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In the spring of 2020, schools across the United States closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing a sudden change from the traditional way education was provided. When schools resumed, many teachers found themselves teaching and scaffolding learning in a new situation, online. However, there is limited information on how teachers implement scaffolding—both in-person as well as online. As such scaffolding depends on teachers’ perceptions, this suggests the need for a measure of teachers’ perceptions of scaffolding across these modalities. This paper reports the design and development of a survey created to measure teacher perceptions of their agency/control related to and self-efficacy for implementing various forms of scaffolding and the forms of scaffolding they use. K-12 teachers who taught before and during the pandemic (N=105) completed the survey in spring/summer 2021. Using exploratory factor analysis, we found that the survey measured these constructs, and that constructs loaded separately by modality (online versus face-to-face). This suggests the survey could be used in shorter forms to provide information about teacher perceptions of scaffolding specific to their modality, in turn providing more information about the kinds of professional development they might benefit from.

 

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.

 

Speculative design, as a diverse set of methods that aim to offer critique, can be challenging to engage productively. In this design case, we share how a prior, stalled design project—an ambitious vision of interdisciplinary design education partnered with business and housing development projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico—provided compelling precedent as we sought to reframe during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognized that solution-focused ways of working in the prior project left the design problem undefined. As we began the design work detailed in this case, we leveraged the perspectives and design knowledge of our interdisciplinary team of faculty and students. While design cases often emphasize the designed training or program, we focus on our reframing process, sharing vignettes as we prepared to and participated in activities at a design workshop, and then used our own design practices to engage in problem framing workshops. In sharing these accounts, we characterize the pandemic as a trickster and speculative co-designer, who revealed much about how our efforts were entangled with institutional structures. Across these punctuated vignettes of design work, we highlight how an initial broad problem frame invited this trickster to participate and how the application of problem framing tools wrested framing agency from the trickster. Collectively, this anchored our attention to systemic inequities in ways that troubled notions of sustainability.

 

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. 

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. 

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. 

While project-based learning purportedly values student agency, supporting and managing this remains challenging. We conducted a design-based research study to understand how problem authenticity, and task and participant structures can contribute to students’ framing agency, in which students make decisions that are consequential to their learning through ill-structured problem framing. We compared three semesters of an undergraduate engineering design project (cohort 1 n=70; cohort 2 n=70; cohort 3 n=66). Discourse analysis of team talk highlights how task and participant structures supported students in the first and third cohorts to display framing agency. In contrast, cohort 2 displayed high agency over task completion, which they had framed as well-structured. We discuss implications for designing ill-structured learning in terms of participant and task structure and problem authenticity.

 

Understanding the roles of agency in learning can be expanded by taking up a posthumanist stance and examining material conversations in creative spaces—such as in this participant observation study set in a university textile technology art class. Using video/audio records, artifacts, and field notes, we categorize being, doing, and becoming agency of materials and the learning opportunities they offer in ecoprinting and computer/machine embroidery. Learning with becoming materials may depend more heavily on iteration. 

In this paper, we share the theories that guided the design of an interprofessional education course on Climate Change and Public Health Preparedness and how the course supported students’ professional interest and action competence as they move through their education and into their professional work in the context of our unfolding climate crisis. The course was guided by the public health emergency preparedness domains and was built to allow for students to explore applications of the content for themselves and their own profession. We designed the learning activities to support personal and professional interest development and help students move into perceived and demonstrated action competence. For the evaluation of our course, we asked the following research questions: What kinds of personal and professional commitments to action did students propose by the end of the course? Did these vary in depth and specificity and by the number of credits they enrolled in? In what ways did students develop personal and professional action competence over the course? Finally, how did they show personal, professional, and collective agency related to the course content on adaptation, preparedness, and mitigation of the health impacts from climate change? Using qualitative analysis guided by action competence and interest development theories, we coded student writing from course assignments. We also conducted comparative statistical analysis to assess differential impacts for students who enrolled for one versus three credits. The results show that this course design supported students’ progression of knowledge and perceived ability in specific individual and professional collective actions to reduce the health impacts of climate change.