As engineering challenges become increasingly global, complex, and community-focused, there is growing recognition of the need to embed cross-cultural competency into the engineering curriculum. Effective stakeholder engagement, cultural humility, and ethical awareness have already been recognised as essential in humanitarian and development contexts, yet traditional engineering education often lacks structured opportunities for students to develop these skills and employ them in broader engineering contexts. Service-Learning programmes have often borne the brunt of fostering cross-cultural skills in students, which has led to mixed success and reinforces the idea that these competencies are optional extras, rather than essential to modern engineering practice. This workshop will explore cross-cultural competency as a core professional attribute for engineers and the potential for incorporating it into mainstream engineering education.

The workshop will involve a presentation of Jessica’s ongoing research into cross-cultural competency, with interactive group activities to explore the integration of cross-cultural skills in engineering education. Students will be encouraged to share their own experiences and insights and reflect upon what it means to be an engineer in the 21st century.

Who: Jessica Landstra

Jess is an Honours student, finalising her double degree in Systems Engineering and International Security Studies. Her areas of special interest and research include humanitarian engineering, user-centred design, and diversity in engineering. She has been studying and tutoring at ANU for six years.

About Community KNoTs.

Community KNoTs are a way to explore learning opportunities that are running off-campus,

There are many great places where learning happens with our partners. The rules for counting Community KNoTs are:

• the intended content must align to your learning goals for the course
• these count as Campus KNoTs
• a Community KNoT needs to be with a McCusker Institute partner or pre-approved

The preparation for a Community KNoT will be different, depending on what it is.

The suggested preparation is to "do your research" into the activity/event. For example, if you are going to see a guest speaker present, do a little background research, such as spending some time reading their latest work, finding out about them (ie wikipedia, etc), or listening to an interview with them.

The Campus KNoT must be able to be mapped to a course learning outcome:

• compare, contrast and apply concepts, arguments and evidence to transdisciplinary problems across scales;
• model the qualities and approaches that support inclusive collaboration for social engagement across difference;
• assess relationships and contextual dynamics to influence change across fields, disciplines and/or knowledge systems

You can also run your own Community KNoT. If you do, make sure that you get pre-approval to count it towards your Campus KNoT maximum, and include the preparation and reflect on the experience for your completion task.

The default completion task for a Campus KNOT is a short reflection.

This should be the equivalent of 1 page, and can include pictures (such as a photo of you attending, or a picture of an important slide).

We encourage you to reflect on the skill or knowledge that you developed through the activity, particularly how it might be useful or not in your creating social change repertoire.

A great prompt to reflect on is a question that you asked the presenter, or would have asked the presenter if there was time.