Search

The Engineering Education Research Network in Africa (EERN-Africa) was created to enable connections between practitioners and researchers with a shared interest in African engineering education contexts. Recognising the importance of developing an African voice in the engineering education research space, the EERN-Africa community has interacted in a dynamic and dialogic way with our own teaching and research practices across diverse African contexts, with an ethical commitment to democratic and inclusive community-building. The objective of this paper is to reflect on the current status of the Community of Practice (CoP), and the challenges and opportunities in sustaining and growing the CoP. A collaborative analysis of perspectives on this emerging identity is presented, using an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology and drawing on collective written reflections and discussions. Six broad themes on the value that the CoP has for both individuals and the group were identified: networking, capacity development, emotional support, impact on professional identity, social and environmental impact, and breaking borders. This paper contributes an approach for collaborative capacity-building in EER through a virtual CoP, underpinned by the spirit of ubuntu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) has been sponsoring a Winter School in Engineering Education Research Methods since 2011. This paper describes how in 2017 attendees at the School applied what they had learned about a little-used data-gathering technique: observation. Starting with a Program Logic analysis, which identifies what an intervention ought to be doing, and hence what kind of evidence needs to be collected to describe its effect, some participants who had attended prior Winter Schools, were given the chance to collect the evidence. They found observation to be much harder to do well than one would think. This paper describes their experience and argues for the use of observational techniques in order to triangulate our data-gathering methods and improve the quality of our educational research. However, we also learned that a great benefit of observation comes from sustained reflection on the process and the data collected. Without such reflection, we argue observation is likely to produce rather thin results. abbriviations: AAEE - Australasian Association of Engineering Education; JEE - Australasian Journal of Engineering Education; WS2017 - 2017 Winter School [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]