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Brechtian Estrangement and the Effect on Learning

Earlier this year, at the end of April, I found myself sitting in a grandiose room at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. overlooking the Lincoln Memorial. I was one of a handful of University Innovation Fellows amongst a crowd of Engineering Deans representing universities from around the United States and Canada who were invited to the Grand Challenge Scholars Workshop. The goal of the workshop was to illustrate the need to improve engineering curriculum, and to identify the existing gaps present in the current generation of emerging engineers.

Cecilia Senoo and M

Cecilia Senoo (left) and Fellow Mary Wilcox.

While at the National Academy of Engineering, I heard Deans from every university in attendance lament and lambast the inability of the emerging generation of engineering students to communicate, work in teams, and to understand the interconnectedness of humanity when applying design thinking toward a challenge.

A major voice in the workshop was that of Bernard Amadei, the founder of Engineers Without Borders. Dr. Amadei delivered a speech pregnant with passion for the need to educate engineers in global cultural understanding, and the benefits that might be derived from exposing young students to the perspectives of different members of a global village.

Two short months later I find myself in a very different setting experiencing in real time the value of what Dr. Amadei was speaking about. My name is Mary Wilcox, and I am currently in Atabu, Ghana, sitting, cradled in the roots of a baobab tree.

I am working on an independent project, distinctly separate from my engineering courses, which has brought me back to Ghana and Togo for a second time in four years. For the past six weeks I have been traveling around Ghana speaking with rural school headmasters, orphanage coordinators, rural farmers, rural agrochemical salesmen, rural fishermen and aqua-culturists, rural women’s collectives, urban poor families, urban school children, the founder of one of the largest nongovernmental organizations in Ghana, and architects at a design institute in Kokrobitey. I will use my research to write an effective implementation plan for the project that will incorporate a participatory development strategy in a culturally relevant and appropriate manner. The project integrates low-tech bio-systems to turn human and animal feces and urine into food, water, soil and energy. It is designed to conserve ninety-eight percent of the water content, and produce significant amounts of high-nutrient food on a year round basis, while removing harmful contaminants from streams of human consumption. It will be income generating, and will be a vehicle that could convey other tools of empowerment such as education or health services.

Nima Accra, Open Sewer. Ghana, Africa.

Nima Accra, Open Sewer. Ghana, Africa.

This project is distinctly different from my engineering courses – most of which may be taken online – making the educational value also distinctly different.

My most valuable educational experiences have been sparked by every day occurrences in Atabu, Ghana, and Mango, Togo. There, ingenuity is not encapsulated in a computer design program, or an online module. It is experiential. It is everyday life. There, simple communication is the most difficult and mind wrenching task I have undertaken, but I learned to communicate. I learned to work with diverse teams, leading in areas I had experience with and following in areas that I needed to develop within myself. I had to. I learned from ad hoc engineering that boggled the mind, and was carried out by one or two brilliant people who never made it past a junior high school level of academic training. In estrangement to my traditional academic career I have found, undoubtedly, the most exponentially valuable educational experiences of my life. These experiences awakened a social entrepreneurial passion and a self-motivated process of growth, which I highly doubt could have ever been evoked from Stewart’s books on calculus.

When I return from Ghana, I will be meeting with the Dean of Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University to discuss the accessibility and availability of accredited engineering programs abroad. By creating opportunities for engineering students to be exposed to different ways of thinking and learning at an early point in their university program, we can produce well-rounded engineers who are culturally competent, communicative, and flexible team workers. By partnering with organizations like Engineers Without Borders, and industry partners, and local NGOs we can engage students in the most valuable learning experiences of their lives, enhance our engineering educational system, and fill the gap. We can begin to really address the Grand Challenges of humanity when we realize the value of humanity as a whole.

 

Mary Wilcox

Fellow Mary Wilcox from Arizona State University Tempe

Mary Wilcox graduated from Arizona State University in 2011 receiving two B.A.s in global studies and political science. Currently working towards a B.S. in mechanical engineering, Mary is focused on the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program at ASU. Through the EPICS program Mary is leading teams of engineering students to design and implement a sustainable development project which will provide inclusive access to food, water, sustainable energy, and preventative health in impoverished communities.

