Reconfiguring the borderlands of identity: Preparing social justice educators

This article offers multiple pedagogical approaches for mobilizing Gloria Anzaldúa\u27s metaphor of borderlands to prepare social justice educators to address issues of justice and equity in increasingly diverse classroom settings. It describes an experiential course in multicultural education, including innovative processes through which Education students analyze the borderlands of identity, society, and geography through critical self-analysis, fieldwork, and social action. By investigating the intersectionality of social justice issues and the social construction of identity, students attempt to transform the borders of their own identities and engage in action projects to begin a process of bridging the edges of cultural inequity

Enterprising Rural Families: Making It Work

Enterprising Rural Families (ERFTM) is an international course for the rural family in business. ERFTM teaches a process of finding success, resilience and satisfaction for rural families engaged in enterprises; including agriculture. Instructors from the United States, Canada and Australia have teamed together to offer this course that focuses on the three main components of a family business: individuals, the family unit and the business enterprise. This course also allows families in business to increase their awareness of cultural differences and similarities and improve their understanding of global issues. The course consists of written presentations, online chat sessions, threaded discussions, readings, videos, case studies and individual projects. Using these mechanisms, the online interaction provides rural families with both the tools and skills to resolve immediate family business issues and build a profitable business for the future.Consumer/Household Economics, Farm Management,

MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transportation Authority) and ME: A Tale of Regional Engagement

In a world of exponentially changing and disparate economic realities, college professors strive to create course projects that help inspire and transform student-learners into informed and active citizens who are prepared for the global workplace, and who have a growing awareness of how various issues impact their region. This paper scrutinizes the design, process, and outcomes of a student media project and refl ects upon the best practices for encouraging media literacy and student engagement with course projects in higher education. This article focuses on student media projects created by a global issues course at a two-year college. The project required students in the course to research, shoot, and edit videos regarding regional transportation issues while working with a community partner (a regional transportation authority) as a client and the ultimate destination for the video projects. The choices made, lessons learned and resulting outcomes are presented as potential best practices for those who might wish to follow a similar path in designing a project for their course

Power and Expertise: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Course Design and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

This essay describes the process of using a team of faculty and undergraduate students to redesign a university course, and outlines the research we conducted on student and faculty learning from the redesign process. We focus particular attention on power relations and issues of expertise, raising questions with implications for faculty who wish to engage students in similar course design projects, regardless of academic discipline, and who partner with undergraduates in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research

Centralisation of assessment: meeting the challenges of multi-year team projects in information systems education

This paper focuses on the difficulties of assessing multi-year team projects, in which a team of students drawn from all three years of a full-time degree course works on a problem with and for a real-life organization. Although potential solutions to the problem of assessing team projects may be context-dependent, we believe that discussing these in our paper will allow readers to relate to their teaching cases and increase the general appreciation of team project related work. Findings discussed in this paper are based on the first cycle of action research in relation to an existing multi-year team project scheme. Based on the interpretivist perspective, this work draws on data from staff and student focus groups, semi structured interviews and surveys. Team project clients were also asked to comment on their experiences and the way they would like team projects to be improved in the future. Since issues affecting the success of team projects are quite closely inter-related, a systemic view is adopted rather than analysis of a single issue in isolation. Overall there is a feeling that multi-year team projects are a good idea in theory but can be challenging to implement in practice. It is argued that the main areas of concern are the assessment process, the dilemmas and tensions that it can introduce, and the related inconsistencies in stakeholder involvement, which can compromise the learning experience if not handled well. We believe that the assessment process holds the key to a successful learning experience in team project work

Inquiry-based learning approach for a systematically structured conceptual design process: Design project for disabled people

With the projects implemented in the 'Design for the Disabled' course in the University 2019-2020 academic year, students are asked to develop solutions for the problems of disabled individuals, which is one of the real-world issues, while gaining professional knowledge such as critical thinking, idea generation and learning the conceptual design process. In addition, it is aimed to increase their learning motivation and interest in social design projects. It was learned that the students did not carry out a design project for disabled individuals in their previous projects. Throughout the semester, students developed their projects with a conceptual design matrix consisting of Data Collection, Primary Analysis, Secondary Analysis, Synthesis, Hypothesis, Preliminary Design and Final Design stages. Students were asked to present their projects at the Final Design stage. The course was conducted through online classes during the Covid-19 Pandemic for twelve weeks. Students are enabled to experience an interdisciplinary critical process. Thus, successful solutions and new models have been developed in projects in terms of product and space

Communication and conflict issues in collaborative software research projects

The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OS- CAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls. We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we outline below have solutions only visible with hindsight. Instead, we seek to provide a fair-minded critique of our role and the mistakes we made in a fairly typical two-year EU research project, and to provide a set of recommendations for other similar projects, in order that they can (attempt to) avoid suffering similarly

Undergraduate research in primary care: Is it sustainable?

