Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

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СКАЧАТЬ argued that engineering educators should have at least a knowledge of their students learning styles. The journey draws attention to convergent and divergent thinking because there is strong argument that engineering students are often taught in ways that are antipathetic to creative thinking. Following discussion of Kolb’s theory of experiential learning and the Felder-Solomon Index of Learning Styles, the journey concludes with a brief commentary on the relation between temperament and learning styles. It is concluded that studies of learning styles and the temperaments of students can provide educators with insights into student learning and instruction.

      Those who follow the learning centred ideology do not like psychometric testing or formal examinations. Yet most of us have beliefs about intelligence and its role in learning. Journeys 13, 14, and 15 deal with issues surrounding the concept of intelligence. Journey 13 begins with a brief discussion of the impact that intelligence testing has had on school systems. It is agreed that tests of general mental ability are found to be relatively good predictors of job performance. But multiple methods of assessment are to be preferred to a unitary instrument. Journey 14 begins with a description of the nature-nurture controversy and concludes that we should think about “Nature and Nurture” not “Nature versus Nurture”.

      Just as engineering educators should have a view about intelligence so they should have a view about competence. Two views of competence are presented. They have profound consequences for the design of the curriculum and instruction. The role of communication is highlighted, but doubt is cast on the methods used to teach communication as a means of achieving the goals that are required. The view is expressed that the curriculum should be perceived in terms of intellectual and personal development that continues throughout life. That places considerable responsibility on industry for the development of their personnel which most organizations do not seem to accept.

      Two alternative theories of intelligence are presented in Journey 15. The first is Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences, and the second, Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence. Attention is given to implicit theories of intelligence. Sternberg is also important for engineering education because of his concept of “practical intelligence.” The journey ends with a discussion of emotional intelligence. These journeys show that not only teaching but policy making in respect of the curriculum, benefit if we have a wide ranging understanding of student behavior.

      The final journey is a commentary on the social reconstruction ideology. It considers that society is doomed because its institutions are incapable of solving the social problems with which it is faced. Therefore, education has to concern it with the reconstruction of society. Like the learning centred ideology it is based on a social constructivist view of knowledge. The principle methods of teaching are “discussion” and “experience” group methods. In education Karl Smith has encouraged “constructive controversy”. Other methods are “debates” and “mock trials”. The journey ends with a case study. It is concluded that since learning is shared activity the least an instructor can do to foster relationships is to share his/her scholarly activity with his/her students.

      John Heywood

      October 2017

       Acknowledgments

      I am very grateful to Professor Arnold Pears of Uppsala University for inviting me to participate in this project which I have enjoyed immensely.

      A big thank you to Dr Mani Mina of Iowa State University for organising this lecture programme and for being my critical friend.

      He and I would like to thank Farah Nordin for the large amount of time she gave to the project to tape, and edit the video and audio files. We would also like to thank Mr Kevin Wikham of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for helping with the web development and WordPress set.

      We would like to thank Professor David Ringholz, Professor Steve Herrnstad, Matthew Krise, Peter Evens and the faculty, graduate and undergraduate students of the Department of Industrial Design for their continuing interest and enthusiastic support for the project.

      More especially we would like to thank the following for leading and contributing to the seminar discussions – Neelam Prabhu-Gaukar, Sara jones, Leif Buaer, Mohammed Al-Mokhainin, and Professors John Basard and Lofthi Ben-Otheman.

      John Heywood

      October 2017

      JOURNEY 1

       Accountable to Whom? Learning from Beginning Schoolteachers 1

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The engineering profession has been keen to develop engineering activities in schools. Both the ASEE and FIE annual conferences hold several sessions each year devoted to K-12 education in which there are exchanges about what has been done and what might be done. Occasionally it is pointed out that engineering education can learn to its advantage about teaching methods in schools especially in primary (elementary) schools [1, 2]. There are no detailed analyses of engineering educators at work of the kind carried out among school teachers by Lortie [3] and more or less replicated twenty years later by Cohn and Kottkamp in the United States [4].

      My experience of teacher education leads me to believe that beginning engineering educators have much to learn from beginning teachers. Therefore, many examples in this text are taken from reports of what happened to beginning teachers and their students while researching their own instruction.

      There seems to be general agreement that there is a need for induction to teaching that goes beyond telling beginning teachers where their classroom, rest rooms, and staff rooms are before they begin their teacher training. However, by all accounts engineering education is still at this primitive stage. It is not unreasonable to suppose that key questions on a beginning engineering educators mind relate to accountability: “to whom, and for whom am I responsible?”

1.2 ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Accountability is important because it is the devil that is driving the mechanisms that control the work of teaching, as for example, the ABET criteria. In the UK, higher education institutions are now being judged for their teaching quality as well as their research [5]. That is, in addition to the quality assurance procedures already in place.

To begin at the beginning, Sockett wrote in 1980 that: “Central to the debate on accountability are the twin ideas of responsibility and answerability for actions undertaken by one party on behalf of another” [6]. My version of the development of accountability in the education system in England is that it began with the student revolt of 1969. Parliamentarians found that although the student unions in the universities received funding from student fees they were not required to account for how it was spent, and this frustrated those parliamentarians. They also came to believe that the СКАЧАТЬ