Expanding horizons: The pedagogical benefits of museum visits for engineering students

Abstract

This paper explores the pedagogical benefits of a museum visit for engineering students. While field trips have proven to be effective tools to improve students' critical thinking, ethical reflection, and cultural awareness, they are still rarely featured in engineering curricula. This paper focuses on a field trip to a museum as part of the course ‘International Engineering: From Hubris to Hope’ at ETH Zürich, where students explored an exhibition addressing colonialism and looted art. We show how this experience bridges the gap between technical knowledge and the complex contexts that engineers must navigate during their career. Combining student questionnaires and reflective reports, we find that students strongly appreciate this type of experiential learning. Moreover, interviews with different stakeholders highlight the importance of field trips in fostering deeper engagement and critical thinking. Overall, our findings suggest that this type of project-based learning can enhance engineering students' preparedness for the ethical and cultural challenges they will encounter in their professional careers.