Epistemology and Ontology

After reading the piece this week by Gloria Dall'Alba, I think I have more questions than answers. From my own experience, I tend to agree with her argument that the current process of education - and particularly education for a purpose of learning a profession - is more focused on gaining knowledge than on the process of integrating who we are into the professional we will become.

As I make connections with this thought and how it plays out in engineering education, I have lots of questions to pose and reflect upon. Are ways of being (ontology) context based? That is, is the way of being an engineer different in industry versus academia? Is the way of being an engineer different across disciplines? Or across industries? How is the learning and integration of becoming intertwined with the culture of a profession - or is learning and integration of becomming really assimilation into the culture of a profession? And what does that mean for those whose ways of being do not "fit" into that culture?

I have heard many, many, many engineering students say that working in industry through an internship or co-op experience was very different for them than the academic experience of being in school. I've heard them say that they liked working as an engineer much better than learning in a classroom. I've heard myself use this point to students who are wondering if "engineering" is right for them - working as an engineer is different than your experience in school. I've told them to try being an engineer before you change your major. I wonder then, if what we call formal engineering education is primarily the epistmological portion of becomming an engineer, and intern/co-op experiences (in some ways the apprenticeship model of educaiton) primarily the onotological portion of becomming an engineer? If this truly is an appropriate question to be asking, then we have, as Dall'Alba says, left "the most challenging task of learning professional ways of being......to the students themselves." Have we pushed that part of our educational process out to the companies and industries that hire our students? Does that mean that we accept them as partners in the educational process (which to me implies that this "pushing" was done intentionally, with full recognition of the consequences)? Or does it mean that we have abdicated our responsibilities to our students in teaching them to become an engineer? Have we explicitly decided that it is not for us to decide "whose knowing, acting and being serve as 'golden standards'" in the context of being an engineer and left it to industry (knowing that there is no uniformity, and thus not all students are developed in the same way)?

I could probably go on posing questions about the possible relationships between epistemology and ontology with regard to what we engineers call "hard skills" and "soft skills", and how our primarily epistemological approach to engineering education will likely need to change if we are to educate the "Engineer of 2020" to which the College has committed, but I think those might be ideas for a different post.