Find Mary’s Student Priorities for ASU Tempe here.

Brilliant Student Innovations Address Global Challenges

The NCIIA grants program is one that has given rise to numerous student-led companies. Actually, given that NCIIA has been around for 17 years, many are ‘all grown up’ and employ hundreds of people, garnering millions in economic impact…. but I want to highlight the ones that one might classify as ‘International Development’. If you’re from a campus that has a well-developed programs to help students explore opportunities for ‘social venturing’, you are lucky. Look into it. For those that do not, students should know that philanthropies, corporations and venture capitalists are investing in for-profit business models to serve the bottom-of-the-economic-pyramid customer base. Socially focused enterprises are thought to effectively address poverty through affordable services and products, including health care, sanitation, clean water, and energy, to those most in need. The NCIIA encourages students to apply for grant funding and create new ventures that benefit society, including ‘bottom-of-pyramid’ customers for whom socially beneficial products, like neonatal technologies, can be a game-changer.

I watched this video today and it hit home personally. Liya’s Diary, produced as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates ‘Living Proof Project’ video series outlines the persistent global challenges of maternal and neonatal health. My father grew up in a rural village in India. Although I was very young, I can remember visiting the poor dwelling where he and his 15 siblings lived. As a woman who has given birth to three children in the last 10 years, one who was born with severe jaundice, the notion that 600,000 deaths still occur annually due to jaundice illicits a personal and emotional response. Ben Cline is a student from Stanford that helped form Brilliance, a company that makes phototherapy devices for the developing world. We first met Ben in 2009 at NCIIA’s venture-development workshop which he had to leave early to catch a flight to India, to develop the innovation further and investigate the best means to bring it to market. We’re pleased to report that in three short years, the phototherapy device is hitting the market at a price point of $400 (see NYT article below).

What separates this success from other student-led projects that aim to have the same level of meaningful impact? Well, there are many but in my mind it was the early partnership with D-Rev, a Bay Area-based non-profit that has years of experience commercializing technologies for the developing world. For any given technology, market sector or innovation, the partner might be different but the importance of forging a strong commercial tie to an organization that has the experience, network and financial resources to move accurately and expeditiously towards appropriate commercial track is one of the biggest challenges for student ventures. Watch the TEDx talk (right) delivered by D-Rev’s, CEO Krista Donaldson, and the value of such a partnership is readily evident.

Last June National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) convened the Neonatal Technologies Forum with support from The Lemelson Foundation. According to the report from the meeting released by NCIIA last September, University-based innovation teams’ technology development and dissemination work is taking place in the context of a larger international development and global health push to improve maternal and child health. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) four and five call for reductions in child and maternal mortality by 2015. The UN’s 2010 Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health calls for new interventions, including new technologies, as key components of an integrated global strategy to achieve the MDGs. Other aspects of the strategy include health systems strengthening, integration of care, support of country health plans, and ensuring access to comprehensive care interventions and services. Students searching for a meaningful way to do well in life and do good should consider ways to be part of the solution.

– Humera Fasihuddin, Program Manager, NCIIA

(On twitter @ihumera)

Innovating The Developing World-WSU

Innovating The Developing World-WSU

The students of Washington State University proudly present Innovating The Developing World. This event was made possible by Engineers Without Boarders (EWB) and National Collegiate Inventors Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). After realizing NCIIA funds innovative, socially impactful student projects and EWB needs funding for these kinds of projects the two organizations thought it would be beneficial to join forces. This event will feature two speakers who have previously received funding from NCIIA for their student projects. In addition information about EWB and NCIIA will be presented to the students showing them how to get involved with creating positive social change through innovative ideas.

Date/Time: December 1, 2011 at 6:00 PM

Location: CUB Auditorium

Contact Us: Jade Patterson, jade.pattersonsa@gmail.com or Brent Olsen, b.olson@live.com