**3.3 A notional proposal for a holistic engineering learning method**

We have laid out the case for a method of learning engineering grounded in a holistic world view. This means that any engineering curriculum would recognize its relationship to its local history and culture. At the same time, we imagine that engineering learning methods across cultures share some learning outcomes. Such outcomes, as we are suggesting in Section 3.2, would reflect not only the reductionist threshold capacities that the engineering community desires to preserve, but include those that are relevant to living in a dynamically complex world that is far from equilibrium. Such a systemic state, as Prigogine and Nicolis [66] have recognized, does not behave in linear ways, where the outcomes are predictable extensions of a plan; systems far from equilibrium are characterized by emergent, spontaneous changes of state which are non-linear, neither predictable nor sourced in the synthesis of the systems components [66]. Such state changes, while not predictable in the conventional meaning of the word, represent outcomes produced by the emergent conditions. The operative question in such systems becomes: What conditions favor the outcomes that we desire?

As a notional proposal, we suggest the threshold technical capacities and holistic enrichments for an engineering education grounded in holism as listed in **Table 4**. The detailed experience of a program based on these capacities is out-of-scope for this chapter, but available in a pending publication by the authors. However, we provide concrete example below. **Table 4** focuses on technical knowledge thresholds ("Reductionist technical content") that fall in the category of technical interests (**Table 1**). It also includes what we conceive of as enrichments ("Enriched by Holism") to support liberal and practical interests (**Table 1**). We acknowledge that **Table 4** is not comprehensive and omits many practical interests that we touch upon in our example below.

As stated, we would expect engineering education grounded in holism to reflect the rich diversity and cultural heritage that exists on the planet. However, to illustrate a practical example, consider this vignette of an example of an engineering learning method in the north eastern United States. It takes the form of a four-year experience.

The central tenets of this holistic learning method include:


These tenets translate to a culture of mutual respect. Everyone is valuable and worthy of dignity, regardless of formal role. In a holism model, a community mantra might be, "Honor the whole." As a community member, one would feel a sense of care and responsibility for one another's well-being.

The faculty create the *least* structure required for learning. Of course, this would vary from institution to institution, but what is shared as humans is our innate


#### **Table 4.**

*Proposed threshold holistic engineering capacities, grouped into themes.*

motion toward learning when it is personally meaningful, it interests us and we can discover with a sense of psychological, emotional, academic and physical safety. The traditional "grading" system might be replaced with developmental milestones and reflection.

In this model, there would likely be an agreed-upon time where the parties convene to co-learn (i.e., a "class"), however, the primary means of learning would be collaborative (i.e., shared power), support self-organization, self-directed learning and peer-to-peer learning. The institutional schedule would structure blocks of time to accommodate collaborative project teams that transgress traditional boundaries.

Imagine that the curriculum was organized around the holistic themes of **Table 4**: *Energetics, Actions in fields, Flow, Measurement, Aliveness* and *Flow*. Over the four years, the curriculum would involve broader and deeper applications of these revisited themes considered at different scales. That is, we might conceive of ourselves as centered at the core of several interpenetrating systems, from most personal (the smallest scale) to transcendent (the whole): self, family, institutional, societal, historical and perhaps spiritual.

As a contextual backdrop, the present U.S. culture is simultaneously alive with the hope of freedom and toxified by its foundational history of genocide of indigenous people, enslavement of Black and Asian people, and violence against women. The myriad violences committed in building our nation have autopoietically reproduced through implicit cultural biases against people of color and women; such biases frequently escalate to lethal violence, such as the pattern of targeting Black men, women and children by law-enforcement agents, fragmenting our communities. A holistic engineering education in the U.S. historical culture could be organized around building the capacities listed in **Table 4** for the purpose of dissolving and healing these cultural dynamics while growing the Aliveness that we aspire to.

