Keywords: research, story, reflection, narrative
Storytelling in Engineering Education
The engineering education research community is evolving, as evidenced by the growth of capacity building
programs and emerging venues for disseminating engineering education scholarship. Central to these
changes are conversations around envisioning engineering education as a new professional discipline. One challenge
emerging from these conversations is how to share what we as a community are learning about the process of
conducting engineering education research, ways to make an impact on engineering education, and strategies for
successfully navigating an engineering education career. The community is at a point in time where focused
dialogue and community building are crucial.
Implications of Findings
| Storytelling provides a
vehicle for scholarly discourse that makes explicit our implicit knowledge, promotes reflective practice, and
provides entry points into a community of practice.
|
An underlying premise for this paper is the value of using storytelling in engineering education to make
explicit knowledge that can advance engineering education as a profession. The interactive story poster
pedagogy described in this brief (and the full paper at the link below) focuses on building community and
intellectual capacity in engineering education research. Evaluation results suggest both a need for and
the value of a community of practice storytelling forum for sharing stories about the challenges and strategies
of navigating engineering education research and careers.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned is the extent to which participants wanted to share and hear stories—and
that this was not something generally experienced at engineering education conferences. Storytelling provides a
vehicle for scholarly discourse that makes explicit our implicit knowledge, promotes reflective practice, and
provides entry points into a community of practice.
Design and Background of an Interactive Storytelling Workshop
The Institute for Scholarship on Engineering Education (ISEE) team of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering
Education, designed and implemented a 120 minute interactive session called “Communities In Practice—What Are We
Learning?” for the 2006 Frontiers in Education Conference in Indianapolis. Six story posters were provided by 8
Scholars of the 2004 Institute. Poster content focused on sharing insider knowledge regarding passions and goals,
processes such as getting started, and what they learned about research.
Story posters provided an anchor for session activities, functioned as an interactive space for promoting dialogue
by involving the audience, modeled strategies for eliciting stories from the audience participants as well as the kinds
of stories that could be shared more publicly, and made use of the ISEE practice of using posters to create public
spaces for feedback and dialogue around designing research studies.
Participating ISEE Scholars were asked to reflect on what they've been learning about engineering education research. They were
then asked to share aspects of their "story" with another workshop participant. This was followed by a mini
presentation describing the session goals and activities. The participants were then invited to view the ISEE
Scholars’ story posters and to use sticky notes to place comments, questions, or reflections on the posters
themselves. Posters featured stories of engineering education research experiences such as the "dirty details" of
designing and conducting research, building community, designing effective learning environments, and bridging
engineering and education perspectives.
Following the story poster walk, participants were encouraged to select a poster that would serve to anchor
discussions around stories of engineering education research. The posters thus served a two-way exchange of ideas
by first modeling the concept of sharing stories, and then engaging others to share their own stories. A particular
focus of the discussions was on identifying challenges, strategies, advice, and epiphanies.
At the end of the story sharing discussions, participants were asked to share stories from their table with the
broader audience. Some story themes were common across tables such as the challenges and strategies for navigating
new vocabulary, ideas, and techniques. Other stories were more personal epiphanies that seemed to resonate with
others in the audience. Some examples of these include "formulating questions IS research," "doing this is like
going through a second PhD process," and "at what point do you stop studying it and do something about it?" Finally,
the presenters brought the session to a close and asked for feedback on the session and ideas for future
opportunities.
What The Evaluation Revealed
The session was formally evaluated by the Educational and Research Methods (ERM) division. This involved a written
evaluation form that included closed and open ended questions regarding how audience participants experienced the
session. Although more than 50 people participated in the session, only 39 evaluations were completed. The session
was highly rated, which substantiated some of our observations.
Themes from the open-ended questions were analyzed in terms of the following session goals: 1) creating collaborative
knowledge, 2) fostering professional development and learning, 3) building networks and community, and 4) providing
strategies for reflective practice.
The group debriefs illustrate that one of the session outcomes was collective knowledge around engineering education
research and specific research endeavors. Most participants commented on the highly interactive nature of the
session—such as "truly interactive, great discussion at my table about an issue I am really passionate about" and
"active and interactive." Participants also described how the activities promoted opportunities for learning.
Networking and community were frequently observed in the participants’ comments and often this illustrated how
participants valued the importance of community building. Some comments focused on the value of connecting with
like-minded people around personally important issues, and other commented on the value of meeting new people.
A number of participants commented on how the session provided an experience they’d been looking for at this
conference—more formal community building activities.
Many participants commented on the self-reflective properties of storytelling, and storytelling as a pedagogical
strategy. Participants also commented on areas for improvement and ideas for taking storytelling into the
future.
There are many affordances to storytelling. Prior work has illustrated that storytelling plays an important role
in learning, meaning making, facilitating change and innovation, and effective pedagogy. Given the success of this
experience, the team plan to take the storytelling idea forward and hope that others will be motivated to build on
the ideas presented in this paper.
Authors: Robin Adams, Cheryl Allendoerfer, Tori Rhoulac Smith, David Socha, Dawn Williams,
and Ken Yasuhara
Source: 2007 American Society for Engineering Education Conference
The full paper, including references, is available via ASEE proceedings search.
For a printable pdf of this research brief, click here.
Brief created July 2007
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