Why Disciplinary Culture Matters: Lessons Learned from 7 Years of Internationalization in Engineering Education

The professional requirements for engineers increasingly include coping with globalized development and production contexts and a sensitivity to intercultural issues. Under the objective of enriching engineering education with international components, the publicly funded Project ELLI works together with the three engineering faculties and the International Office of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Since the start of the project in 2011, measures were implemented to facilitate the acquisition of intercultural competencies and foreign language skills for engineering students. This short paper will go into more detail regarding the setup of the different internationalization measures of Project ELLI and their respective evaluation results. After giving a theoretical overview on engineering disciplinary culture and its importance for internationalization, it will elaborate further on participation structure and on the student’s opinions with regard to the competences they’ve acquired through participating. In its concluding section, the paper will summarize success factors of discipline-specific offers in internationalization of engineering education and give an outlook on potential future projects.