Developing distinctively Christian engineering textbook content

Justin R. Vander Werff

Keywords: Christian engineering, engineering education, engineering textbooks, Christian Engineering Society

Abstract:

Engineering education continues to change. One particular aspect that is very different than a generation ago is the place of engineering textbooks. Students increasingly have less appetite for traditional engineering textbooks, given the apparent prevalence of information everywhere, however helpful it may or may not be. Even when traditional textbooks are used, students typically will simply rent them for the few months of the course and then return them, rather than tab them, earmark them, mark them up, and give them a hallowed spot on their bookshelf as we may have done a generation or two ago when we were engineering students.

However, rather than to cause us to bemoan what used to be, students’ appetite for more agile, less traditional, more focused material can actually provide us an opportunity as Christian engineering educators to develop our own material from a Christian worldview. While most of us have understandably taught much of our technical engineering content from typical, supposedly “neutral” textbooks, we know that in actuality worldview always matters and none of these standard texts are really neutral. Developing our own material can provide us with an opportunity to re-think what we may have taken for granted and work from a biblical context.

A few technical areas where I have had the opportunity to develop my own material are introductory statics, structural analysis, structural steel design, and reinforced concrete design. In this paper I will share some observations, challenges, and lessons learned from this work. In addition, hopefully this work will stimulate conversations with other Christian engineering educators who might be interested in developing similar materials in their own disciplinary areas.

Email Sharing: We authorize the sharing of all author emails with Program Chairs.

Data Release: We authorize the release of our submission and author names to the public in the event of acceptance.

Submission Number: 24