Culture in engineering education -CDIO as a frame for developing intercultural competences

Abstract

As engineers today often work in intercultural projects and contexts, intercultural compe-tences must be part of the learning objectives in engineering educations. This is in line with the CDIO programme; however, the programme, as well as the teach-ing practises, undoubtedly needs to further develop approaches to cultural aspects in engineering education. Hence the key-question of this paper is how CDIO support the development of intercul-tural competences in engineering education, and the paper explores the implementation of CDIO in an explicitly intercultural engineering programme with focus on potentials and challenges of building close authentic interrelations and cases with the local context.