Conference: Caring for the Future: Empathy in Engineering Education

In today's fast-paced world, engineers play a crucial role that goes beyond just fixing technical issues. To build a sustainable and connected world, engineers need more than just technical skills – they need empathy. Empathy helps them understand different viewpoints, work well with others, and tackle big challenges that affect us all. For these reasons, through this project educators and researchers from different disciplines will come together in a three-day forum to talk about how to include empathy in the engineering education curricula. The primary objective is to cultivate a new generation of empathetic and socially conscious professionals capable of thriving in diverse, multicultural settings and contributing as conscientious global citizens. By nurturing engineers who embrace collaboration, value diverse viewpoints, and approach issues with ethical and empathetic lenses, this conference will address a critical gap in engineering education. By focusing on empathy, engineering educators are not only teaching technical skills; they are teaching future engineers how to be good citizens of the world. This initiative aligns with the National Science Foundation Engineering Education Centers’ overarching goal of fostering innovation and societal impact. By setting up an agenda of how to include empathy in engineering education, we are not just preparing students for their careers – we are helping to build a world where people understand each other better, work together more effectively, and make decisions that benefit everyone. In response to the evolving global landscape, engineers are increasingly required to possess skills beyond technical proficiency. This forum will advocate for the integration of empathy into engineering education to foster a sustainable and cohesive global community. The three-day conference will convene higher education researchers and educators across diverse disciplines to deliberate and devise methodologies for embedding empathy within the engineering curriculum. The overarching objective is to cultivate a cadre of empathetic and socially conscious young engineers capable of navigating multidisciplinary, multicultural environments and assuming roles as conscientious global citizens. By fostering collaboration among educators, researchers, and practitioners from diverse domains, this initiative seeks to catalyze a paradigm shift towards empathy-driven engineering education, with the ultimate objective of producing engineers who are not only proficient but also empathetic. The outcomes of the conference hold significant intellectual merit as it endeavors to bridge a critical gap in engineering education. By integrating empathy into the engineering curriculum, it heralds a paradigmatic transformation in the preparation of future engineers. This initiative contributes to the academic realm through three key avenues: advancing comprehension of empathy's role in engineering education, fostering innovative curriculum development, and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, the broader impacts of this conference reverberate across academia, industry, and society. It redefines pedagogical norms, enhances engineering education quality and relevance, promotes innovation and sustainability in industry, and nurtures a more harmonious and inclusive global society through the cultivation of compassionate, responsible engineers. Throughout the conference proceedings, data will be actively collected through surveys, feedback mechanisms, and participant interactions to gain valuable insights into the efficacy of the conference discussions, workshops, and collaborative endeavors. This data will serve as a foundation for generating a comprehensive report, which will be disseminated among NSF and the wider community of practitioners. Anticipated outcomes are in the following areas: research and curriculum agenda; resource sharing; networking and collaboration; knowledge dissemination of the findings to benefit a wider audience of educators, researchers, and practitioners in engineering education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.