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1. A methodological approach for researching online teacher professional development

   Johnson, M. M. ( April 2021 , Middle Atlantic ASEE Section Spring 2021 Conference)

   COVID-19 has altered the landscape of teaching and learning. For those in in-service teacher education, workshops have been suspended causing programs to adapt their professional development to a virtual space to avoid indefinite postponement or cancellation. This paradigm shift in the way we conduct learning experiences creates several logistical and pedagogical challenges but also presents an important opportunity to conduct research about how learning happens in these new environments. This paper describes the approach we took to conduct research in a series of virtual workshops aimed at teaching rural elementary teachers about engineering practices and how to teach a unitmore »from an engineering curriculum. Our work explores how engineering concepts and practices are socially constructed through interactions with teachers, students, and artifacts. This approach, called interactional ethnography has been used by the authors and others to learn about engineering teaching and learning in precollege classrooms. The approach relies on collecting data during instruction, such as video and audio recordings, interviews, and artifacts such as journal entries and photos of physical designs. Findings are triangulated by analyzing these data sources. This methodology was going to be applied in an in-person engineering education workshop for rural elementary teachers, however the pandemic forced us to conduct the workshops remotely. Teachers, working in pairs, were sent workshop supplies, and worked together during the training series that took place over Zoom over four days for four hours each session. The paper describes how we collected video and audio of teachers and the facilitators both in whole group and in breakout rooms. Class materials and submissions of photos and evaluations were managed using Google Classroom. Teachers took photos of their work and scanned written materials and submitted them all by email. Slide decks were shared by the users and their group responses were collected in real time. Workshop evaluations were collected after each meeting using Google Forms. Evaluation data suggest that the teachers were engaged by the experience, learned significantly about engineering concepts and the knowledge-producing practices of engineers, and feel confident about applying engineering activities in their classrooms. This methodology should be of interest to the membership for three distinct reasons. First, remote instruction is a reality in the near-term but will likely persist in some form. Although many of us prefer to teach in person, remote learning allows us to reach many more participants, including those living in remote and rural areas who cannot easily attend in-person sessions with engineering educators, so it benefits the field to learn how to teach effectively in this way. Second, it describes an emerging approach to engineering education research. Interactional ethnography has been applied in precollege classrooms, but this paper demonstrates how it can also be used in teacher professional development contexts. Third, based on our application of interactional ethnography to an education setting, readers will learn specifically about how to use online collaborative software and how to collect and organize data sources for research purposes.« less
2. ABET & Engineering Accreditation - History, Theory, Practice: Initial Findings from a National Study on the Governance of Engineering Education

