Integrating Army Doctrine and Engineering Design: Preparing Millennials to Become Future Officers

The United States Military Academy (USMA) mission is to “educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character.” Anecdotally, some cadets believe the “educate” aspect occurs within the academic setting and the “train” aspect occurs within the military program. However, the interconnectedness of these two seemingly disparate goals within the mission are able to be achieved simultaneously and can enhance the future officer’s development. We have designed a senior capstone engineering design course that purposefully blends the “body of knowledge” from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) and Army doctrine. The interaction of these two professional aspects, and how they are integrated into the engineering design project, will be presented. The deliberate blending of these critical components from each perspective to meet both the needs of the engineering profession and the needs of active duty military service will be discussed. Although meaningful assessment of the impact of this educational approach is not borne out until students have graduated, the faculty at our institution have assessment data that demonstrate the value of this approach for future personal and professional growth. Introduction One of the common attributes of a profession is that it defines and maintains a professional body of knowledge (BOK) [1]. A clear goal of any undergraduate education program is to familiarize graduates to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that serve as the foundation for entry into a given field. Within engineering curriculum, each undergraduate program has an associated professional organization such as the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) that maintains and widely publishes “The Environmental Engineering Body of Knowledge (2009)[2]. For any given profession, the BOK serves as a focal point where students, educators, employers, and professional practitioners can gain an understanding of the breadth and depth of knowledge expected of its members. The BOK is not to be viewed as a prescriptive checklist nor does it eliminate multior interdisciplinary approaches. The BOK can serve to enhance communication when seemingly disparate approaches exist and find a common framework to discuss, design, and communicate solutions to engineering problems. The United States Military Academy’s (USMA) mission is to “educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character [3].” With respect to the “educate” part of the mission, the Dean of the Academic Board publishes a strategic document outlining the specific aspects of the educational domain. The recently published document, Educating Army Leaders: Developing Intellect and Character to Navigate a Diverse and Dynamic World, states that, “West Point educates and inspires leaders of character who think critically, internalize their professional identity, and employ their education to help build the Army and the nation’s future [3].” The United States Army, as a profession, also publishes and maintains their BOK in the form of doctrinal publications intended to meet the wide range of professional needs; some apply to the entire profession while others are more focused upon the scope of the knowledge being discussed. In an effort to simultaneously achieve the “educate” and the “train” aspects of the USMA mission [3] within an academic setting, we designed a senior capstone environmental engineering design course to blend the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) Body of Knowledge and Army doctrine. One of the unique educational challenges at West Point is for instructors to integrate both the professional disciplinary knowledge associated with each student’s academic field with the requirement to develop students to be Army officers. On the surface, especially from a student-centric perspective, this underscores the educational goal of “relevance to the profession [3].” The ability to acquire and apply knowledge within a military context of current operations is at the forefront of each student’s interests. Most students will focus on short-term academic coursework that will support their immediate and perceived tasks that they will encounter as a junior officer. However, the Environmental Engineering Sequence approaches officership from a long-term perspective by blending disciplinary and doctrinal knowledge as mutually supportive instead of mutually exclusive standpoint. So, the faculty challenge is to intentionally plan, resource, and integrate course curricula that will meet both the short and long-term goals of our students, faculty, Army stakeholders, and the profession itself to better equip millennials for their future roles as officers in the Army. The Students of Today; Officers of Tomorrow “In the learning paradigm, the mission and purpose of education is to produce learning, not to deliver instruction.” [4] A critical task for faculty is to design learning activities that (1) nest within a discipline’s body of knowledge, (2) support the Institution’s academic charter, and (3) create opportunities for each individual student’s growth. “The goals are the same for all our students—to foster academic success...One of these factors is knowing the cultural context of our students' life experiences so we can maximize their particular strengths [5].” The undergraduate students currently in our classrooms have been referred to as ““Generation C”—students who are connected, content-centric, computerized, communityoriented, and, most importantly, continually clicking [6],” “Millennials”, or “Digital Natives.” The labels are applied because the students were “born between 1982 and 2004 [7]” and they have the distinct privilege to have always been “immersed in digital world.” [6]. There is little public debate that today’s students—widely referred to as “millennials”— bring different attitudes, expectations, preparation, strengths, and shortcomings into the college classroom than previous students. [6] But, this can be a simplistic view if limited to the focus upon their ability to use technology. The interaction with “content” is a topic that needs more attention. After all, “learners don’t know what they don’t know [8].” Professors across the country are finding that millennial students are less interested in classical STEM studies, group-work, “and in anything that involves non-virtual media [9].” This study begins with a baseline understanding of the students we desire to engage in our classrooms and inspire in our disciplinary communities. As a generalization, Millennials are often characterized by the following sentiments: “They can easily, and quickly switch their attention between tasks and technology, like laptops, smartphones, and television, an average of 27 times per hour compared to only 17 times per hour for previous generations [10]” “Millennials have a mindset of continuous learning [10]” “Despite millennials’ ability to multi-task, they still crave structure. Project instructions, assignment guidelines, and training courses should be clearly communicated and delivered [10].” “Alongside with their special skills of naturally interfacing with software... there are justified concerns in educating this generation due to their general lack of interest in a physical, conceptual grasping of the real world [9].” Since 2013, the Deloitte Group [8] has released the results of its annual “Millennial Survey” to gauge the attitudes of millennials towards a broad range of topics. The survey “reinforces the connection made between purpose and retention... Businesses frequently provide opportunities for millennials to engage with “good causes,” helping young professionals to feel empowered while reinforcing positive associations between businesses’ activities and social impact [11].” Interestingly, the responses to several questions shows a change from 2015 to 2017. This includes responses that indicate millennials’ attitudes are changing [11]: “focus on their own agenda” Agree 75% (2015) to 59% (2017) [11]. “behave in ethical manner” Agree 52% (2015) to 65% (2017) [11]. “leaders are committed to helping society” Agree 53% (2015) to 62% (2017) [11]. These trends indicate a decrease in self-centric attitudes and emerging “social optimism [11].” “The latest survey indicate that millennials feel accountable, to at least a fair degree, for many issues in both the workplace and the wider world [8].” This is supported by responses that indicate that millennials feel more accountable than influential to protect the environment (59% feeling accountable to 38% influence) and social equity (53% feeling accountable to 33% influence) [11]. Like any cohort of students, there are strengths and opportunities for growth. We intended to build upon the ability of millennials to interact with information from a wide range of sources that is available digitally and introduce them to the professional dogma of both the Army and environmental engineering. The intent of our course is to leverage their strengths to further develop cadets’ “higher-order” thinking through the correct application of “mind models”, within the engineering process [9]. This higher level thinking is both doctrinal [12] and pedagogical [9] in nature. Using the doctrinal framework as a critical thinking tool combined with creative thinking and engineering design principles, we teach students to apply “practical thinking” skills on a complex design problem with no readily available “book answer” [12]. The benefits of this approach is the production of officers who can balance creative and critical thinking techniques who are “prepared to think about issues instead of ignoring or dismissing them, and asking insightful questions.” [12]. Knowledge Content and Course Design The overarching purpose of this course is to serve as