Principales Clientes

Mel Chua*_{, Lynn Andrea Stein}+_{, Robin S. Adams}*

* _{School of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA} + _{Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, USA}

Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract

Project-based learning (PBL) requires instructors to re-examine their perspectives on teaching. What counts as "success"? How should a course "impact" students, the institution, and the world? What language and practices do we use to describe and discuss these topics? In this workshop, facilitators will challenge participants to observe and disrupt their conversation patterns about "impact" and "success" in engineering education.

Keywords: impact, participation architecture, engineering education

1 Intended audience

This workshop is designed for instructors, administrators, and anyone else involved in decisions about what the words “impact” and “success” mean for a PBL curriculum. We invite participants to bring their own PBL projects as material to discuss using alternative conversation/participation architectures geared towards transformative learning and self-authorship.

2 Scope

Our goal is to help participants form a clearer idea of how they currently conceptualize and communicate “impact” and "success" for PBL initiatives (Siddiqui & Adams, 2013) and expose them to alternative participation infrastructures as tools they can use to reframe their thinking. The vocabulary of self-authorship (Baxter-Magolda & King, 2004) and transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991) will be introduced as tools to think with as we alternate between hands-on activities and reflective dialogues.

3 Workshop overview

The total workshop time is 90 minutes; facilitators will provide materials. We can accommodate 15-40 participants, and require a room with movable chairs and tables that can be grouped for discussion.

3.1 Activity 1: Divergent Thinking (minutes 0-20)

The first activity is a divergent thinking exercise that draws its participation architecture from improvisational theatre. Participants are seated in small groups and given a stack of cards with engineering innovations and artistic terms on them. (Examples: the internet, running water, a string quartet, street dance, etc.) Participants help each other create "impact analogies" for their PBL project: "My project is like ____, because ____." Examples:

 My course redesign is like ballet: we're performing a difficult thing in front of our student audience, but need to make it look easy.

 My summer bridge program is like the flu vaccine, because it helps "protect" first-year students from environmental factors that often cause attrition.

 My flipped classroom is like indoor plumbing, because it turns a centralized activity into one that has round-the-clock individualized availability at home.

This activity serves as an icebreaker while simultaneously building critical consciousness of our language habits in engineering education. Participants explain their own engineering education projects to others while using “out of the box” language. Scope

This symposium will be based on two different interaction approaches between participants. One is the traditional paper sessions where participants can share their work and proposals. The other model of interaction results from our main goal of learning from each other and is based in workshop sessions of small groups working as “project teams”.

3.2 Activity 2: Circle discussion (minutes 20-60)

The second activity uses the "Circle Way" (Baldwin, Linnea, & Wheatley, 2010), a participation architecture drawn from traditional tribal storytelling practice. "Circle Way" elements include an emphasis on intentional listening and an avoidance of "caretaking" or "problem-solving" behaviors ("let me help you fix that!"). It focuses on holding uncertainty within a conversation for extended periods of time. To do so, it employs communal pauses as a strategy for re-centering and speaking protocols that give each person multiple chances to voice their thoughts.

Participants will gather in circles, with at least one facilitator at each circle. Facilitators will give a brief overview of Circle format, then guide the group in rotating through the following roles:

 Host: convenes the discussion and poses a topic or question of deep inquiry to the group. (Facilitators will initially serve as Hosts.)

 Guardian: monitors the shared energy and attention of the circle, and calls for re-centering pauses when needed or as cued by other members of the group. For instance, a pause may be called to thank and honor a particularly brave moment of sharing. It may also be called to defuse tensions, provide breaks for physical fatigue, remind the group of discussion rules, or for any other reason.

 Scribe: records the sense of the group's conversation in any method they prefer. The focus is not on detailed factual reproduction for an external audience, but rather on enabling group members to re- visit moments of insight later on. We will use this architecture to reflect on what the "analogies" activity revealed about our PBL projects and our thought patterns around "impact" and "success."

The final few minutes of circle format will be spent discussing the format itself and its potential applications to our home settings, such as course discussions and committee meetings. In addition to facilitating reflection on our “impact” rhetoric, this activity is intended to give participants a lived experience of a different sort of conversational environment and to make-visible the underlying social rules that enable such an environment to occur.

3.3 Activity 3: Step-back peer review (minutes 60-90)

The final activity uses the "step-back" participation architecture from the Harvard Macy Institute. Participants take turns describing their PBL project to 2 other people. They then "step back" and listen to their 2-person "audience" discuss their project as if they were not in the room. Timing is as follows, given a group with 3 participants (A, B, and C):

 Presentation: 1 minute. Person A presents their PBL project to B and C. The time is deliberately kept short so there will be insufficient room to present the full idea.

 Step-back: 5 minutes. Person A shifts their chair backwards and silently listens while B and C discuss A's project as if A were not in the room. Person A is not allowed to speak, and B and C are not allowed to acknowledge A's presence.

 Response: 2 minutes. Person A rejoins the conversation and responds to the dialogue they overheard between B and C.

The workshop will conclude with a brief wrap-up and pointers to further resources for each of the participation architectures presented.

4 Expected outcomes

Participants will come away from the session with a clearer idea of how they currently conceptualize and communicate “impact” for their projects as well as alternate ideas for how they and others could conceptualize and communicate it. They will have had exposure to multiple frameworks and vocabularies for discussing impact, practice in switching between frames of reference during a peer-review dialogue, and a rich shared experience of engagement in self-authorship.

5 References

Baldwin, Christina, Ann Linnea, and Margaret Wheatley. 2010. The circle way: a leader in every chair. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Baxter-Magolda, Marcia B and Patricia M. King. 2004. Learning partnerships: theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship. Sterling, VA: Stylus Pub.

Mezirow, Jack. 1991. Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Siddiqui, Junaid and Robin S. Adams. “The Challenge of Change in Engineering Education: Is it the Diffusion of Innovations or Transformative Learning?” In 120th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. 23-26 June 2013. Proceedings of the Annual ASEE Conference. Atlanta, June.

Learning and Teaching Guidelines for Engineering Students and Staff in