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Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building. We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies. Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections. Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful.
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Channelling Artscience Through Fan-Fiction for Diversifying STEM Approaches in Participatory Learning in Malaysia
Fan-fiction is proposed as a participatory and discovery-learning approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; communication; and collaboration through the epistemic third space afforded by artscience. The objective is to increase the affective dimension in STEM instruction by allowing STEM to enter intimately into social spaces, all the while drawing interests from girls and women. There is strong female participation in fan-fiction creation, whether in the form of textual stories or other transmedia objects, that could be used to develop more multi-dimensional STEM-based experiential and imagination-centric learning without excluding the more technical aspects of the science – in fact, the technical aspects could be weaved in as a STEM problem or project to be collectively tackled through the communal experience of creating and responding to fan-fiction. Moreover, the world-building capability of fan-fiction, with its ability to bring together multiple fandoms such as multiple works from the same creator or different creators within similar genres, means that there is ample room for using fan-fiction during interdisciplinary engagement for STEM problem-solving or research creation approaches to learning and doing. In this article, some examples of activities are taken from workshops targeted at Malaysian audiences to explore the possibility of deploying fan-fiction approaches to STEM, or STEM through the lenses of artscience, within the culture of learning and doing in Malaysia. These workshops were not originally conceived with fan-fiction as method and medium in mind and yet, were found to share certain similar traits with fan-fiction. The world-building capacity of fan-fiction could be deployed to mainstream the incorporation of indigenous and cultural ways of knowing within Malaysia into the rubrics of institutionalized STEM education. However, the convergence and compatibility between fan-fiction and participatory design, which were featured in at least three of the four workshops depicted here, are the reasons for the choice, while the fourth workshop considers the practice of fan-fiction and its relevance to more informal practices in STEM publishing and communication at a meta level.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1937849
- PAR ID:
- 10327667
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Behavioral Scientist
- ISSN:
- 0002-7642
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 000276422210785
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building. We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies. Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections. Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful.more » « less
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This study explores the experiences of two teachers participating in professional development workshops focused on supporting implementation of SocioScientific Issues (SSI) and aspects of social justice into STEM classrooms. SSI are ill-defined problems, with a basis in science, but necessarily include moral and ethical decisions that cannot be resolved through science alone. These debatable issues can enhance learning of STEM by engaging students in real-world and authentic problems. The USTRIVE project was developed to foster STEM learning through integrated professional development workshops and the development of professional learning communities to support teachers in the use of SSI and incorporation of aspects of social justice in their STEM classrooms. Two research questions were investigated: (a) To what extent did teachers implement SSI into their lesson planning during the project and (b) In what ways did teachers’ designed lessons change from the beginning of the workshop?more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221078511
