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The purpose of this paper is to highlight and discuss the impact of culture as a powerful outline for how to think, feel and act. Norms and routine acts are taken for granted and guide individuals as well as the organisation. In 1999 Linkoping University started a collaboration between MIT, Chalmers and KTH with the aim of developing engineering education. This was the start of the CDIO initiative. In 2002 the first cohort of students in the study program of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering (Y-program) entered into a program designed to meet the requirements of a CDIO syllabus.
In this study recurring interviews with ten Y-students between 2002 and 2007 and a focus group interview in 2010 with lecturers in the Y-program are used to discuss the following questions in relation to a selection of program targets:
• Students entering a study program have some expectations of what studying is and what the study environment will demand from and offer them. How do they express this during their period of studying?
• How do teachers express their expectations of the students and of themselves as teachers?
• Within the context of a specific study program, the Y-program, is there an alignment or a dissonance between the approaches to learning and studying expressed by the students and the approaches to teaching and learning, as expressed by the teachers?
Our results indicate that despite the curricular changes made between 2002-2010, both students and academic staff experience that the changes made, i.e. CDIO project courses, are joyful and useful but that these are not integrated into the “real courses” or regarded as “true teaching”. The norm of how to design and carry out the basic structure is strong and in the discussion we argue that this might be upheld by values in society, of Engineering as a solid male/masculine culture, where females find difficulties in adjusting, or changing the culture and therefore take on different paths or exit and leave the programme.