Negotiating knowledge in systems engineering curriculum design: shaping the present while struggling with the past

Designing a systems engineering curriculum is a complex process, not in the least because it involves a variety of academic professionals whose perceptions and interests rarely concur from the onset. The variety in stakeholders breeds variety not only in values and objectives, but also in supposed—and mostly tacit—views of an educational system. In such an ambiguous design context, models serve to make knowledge explicit and facilitate communication. This paper contains a description of curriculum design in systems engineering, policy analysis, and management (SEPA) at Delft University of Technology (DUT), with a particular emphasis on these models, and the way they are embedded in a systems approach to curriculum design.