Ways of Knowing in a Postgraduate Engineering Management

With management problems, including those in engineering contexts, the problems we deal with are generally multidisciplinary and can be categorised as ill structured or complex problems which require multiple sources of data, and the judgment of appropriateness of information and synthesis. A course in a postgraduate Engineering Management program uses Systems Thinking as a means of dealing with these problems. Systems Thinking as a discipline demands a knowing subject [1], is highly abstracted, can entail complex modelling, and relies significantly on the individual/s to establish validity. The application of systems thinking to management problems therefore requires higher levels of cognition. In this paper, systems thinking in engineering management education is presented, with the central focus of the paper being the consideration of individual compatibility with systems thinking. This compatibility is first investigated by identifying student conceptions of their learning and then identifying different types of student epistemology or ways of knowing. Using a naturalistic methodology i.e. observations and interviews, a cohort of postgraduate engineering management students were found to have developed higher order conceptions of learning as a consequence of participation in the course. The four different types of epistemologies that were identified were not all compatible with systems thinking