Collaboration Conundrum

There may be few other issues more important to technology education at this moment than the nature of the profession’s relationship to engineering. Technology education has undergone a significant reshaping since the mid- 1980s, particularly when the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) launched the field on a standards-based reform path in the early 1990s. The standards’ vision for what students ought to know and be able to do in technology reflects a strong engineering influence. This is not surprising given that ITEA sought input from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on the standards and, later, submitted the standards to an intensive quality-review process at the National Research Council (NRC).