Portland, Oregon
June 23, 2024
June 23, 2024
July 12, 2024
First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 8: Peers as Mentors & Instructors
First-Year Programs Division (FYP)
https://peer.asee.org/46645
Luke Raus is studying Engineering with a concentration in Robotics at Olin College of Engineering.
Zachary del Rosario is an Assistant Professor of Engineering and Applied Statistics at Olin College. He studies how people react to uncertainty. In particular, he is interested in how technical people (scientists, engineers) make decisions with numbers. There are examples in the historical record where decisions ignored uncertainty and the results led to catastrophic failure. Prof. del Rosario's research goals are to understand how technical people experience uncertainty, and use that understanding to help them make better decisions.
In this complete research paper, we study student-instructor communication in an engineering studio course. Studio pedagogy is an increasingly popular active learning technique. This tradition of pedagogy deemphasizes faculty lecture and emphasizes student-directed project work. However, studio pedagogy draws heavily on instructor-initiated communication for effective instruction. A limited body of research suggests that such communication is challenging, and we posit that early instructors experience additional, as-of-yet unidentified challenges. To better understand these communication issues, a team of four undergraduate course assistants and one faculty member conducted a collaborative autoethnographic study of instructors learning to teach in a first-year studio course. We identified the challenges the (student) instructors faced and the approaches they used. For instance, the instructors faced an interaction barrier—sources of resistance to initiating a student-instructor interaction, such as a lack of instructor self-confidence or student reticence. We illustrate challenges instructors faced and their approaches to resolve them through reflective episodes from the instructors. Our audience is twofold: Education researchers will find new lines of investigation for future work on studios, while early instructors will learn how to get started with teaching in studios.
Abbot, E. E., & Lan, B., & Raus, L., & Fan, B., & del Rosario, Z. (2024, June), Beyond "How's it going?": A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study by Early Instructors in a First-Year Engineering Studio Course Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/46645
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