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Cultural Relativism and Technology Transfer in Engineering Education

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Cultural Issues in Engineering: International Division Technical Session 2

Tagged Division

International

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34361

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34361

Download Count

836

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Paper Authors

biography

Jayanta K. Banerjee University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus

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Jayanta Banerjee is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez campus. Dr. Banerjee received Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo and M.Ed. from Queen's University, both in Canada. He has worked in industries and taught at the universities in Germany, Canada, USA and Latin America. He has over hundred publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings and a few books to his credit. Jayanta is a member of ASEE, ASME and VDI (Germany).

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Abstract

While we can’t govern our education only by our culture, culture still plays a very significant role in our academic and professional career. In engineering education in particular it is very important to understand a local culture while transplanting a new global technology in a different country. In any technology transfer the giving end and the receiving end must understand each ones constraints and the limitations of the technology itself that is going to be transferred and transplanted. Our class lectures and labs are not sufficient to make a student prepared for, if not even aware of, such differences in different local cultures in global technology transfer. The engineering student has to live and work in a different cultural setting during one or two Co-Op training assignments or other type of industrial internship in a different culture. In this short paper several examples are given to illustrate how cultural relativism plays a significant role in preparing an engineering student in working in varied cultures in different countries.

Banerjee, J. K. (2020, June), Cultural Relativism and Technology Transfer in Engineering Education Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34361

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