The Role of Democracy in Engineering Education. An Analysis of SEFI Conference Proceedings

Introduction - The study is a first review of the role of democracy in engineering education within the conference proceedings of the SEFI annual conference. Methods - The study aims at a systematic data collection and a first tentative analysis through a mixed-methods approach. For this, the retrieved data is analyzed with quantitative methods for a simple descriptive statistics and a simple qualitative analysis in which contexts the words democracy and/or democratic are used. Results - The search string yielded 219 hits across 79 papers out of 1.824 papers in total, representing 4,3%. There are 67 papers which have only one match (66,7%) or two matches (19,0%). A first deductive coding of the matches identifies hits where the search term is used only in a peripheral or "accidental" manner which is the case for 55 hits (25,1%) in 47 papers (59,5%). There are 101 hits (46,1%) across 23 papers (29,1%) which address democracy in the context of higher education and learning. Discussion - The study is an explorative study and only provides a first glimpse into the research field but as such it serves to identify future in-depth research. As a result of the high peripheral usage of the search term, the relative number of papers drops across all the annual proceedings from 4,3% to 1,75%.