Abstract
Engineering technology education in South Africa has undergone a number of significant alterations in the past three decades. The most recent of these is the establishment of a new degree qualification – Bachelor of Engineering Technology – to replace the qualification for engineering technologists and decouple it from the existing engineering technician qualification. However, the new qualification standards alone do not give a clear distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories. This lack of clarity about what knower the new programme is intended to produce is a stumbling block to educators who need to plan, develop and implement the new curriculum. It is only through understanding the knower who should be developed that questions pertaining to what kinds of knowledge should be encountered and the encounters themselves can be answered. In this paper, the intended knower dispositions is conceptualised for the new programme by carrying out a comparative analysis of the current and new exit-level outcomes. Bloom’s taxonomy and Luckett’s knowledge plane are used as lenses to perform the analysis and draw a distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories. The analysis suggests that the engineering technologist category exhibits a relative shift towards subjective and theoretical “ways of knowing”. How this shift could influence the new curriculum particularly with regard to developing effective scaffolding for engineering technology students is also fleshed out.