Thinking Foundation for Product-Process-People Model

Final Paper pdf 85KB

What happens when a professional engineer and a higher education professional become faculty colleagues at a statewide location of Purdue University’s Polytechnic Institute? An interdisciplinary approach to course transformation! Over the last year, we have developed and refined a model to facilitate our students’ understanding of the relationships between products, processes, and people. Across the majority of engineering disciplines, focus is directed upon the product (e.g., design, composition, structure, sustainability, life cycle; discovery, theory, application). Our areas of industrial engineering and leadership focus more on development and improvement of processes and people. In transforming the teaching and learning in first-year courses, we ground the content in foundational theories and concepts and address the need for polytechnic thinking, including systems, process, relational, reflective, and metacognitive thinking. Through our work, we seek to teach students to be flexible and innovative thinkers who see process- and people-oriented solutions and implications from multiple perspectives.

Author(s):

Jan Tyler    
Purdue Polytechnic Statewide, Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation
Purdue University
United States

James Maley    
Purdue Polytechnic Statewide, Department of Technology Leadership & Innovation
Purdue University
United States