   Akera, A. ( January 2019 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Who and by what means do we ensure that engineering education evolves to meet the ever changing needs of our society? This and other papers presented by our research team at this conference offer our initial set of findings from an NSF sponsored collaborative study on engineering education reform. Organized around the notion of higher education governance and the practice of educational reform, our open-ended study is based on conducting semi-structured interviews at over three dozen universities and engineering professional societies and organizations, along with a handful of scholars engaged in engineering education research. Organized as a multi-site, multi-scale study,more »our goal is to document differences in perspectives and interest the exist across organizational levels and institutions, and to describe the coordination that occurs (or fails to occur) in engineering education given the distributed structure of the engineering profession. This paper offers for all engineering educators and administrators a qualitative and retrospective analysis of ABET EC 2000 and its implementation. The paper opens with a historical background on the Engineers Council for Professional Development (ECPD) and engineering accreditation; the rise of quantitative standards during the 1950s as a result of the push to implement an engineering science curriculum appropriate to the Cold War era; EC 2000 and its call for greater emphasis on professional skill sets amidst concerns about US manufacturing productivity and national competitiveness; the development of outcomes assessment and its implementation; and the successive negotiations about assessment practice and the training of both of program evaluators and assessment coordinators for the degree programs undergoing evaluation. It was these negotiations and the evolving practice of assessment that resulted in the latest set of changes in ABET engineering accreditation criteria (“1-7” versus “a-k”). To provide an insight into the origins of EC 2000, the “Gang of Six,” consisting of a group of individuals loyal to ABET who used the pressure exerted by external organizations, along with a shared rhetoric of national competitiveness to forge a common vision organized around the expanded emphasis on professional skill sets. It was also significant that the Gang of Six was aware of the fact that the regional accreditation agencies were already contemplating a shift towards outcomes assessment; several also had a background in industrial engineering. However, this resulted in an assessment protocol for EC 2000 that remained ambiguous about whether the stated learning outcomes (Criterion 3) was something faculty had to demonstrate for all of their students, or whether EC 2000’s main emphasis was continuous improvement. When it proved difficult to demonstrate learning outcomes on the part of all students, ABET itself began to place greater emphasis on total quality management and continuous process improvement (TQM/CPI). This gave institutions an opening to begin using increasingly limited and proximate measures for the “a-k” student outcomes as evidence of effort and improvement. In what social scientific terms would be described as “tactical” resistance to perceived oppressive structures, this enabled ABET coordinators and the faculty in charge of degree programs, many of whom had their own internal improvement processes, to begin referring to the a-k criteria as “difficult to achieve” and “ambiguous,” which they sometimes were. Inconsistencies in evaluation outcomes enabled those most discontented with the a-k student outcomes to use ABET’s own organizational processes to drive the latest revisions to EAC accreditation criteria, although the organization’s own process for member and stakeholder input ultimately restored much of the professional skill sets found in the original EC 2000 criteria. Other refinements were also made to the standard, including a new emphasis on diversity. This said, many within our interview population believe that EC 2000 had already achieved much of the changes it set out to achieve, especially with regards to broader professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and design. Regular faculty review of curricula is now also a more routine part of the engineering education landscape. While programs vary in their engagement with ABET, there are many who are skeptical about whether the new criteria will produce further improvements to their programs, with many arguing that their own internal processes are now the primary drivers for change.« less
3. Introduction to the Special Issue of the Florida Journal of Educational Research on Education Research for Equity and Social Justice in Florida

   Davis, C.H. ( January 2021 , Florida journal of educational research)

   From pre-K to university, education can confer a host of personal and societal benefits to individuals and the nation. Because of the vital importance of education to civic and economic participation, democratic societies must ensure all citizens have equal and equitable access to education. However, despite broad support for the democratic ideals of equality and equity in education, minoritized populations, particularly in Florida, continue to face inequities due to multiple types of oppression, including racism, sexism, classism, and others, and their intersections in schools. We asked educators and researchers in Florida: 1. What are the most pressing social justice issuesmore »in Florida schools today, and how is education in Florida continuing to reproduce and reconstitute systems of oppressive power, no matter how unintentionally? 2. How do we address and redress social inequities? 3. What innovative programs, curricula, and community partnerships are being conducted in and with Florida schools that lead to increased social justice and emancipation? We are inspired by our colleagues who are champions of social justice, whose activist scholarship highlights and undermines systematic forces of marginalization in Florida’s schools, colleges, and universities. We highlight their impactful work in this introduction, and we encourage you to share and apply the insights and recommendations contained in their policy critiques, program descriptions, literature reviews, research studies, and commentaries in this special issue.« less
4. Using power, privilege, and intersectionality to understand, disrupt, and dismantle oppressive structures within academia: A design case

   Kellam, Nadia ; Svihla, Vanessa ; Davis, Susannah C. ; Sajadi, Susan ; Desiderio, Jasmine ( January 2021 , CoNECD Conference)