To describe the research project component of the BSc in Primary Health Care and to discuss the issues faced by students and faculty in attempting to complete a student-led research project. Medical schools increasingly expect medical students to undertake research as part of intercalated BSc’s or in self-selected study modules. This research has historically been laboratory based, ‘piggybacking’ onto existing projects. Projects initiated by students themselves and studies in primary care or community settings are more unusual. A qualitative study, based on interviews with students and examiners, triangulated with data from the peer review process and personal observations on the running of the course. A London medical school, running an intercalated BSc in Primary Health Care. We interviewed 24 of 26 students and two external examiners during the interview period of the study. Students successfully undertook research, from initial question through to publication. Overall, 90 dissertations were completed since 1997, of which half used a qualitative methodology (45/90). Ten projects have subsequently been published; there were also 16 conference presentations and 6 research letters. Themes from the interview data include: the students’ strong sense of project ownership, the difficulties of being a novice researcher, the difficulties posed by the research governance hurdles, the beneficial and for some students adverse impact (stress and coping with unsuccessful projects) and finally, the impact on their careers. Students gain considerably from this learning process, not only by undertaking their own research, but they also gain in terms of acquisition of transferable skills such as critical appraisal and improved self-directedness. Project completion and publication rates suggest that programmes developing undergraduate initiated research projects can be as successful as those for other novice researchers. The student-led project is a fragile endeavour, but currently is sustainable. © 2008, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved

Teaching Non-Technological Skills for Successful Building Information Modeling (BIM) Projects

abstract: Implementing Building Information Modeling (BIM) in construction projects has many potential benefits, but issues of projects can hinder its realization in practice. Although BIM involves using the technology, more than four-fifths of the recurring issues in current BIM-based construction projects are related to the people and processes (i.e., the non-technological elements of BIM). Therefore, in addition to the technological skills required for using BIM, educators should also prepare university graduates with the non-technological skills required for managing the people and processes of BIM. This research’s objective is to develop a learning module that teaches the non-technological skills for addressing common, people- and process-related, issues in BIM-based construction projects. To achieve this objective, this research outlines the steps taken to create the learning module and identify its impact on a BIM course. The contribution of this research is in the understanding of the pedagogical value of the developed problem-based learning module and documenting the learning module’s development process.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

Ongoing Development and Evaluation of an Engineering Service Course

George Fox University has a service-learning course required of all engineering program graduates. The course began in 2010 as a one-credit per semester, four-semester sequence starting in the spring of the sophomore year. This structure provided an overlap of students in their first and second year in the course. All student teams met concurrently one evening per week to work on faculty-provided projects. Each faculty member was responsible for approximately four teams. Faculty and students began each year of the program with excitement, but over time, a number of significant challenges emerged, among these the explosive growth of the George Fox University engineering program and its potential effect on the sustainability of the program. Therefore, in this paper we follow-up on our published review of the first few years of the program. Here we discuss the mechanics of these changes and their continuing effect on the overall program. An increasing number of students necessarily required an increasing number of projects. Faculty had already expressed difficulty in managing four projects and in finding clients with appropriate engineering challenges. Faculty had also recognized that some students lacked motivation to participate in some of the provided projects, especially during their second year of the course. To meet these challenges, the course was restructured as a two-credit per semester, two semester sequence in the junior year. This cut the number of students (and therefore projects) in half. Faculty were generally assigned to oversee one team. Finally, the task of finding projects was given to the incoming juniors who became responsible to propose and present projects for instructor approval. In addition to describing the evolution of the program, statistical analyses of student perceptions of the design process and the influence of service experiences will be presented. These longitudinal data are used in the evaluation of the program as well as the overall presentation of the design process in the engineering curriculum. The details of this paper will provide information to other programs in their development of similar courses. Through the discussion of ongoing areas of concern, those implementing similar programs will gain exposure to issues that are sure to arise