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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 10, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 10, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2025
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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2025
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Engineering is fundamentally about design, yet many undergraduate programs offer limited opportunities for students to learn to design. This design case reports on a grant-funded effort to revolutionize how chemical engineering is taught. Prior to this effort, our chemical engineering program was like many, offering core courses primarily taught through lectures and problem sets. While some faculty referenced examples, students had few opportunities to construct and apply what they were learning. Spearheaded by a team that included the department chair, a learning scientist, a teaching-intensive faculty member, and faculty heavily engaged with the undergraduate program, we developed and implemented design challenges in core chemical engineering courses. We began by co-designing with students and faculty, initially focusing on the first two chemical engineering courses students take. We then developed templates and strategies that supported other faculty-student teams to expand the approach into more courses. Across seven years of data collection and iterative refinements, we developed a framework that offers guidance as we continue to support new faculty in threading design challenges through core content-focused courses. We share insights from our process that supported us in navigating through challenging questions and concerns.
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STEM instruction commonly constrains learners’ agency as a means to focus attention to specific content. One consequence of this is much more research has investigated problem solving, rather than problem framing. This study investigated how learners negotiate framing agency—that is, making decisions about how to frame a design problem. Set in the context of a coding camp, learners worked with micro:bits and paper template my:Talkies to pose a community problem that could be solved via radio systems. Noticing their fixation, we guided learners through an ideation technique that prompts them to generate humiliating, harmful ideas before generating beneficial ideas, which resulted in divergent designs. Interaction and discourse analysis of video recordings highlights how learners (re)framed.more » « less
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Research on change efforts in higher education highlights the importance of change teams having sufficient authority to bring about the change they envision. This paper employs an activity-theoretical framework for organizational change known as expansive learning, along with theory on agency and intersectional power, to examine how faculty exhibited change agency in dialogue in observational data from an engineering department undergoing a major reform project. We analyzed discourse from audio-recorded faculty meetings and workshops within this six-year change project to characterize change agency in talk. Findings highlight the importance of meeting stakeholders where they are, acknowledging and legitimizing their concerns, sharing agency with them, articulating potential control, and inviting them into the effort in ways that suggest ownership. This study extends previous work on expansive learning by illuminating discursive practices that can further joint object-oriented activity in ways that foster stakeholder agency.more » « less
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While students can learn both chemistry content and inquiry practices by participating in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), it is well documented that prior experiences shape perception. We conducted a case study to investigate students’ first experiences with a CURE in an upper-division chemical engineering laboratory course, drawing upon interviews (n = 6), field notes, and written reflections (N = 31). We used discourse analysis to characterize students’ agency as they navigated their uncertainty and made sense of the authentic research. We found that students’ past experiences shaped their expectations about the CURE, with some wishing for traditional learning supports misaligned to CUREs. Offering students constrained yet consequential agency allowed them to recognize the authentic supports that were available, including help-seeking as itself a form of agency; understand failure as endemic to research rather than their own shortcoming; and position themselves as capable of navigating the uncertainty as a community of researchers. Our results suggest that instructors should model uncertainty and failure as endemic to research and position students as valued collaborators and support for overcoming abundant prior experiences with cookbook-style experiments.more » « less