Entrepreneurship and Gender in Higher Engineering Education in Germany
- Autor(en)
- Dominik May, Bengü Hosch-Dayican, Liudvika Leisyte, Lisa Sigl, Claudius Terkowsky
- Abstrakt
In the past years European economic and employment policies increasingly underline the strategically important role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in boosting Europe?s innovation potential through supplying highly skilled labour[1, for references see additional document]. Two key priorities are particularly emphasized: The first is to embed entrepreneurship into higher education curricula in order to further develop the knowledge triangle that integrates education, research, and innovation with each other [2].This particularly counts for applied disciplines such as engineering [3]. The second priority is to enforce gender equality in labour force participation and increaserepresentation of women in skilled employment [4]- which is again most evident in engineering - by incorporating gender issues in teaching plans and creating more awareness for gender balance in labor markets [5].These objectives have subsequently been incorporated into national and regional policies. In Germany, funding for knowledge and technology transfer for economic and societal applications is already a central instrument in policy strategies of federal and state level ministries of education and science [6,7]. The question now is in how far these policies are already put into practice at universities in Germany. Curricula documents can serve as a database for a first-hand insight, which bases on the assumption that if entrepreneurship and gender is taught at the universities it must be visible in these documents.Hence, this research brings together entrepreneurial and gender research with research on higher engineering education. The connected research questions are the following: In how far is entrepreneurship and gender manifested in curricula of selected German technical universities? How and by whom are these topics taught? The methodology for this research is mainly based on content analysis. Therefore the mechanical engineering curricula for bachelor and master level from nine leading German technical universities (TU 9) were analyzed (for this abstract a focus was put on TU Munich, RWTH Aachen and TU Berlin). First findings show that entrepreneurship is represented in all of the curricula, even ifthe way how it is represented differs significantly. On the one hand there can be found educational modules that fully address entrepreneurship. On the other hand there are quite a number of modules that tackle the topic of innovation only in one or two parts of the full course. Comparing these result with the results on the gender topic is pretty disappointing. Only in one of the curricula there could be found one course that had the term gender in its description and teaches gender sensitivity. For the full paper this research will be broadened to all TU 9 universities and more detailed results will be explained. Moreover it will be examined how in terms of teaching methods entrepreneurship and innovation as well as gender and diversity are taught in present engineering education practice.
- Organisation(en)
- Externe Organisation(en)
- Technische Universität Dortmund
- Publikationsdatum
- 2015
- ÖFOS 2012
- 509017 Wissenschaftsforschung
- Schlagwörter
- ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
- Allgemeiner Maschinenbau, Education
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/55186676-9c01-4228-962f-47fe72afa2c6