Preface: This is the first of three session proposals organized by the Promethean (Engineering) SIG’s working group on history and engineering education. We have grouped these papers/sessions according to the themes of “global perspectives” (A), “the history of US engineering education” (B), and “humanistic-social education in engineering curricula” (C). This proposal covers the first of these themes. If all three sessions are accepted, we recommend that they appear in the program in this sequence.

Beginning with works such as Ken Alder’s Engineering the Revolution (1999), much of the work in the history of engineering education has been based on a polarization of British and French models of engineering education. This has had broad implications for how we approach the field, with analytical approaches and academic credentialing (as sanctioned by a strong state) said to characterize the French model (e.g., Ecole Polytechnic and the Ecole de Mines), and more pragmatic education and industry sanctioned certifications as marked by the British tradition. While it is clear that historically these models have had broad influence in other countries, and most notably the United States, there is a need for a greater understanding of the different approaches that unfolded elsewhere (and at different times) in Europe, an in the case of Doing’s paper, at the juncture of the U.S. and Latin America today. There is also a need to understand (as Alder himself describes in his work) the more subtle variations that occurred within Europe itself, especially in what, in the context of modern industrial democracies, became its more “peripheral” economies. These efforts to study alternative models are not merely an attempt to recover some forgotten pasts. Practices of engineering and engineering education have been known to persist across generations in what, for most countries, remains the highly pluralistic institutional context of higher education. These lost histories point to a different suite of options on how to configure engineering education, and along with it, different strategies for constituting professional identities. These issues are explored in earnest in this series of papers, which span both historical and present day perspectives.