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.