What should we teach? : Defining your discipline to drive curriculum renewal : an environmental engineering case study

In Australia, the federal government, employers, and accrediting bodies, such as Engineers Australia, are calling for more clearly defined program outcomes or exit standards for engineering programs [1-3]. Engineering Schools are therefore under increasing pressure to more clearly define what graduates from four or five year engineering programs should know and be able to do. This paper describes a simple, but elegant stakeholder process that can be used to define the capabilities of a graduate who could claim in-depth technical competence in their discipline. The Defining Your Discipline (DYD) Process [4] may be used by educational institutions and industry organisations to develop practitioner-authenticated sets of graduate capabilities for their discipline. During 2010 and 2011, the DYD team worked with the members of Engineers Australia’s Environmental College to produce a set of graduate capabilities for environmental engineering programs. This work resulted in the publication of a Guide [5] that defines the profession’s expectations of the capabilities of graduates during their first two or three years of practice. These graduate capabilities are described, including the Environmental Engineering Capability Cube, a somewhat unexpected result.