notoriously challenging, but what if they also challenged students to become better people? In Engineering 101, an introductory course for first-years that focuses on design and technical communication, professors Michael Rizk and Ann Saterbak challenge students not only to develop their STEM skills, but also their character.
This course is part of Character Forward, a partnership between Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and The Purpose Project at Duke, a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School, and the Office of the Provost. Character Forward seeks to integrate purpose and integrity into the engineering curriculum.
Dr. Rizk says that he saw this course as an opportunity “to be a part of students’ lives as they figure out what they want to do in life and what’s important to them.” In addition to helping them develop good habits as engineers, he hopes to help them shape their values and aspirations in everyday life.
Rizk worked with the Character Forward team to emphasize valuable character traits during each stage of course projects, such as team formation, ideation, prototyping, testing and result-sharing. For example, team formation requires respect, especially when students come from different backgrounds or have different lived experiences. The instructors gave examples of how teams could foster respect before the phase even began. Students later created video reflections to share what they learned throughout their projects and how it applied to their personal lives.
A Kenan Institute for Ethics assessment team found that 80% of students had a positive view of the focus on character in their course. One student, Daniel Matten E’28, said that the character exercises were instrumental in bringing his group together.
“Although I knew we were all smart people, I was initially concerned about the group dynamics given our various backgrounds and leadership styles,” he said. “The character reflections encouraged by the instructors and TAs sparked the conversations that we needed to have as a group and pulled us much closer together.”
Other students echoed that the communication and teamwork skills that they learned in the course would stay with them long after they received their final grade.
Rizk says that the Pratt School of Engineering is defined by the kind of people it sends out into the world. He is proud of the work he has done with the Character Forward Initiative and optimistic about the future of his Engineering 101 students.
Read the full story by Mahi Patel on the Pratt School of Engineering website here.
