Search

This paper examines specific problems of educational practice that I, an undergraduate engineering educator and education researcher, have encountered in creating an interdisciplinary engineering project course. I reveal my process of theorising about problems of practice to position engineering educators' pedagogical theorising as worthy of scholarly focus. In a reflective scholarship of teaching and learning paradigm, I take the iterative design of this course as the object of inquiry, across semesters and institutional contexts. I discuss the iteration of five key dimensions of the course: (1) authenticity to engineering professional work, (2) promoting learning of teamwork skills, (3) complexities and equity dimensions of situated project-based learning environments, (4) valuing social sciences and social context reasoning for engineers, and (5) creating a responsive curriculum for students. I distil insights related to each of these dimensions. I conclude with a consideration of the interplay between these dimensions and a reflection on the form of scholarship for engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges out of ethnographic scholarship on marginalization in present-day engineering education. I pursue a scholarship of integration to contextualize my own and others' engineering education research with critical, cultural, and historical accounts of engineering. I structure the narrative around the ethnographic themes of masculinity, competition, and competition-as-masculinity. Within each theme I situate present-day ethnographic observations of engineering educational culture, elaborate on those observations with historical context, and return to consider how historical context extends the original ethnographic observations. The implications for the study are threefold: (1) generating a new functional lens on engineering educational culture as masculine and competitive, (2) communicating useful historical context to stakeholders in engineering education, and (3) demonstrating the value of integrative scholarship to promote further interdisciplinary collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]