Auto-Ethnographic Reflections : Lessons from Leading a Stem Initiative for Girls in School While We Ourselves Were in School

In this paper, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to describe first-hand the reflections and learnings from leading an organization to help school children, especially girls, familiarize themselves with STEM and Cyber Security. The primary authors and ethnographers are founders of STEM initiatives for young learners. The primary author is a recent high school graduate who has taken up an engineering field, and two other contributing authors are high-schoolers currently leading these initiatives. With help from the three engineering educators on our authorship team, we use our individual self-narratives to develop a set of recommendations for other young engineering educators across the globe looking to start their own initiatives

Exploring perceptions of disciplines using arts-informed methods

This complete evidence-based practice paper describes a methodology used in a general first-year engineering program to explore students’ perceptions of engineering through the use of drawings. One of the primary objectives of the first-year program is to help students develop a sense of identity within the field of engineering, as well as, understand basic engineering knowledge and skills, which in turn will support them in their selection of an engineering major (among 15 different options) and ultimately in their persistence toward their selected degree. Hence, understanding students’ preconceptions of the engineering discipline when they start their academic program is crucial. However, many students entering the program come with narrow preconceptions or limited knowledge about the profession. One challenge instructors face is how to facilitate students’ thinking about their own perceptions of engineering in a meaningful way. A typical activity to help the students understand their perceptions of the engineering discipline is to ask them “What is engineering?” However, instructors have been frustrated by the lack of depth in students’ responses. This paper explores a different methodology to explore students’ perceptions of the engineering discipline by taking an arts-informed approach; instead of writing down their perceptions or talking with a peer, students are first asked to draw the response to the question “What is engineering?” Approximately 150 students participated in this activity during the first class at the beginning of their first semester in engineering (Fall 2018), across 6 sections of the first in a two sequence, foundations of engineering course, taught by two instructors.Our work was informed by the theoretical framework developed by Capobianco et al. (2011). They used the Draw An Engineer Test (DAET) to identify how elementary school students perceived an engineer. In their work, they were able to identify the actions performed by an engineer, and the artifacts used by an engineer from the students’ perspectives. They were also able to categorize an engineer into 4 different groups: (1) mechanic, (2) laborer, (3) technician, (4) designer. Although this work has been used previously in engineering education research and provides insightful data on kids’ perceptions of an engineer, we are taking a different approach. We are interested in understanding not the perceptions about the person (i.e. the engineer), but about the discipline. Hence, we used Capobianco et al. (2011) work to inform our approach to data collection and analysis.This paper presents preliminary results on the analysis of the students’ perceptions of the engineering discipline through art-based techniques using a visual methods qualitative approach. It has been suggested that these types of approaches can facilitate more meaningful conversations between instructors and students regarding their previous preconceptions of disciplines. We used these methods to investigate students’ drawings to observe how they organized their thoughts and chose to represent their views. Data were analyzed using open coding of the draws and the analysis was conducted by 3 different researchers. The researchers agreed on an initial codebook. Some descriptive statistics are presented to understand the different aspects highlighted by the students in their draws.Anticipated results provide an insightful representation of undergraduate engineering students preconceptions about the discipline in terms of the context in which they believe engineering happens, the typical work performed in the discipline, the tools and artifacts used in the discipline, the types of problems the discipline solves, and the scope of the field. We provide implications for research and practice and recommendations on how first-year engineering instructors can use this information to better understand their own students' preconceptions about engineering to help them develop a complete and critical understanding of what engineering is

WIP: Using a teamwork model to manage large teams in a large lecture

Despite calls to promote teamwork as “an indispensable quality for engineering” (Lingard & Barkataki, 2011) engineering schools have been generally slow in developing pedagogies that successfully promote collaborative behaviors. For companies, one way to increase their productivity and being more competitive is by having employees that can effectively work with others. However, organizations recognize that new employees do not bring adequate teaming skills to the workplace (S. Adams & Ruiz, 2004). In engineering classrooms teamwork is seen by most of the engineering students as a requirement of a course in order to get a grade, rather than as a skill that they need to master to become effective engineers. Part of the problem is that students are selected and assigned to teams with the expectation that they will know how to effectively work with others, without providing any previous teamwork training.Students need to be able to develop the competencies, knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards effective teamwork that allow them to become effective team contributors when they face the demands of the job market. Hence, teamwork’s purpose goes beyond assigning a task to a group of people to achieve a goal. Teamwork has a bigger purpose, to create synergy that allows the team to provide with the most effective way to solve a problem.The purpose of this research is to implement a teamwork effectiveness model to manage large teams in a large lecture to promote teamwork competencies in engineering students. Our focus was to provide structured team training addressing required individual and team competencies, designed under instructional strategies that allow individuals the opportunity to experience real team situations (a problem-based design project) and have time for reflection on their learning process.In order to provide the training and support we used the “Model for the development and assessment of teamwork” proposed by S. G. Adams, Vena, Ruiz-Ulloa, and Pereira (2002). According to the authors highly effective teams exhibit certain characteristics described as constructs in their model (i.e. common purpose, clearly defined goals, psychological safety, role clarity, mature communication, productive conflict resolution, and accountable interdependence). We provided students with a course design that helped us implement that model to train the students on how to develop the competencies they require, without losing the main focus of the class that is to develop problem-solving and design skills.Teamwork effectiveness was measured by the Team Effectiveness Questionaire in a pre-and-post test. Results suggest that providing training had a positive impact in every teamwork construct in the students, and helped them overcome the challenges of working in large teams