As educators we train our students to view the world using a particular disciplinary lens. In engineering this means helping our students to "think" like engineers. We teach them to categorize and solve problems using a technically focused mindset. For instance, they learn the importance of using hard data to quantify success or failure. Other disciplines, especially in the social sciences, focus additional attention on normative and substantive issues. Students are taught the importance of developing contextual understanding and of recognizing that lived experiences generate different perceptions of reality. This variety in discipline specific thinking gives rise to a rich diversity of ways to interpret the world. These mindsets, however, can also act like silos that prevent the exchange of information. For example, while engineers share a common language, they often find it difficult to explain to a non-specialist how they reached a particular decision. As teams are rarely composed of individuals from a single discipline, this presents a fundamental challenge. How do teams collaborate effectively across disciplinary boundaries?This paper, submitted as a work-in-progress, presents the current state of our course development. We discuss our learning outcomes, describe our pedagogical approaches, and identify areas of concern associated with this approach to multidisciplinary engineering education. By providing a detailed framework of the class as currently designed, we hope to solicit meaningful feedback from the multidisciplinary engineering community before teaching the course in the fall of 2017.
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