Professionals are increasingly expected to collaborate in interdisciplinary settings. Higher education institutes offer students opportunities to develop necessary skills, often in the context of project-led education. In such types of education, the role of the tutor is changing, from a focus on teacher-oriented teaching towards learner-oriented coaching, facilitating students’ knowledge construction. Hardly any research focuses on how teachers apply this new didactical approach and how it impacts student learning. In our research, we study how tutors in interdisciplinary engineering education take on the coaching role; how tutors and students value this coaching behavior as beneficial for student learning; and what support (new) tutors need to develop the coaching role.
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In this empirical study, the one-day project Robot Love Design-a-thon was designed for an interdisciplinary group of preservice teachers (in arts, sciences, and primary education), and evaluated through observations and learner reports. An analysis of the observations and the learner reports showed that having to go through a complete design process in a single day worked well: it facilitated the exchange of ideas and critical discussions between students concerning the project’s socially engaged theme ‘Tenderness and Technology’. In addition, interdisciplinary collaboration emerged as an important learning outcome. All students found working in mixed teams a relevant and educational experience as they could profit from each other’s expertise.
ClimateCafé is a field education concept involving dierent fields of science and practice for capacity building in climate change adaptation. This concept is applied on the eco-city of Augustenborg in Malmö, Sweden, where Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) were implemented in 1998.ClimateCafé Malmö evaluated these NBS with 20 young professionals from nine nationalities and seven disciplines with a variety of practical tools. In two days, 175 NBS were mapped and categorised in Malmö. Results show that the selected green infrastructure have a satisfactory infiltration capacity and low values of potential toxic element pollutants after 20 years in operation. The question “Is capacity building achieved by interdisciplinary field experience related to climate change adaptation?” was answered by interviews, collecting data of water quality, pollution, NBS and heat stress mapping, and measuring infiltration rates, followed by discussion. The interdisciplinary workshops with practical tools provide a tangible value to the participants and are needed to advance sustainabilityeorts. Long term lessons learnt from Augustenborg will help stormwater managers within planning of NBS. Lessons learned from this ClimateCafé will improve capacity building on climate change adaptation in the future. This paper oers a method and results to prove the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel wrong when he opined that “we learn from history that we do not learn from history”
Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
The pace of technology advancements continues to accelerate, and impacts the nature of systems solutions along with significant effects on involved stakeholders and society. Design and engineering practices with tools and perspectives, need therefore to evolve in accordance to the developments that complex, sociotechnical innovation challenges pose. There is a need for engineers and designers that can utilize fitting methods and tools to fulfill the role of a changemaker. Recognized successful practices include interdisciplinary methods that allow for effective and better contextualized participatory design approaches. However, preliminary research identified challenges in understanding what makes a specific method effective and successfully contextualized in practice, and what key competences are needed for involved designers and engineers to understand and adopt these interdisciplinary methods. In this proposal, case study research is proposed with practitioners to gain insight into what are the key enabling factors for effective interdisciplinary participatory design methods and tools in the specific context of sociotechnical innovation. The involved companies are operating at the intersection between design, technology and societal impact, employing experts who can be considered changemakers, since they are in the lead of creative processes that bring together diverse groups of stakeholders in the process of sociotechnical innovation. A methodology will be developed to capture best practices and understand what makes the deployed methods effective. This methodology and a set of design guidelines for effective interdisciplinary participatory design will be delivered. In turn this will serve as a starting point for a larger design science research project, in which an educational toolkit for effective participatory design for socio-technical innovation will be designed.
The project Decolonising Education: from Teachers to Leading Learners (DETeLL) aims to develop a multi-site approach for interventions towards inclusion and decolonisation in order to change the hierarchical nature of higher education in the Netherlands. DETeLL identifies the model of the ‘traditional teacher’ as embodying the structural exclusions and discriminations built into the classroom and proposes the figure of a ‘Leading Learner’ as a first step towards a radical change in the educational system. In collaboration with the education departments in the Theatre and Dance Academy at ArtEZ, the post-doc will build up a research and teaching programme that engages with students and teachers in the faculty to create a prototype of an inclusive and diverse educational practice. RELEVANCE: Education should be the critical space in which changes occur in order to shape best possible futures. In DETeLL’s acceptation, decolonisation refers to a complete change in the way of thinking and behaving. It does not refer only to the urgency of dealing with historical colonial legacies embedded in society, but also to the subversion of the deeply oppressive colonial culture that (also unconsciously) regulates public and private living, whether this is related to gender, race, class or sexuality issues. RESULTS: 1) Create a theory and practice-based scientific base-line of decolonisation and art education; 2) Provide a definition of ‘Artist educator as Leading Learner’ following a practice- based methodology of intervention; 3) Design and Pilot a new teaching programme for theatre education at ArtEZ to be then upscaled to all educational departments in a follow-up project); 4) Produce a strong interdisciplinary and international output plan: 3 academic publications, 2 conferences, 4 expert group workshops. NETWORK: ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam (UvA); Ghent University; UCHRI; Hildesheim University; Cape Town University. The partners will serve as steering committee through planned expert group meetings.