In the first year, among the many activities, learners would build capacities to access their whole neurology through such practices as mindfulness, meditation, yoga, martial arts or spiritual expression. Simultaneously, they would be learning about sensing, instrumentation and measurement by building electronic circuits. These human-centered and technological activities would be integrated to communicate the value in one's whole development. Such an integration of the fragmented Western so-called "mind"—abstract, cognitive thought—and so-called "body" somatic sensations and feelings—would autopoietically produce holistic solutions.

They might also engage in learning history of the region and country, mapping the autopoietic results of these events as institutional structures, policies and practices at different scales: personal, social, regional, nation state, planetary. Simultaneously students would apply mathematics to simulate dynamic systems behavior through computer modeling. Using reflective dialog, they would make meaning together of systemic patterns, perhaps metabolizing residual effects in cases where their lives have been adversely affected.

They might develop their identity through weaving a story of their past, present and future selves in an engineered world. The sharing of these oral histories would be a celebrated community tradition. While developing their narratives of personal power, they would learn about power and energy viewed from the laws of thermodynamics. They would also learn how force works together with motion, equilibrium or stasis through Newton's laws of motion. Artistic expression, dance, music or theater would be practiced and celebrated with joy. Such activities serve to enrich their vision of who they are becoming and the influence they aspire to have in the world.

The theme of Aliveness could be addressed by studying Nature's designs. In addition to the basic concepts of chemistry and biology, students would learn the principles of autopoiesis and structural coupling. As an introduction to design, learners would be trained on the use of available prototyping tools so they can design a nature-inspired "Hopper." They would also draw connections between structural coupling in autopoiesis and inequities in our country's economic, health and environmental patterns. During this time, computational skills would be developed to analyze data.

In the following years, learners would return to the holistic themes of *Energetics, Action in fields, Flow, Measurement* and *Aliveness.* They may also expand their view and application of ideas to larger social scales. The learning might take the form of project-based learning in collaborative partnership with regional communities. For example, along with learning about energy and heat transfer, they could create data-based stock and flow maps of energy at institutional, regional and planetary scales. Such maps could serve as the basis to co-design highly-leveraged interventions for carbon-negative systems with community partners. Or, they may partner to co-develop technologies appropriate to the community setting. What is important in these later years is the process of collaborative discovery in the world outside of the campus.

The curriculum could include partnerships where learners live together situated on a site to demonstrate sustainable communities. They would continue embodied practices and learning related to *Energetics, Action in fields, Flow, Measurement* and *Aliveness.* They can deepen their technical knowledge around feedback and controls as they consider how these can be used to provide needed renewable power. Again, such questions of renewable power would be undertaken in metaphorical ways at different scales: self, family, institutions, community, society, history and future. On such demonstration sites, they could also deepen their practices by collaboratively working with regional partners to co-design carbon neutral exchanges of goods and services aimed at creating meaningful livelihood for those experiencing low income.

In this section, we have offered a glimpse into what learning engineering from holism might look like. In its essence, we have offered a vision of learning that is itself, autopoietic. That is, we have described a living, learning organization situated in the U.S. that sustains itself through a recursive return to global themes of *Energetics, Action in fields, Flow, Measurement and Aliveness,* including themselves as part of the systems they study*.* Projects, co-created and chosen by learners, figure prominently in the curriculum as does collaboration across boundaries. Embodied practices and dialog play central roles in dissolving power inequities in the learning environment; they enable people to manage their state for better learning and collaboration. Later years expand the scale of co-learning to encompass regional partnerships; sites serve as living laboratories to demonstrate the viability of beneficial, just and equitable alternatives to our current systems.

While this description may seem unrealistic, it is a narrative derived from our institution's myriad learning experiments over the last 20 years. The vision we describe above coheres to an explicit holistic model that was not a cohering principle of our institution's past curriculum. However, we offer it as a glimpse into one incarnation that is possible, recognizing it as something singular to our context. From the point of view of holism, we would expect a diversity of expressions of engineering curricula, relevant to the regional situation.