   Many of us are working to create a more inclusive and socially just culture within engineering education and engineering. Despite significant effort, marginalization and discrimination continue, buoyed by systems of oppression. How can we disrupt and dismantle oppressive systems in engineering education? In our work, we explore how power and privilege are enacted within leadership teams that aim to create revolutionary changes within engineering departments. Based on this work, we developed the POWER protocol (Privilege and Oppression: Working for Equitable Recourse), a workshop that guides engineering educators to identify and understand the intersectional nature of power and privilege before planningmore »strategies to disrupt, disarm, and dismantle it. In this paper, we present a design case to show how this workshop has evolved. We provide the POWER protocol in the appendix so that others can adapt this workshop for their own contexts. In the interactive session at CoNECD, we will take attendees through part of the POWER protocol (we will scope the workshop to fit in the time allotted; the full workshop is 1.5 hours) to examine how power, privilege, and intersectionality can help attendees frame their experiences and begin to understand how their everyday experiences may be influenced by systemic oppression. To guide this process, we orient around the question: How can we become aware of power and privilege on collaborative academic teams in order to better affect social change and improve interdisciplinary and cross-identity/boundary interactions, communication, and inclusivity? We hope that through interactive sessions such as this that we can all become more persistent and sophisticated in our efforts to dismantle some of these forms of power and privilege within the university, especially those aspects that continue to oppress and oftentimes push marginalized people and perspectives out of academia. Our interactive approach will position attendees to bring this protocol back to their institutions and adapt it to their own contexts. In the tradition of the design case such as those published by the International Journal of Designs for Learning, we detail how our contexts and the literature informed the iterative development of the POWER protocol in this paper. We provide a vivid account of the POWER protocol and a facilitation guide that others can use and adapt in their own contexts. Using a narrative format, we share a forthright account of our development process. Design cases are valuable in highlighting distinctive aspects of how a design came to be; by sharing our design decisions along with the design, others may gain insight into both what has made our design successful, and where it may be brittle when used in new contexts. Finally, we describe how we will engage attendees in the CoNECD session.« less
5. Progress in the Nationwide Dissemination and Assessment of Low-Cost Desktop Learning Modules and Adaptation of Pedagogy to a Virtual Era

   Van Wie, BJ ( July 2021 , American Society for Engineering Education)

   The development of tools that promote active learning in engineering disciplines is critical. It is widely understood that students engaged in active learning environments outperform those taught using passive methods. Previously, we reported on the development and implementation of hands-on Low-Cost Desktop Learning Modules (LCDLMs) that replicate real-world industrial equipment which serves to create active learning environments. Thus far, miniaturized venturi meter, hydraulic loss, and double-pipe and shell & tube heat exchanger DLMs have been utilized by hundreds of students across the country. It was demonstrated that the use of DLMs in face-to-face classrooms results in statistically significant improvements inmore »student performance as well as increases in student motivation compared to students taught in a traditional lecture-only style classroom. Last year, participants in the project conducted 45 implementations including over 600 DLMs at 24 universities across the country reaching more than 1,000 students. In this project, we report on the significant progress made in broad dissemination of DLMs and accompanying pedagogy. We demonstrate that DLMs serve to increase student learning gains not only in face-to-face environments but also in virtual learning environments. Instructional videos were developed to aid in DLM-based learning during the COVID-19 pandemic when instructors were limited to virtual instruction. Preliminary results from this work show that students working with DLMs even in a virtual setting significantly outperform those taught without DLM-associated materials. Significant progress has also been made on the development of a new DLM cartridge: a see-through 3D-printed miniature fluidized bed. The new 3D printing methodology will allow for rapid prototyping and streamlined development of DLMs. A 3D-printed evaporative cooling tower DLM will also be developed in the coming year. In October 2020, the team held a virtual implementers workshop to train new participating faculty in DLM use and implementation. In total, 13 new faculty participants from 10 universities attended the 6-hour, 2-day workshop and plan to implement DLMs in their classrooms during this academic year. In the last year, this project was disseminated in 8 presentations at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Virtual Conference (June 2020) and American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Conference (November 2019) as well as the AIChE virtual Community of Practice Labs Group and a seminar at a major university, ultimately disseminating DLM pedagogy to approximately 200 individuals including approximately 120 university faculty. Further, the former group postdoc has accepted an instructor faculty position at University of Wisconsin Madison where she will teach unit operations among other subjects; she and the remainder of the team believe the LCDLM project has prepared her well for that position. In the remaining 2.5 years of the project, we will continue to evaluate the effectiveness of DLMs in teaching key heat transfer and fluid dynamics concepts thru implementations in the rapidly expanding pool of participating universities. Further, we continue our ongoing efforts in creating the robust support structure necessary for large-scale adoption of hands-on educational tools for promotion of hands-on interactive student learning.« less