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Navigating Epistemological Borders: Considerations for Team Teaching at the Intersection of Humanities and STEM

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Sociotechnical Integration and Programmatic Reform

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES)

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47792

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Paper Authors

biography

Joshua M. Cruz Texas Tech University

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Joshua Cruz is an assistant professor of education at Texas Tech University. His specializations include qualitative methods, post-secondary transitions, and academic writing.

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John Carrell Texas Tech University

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John Carrell is Assistant Professor of Engineering at the Texas Tech University Honors College. He received his doctorate in industrial engineering from Texas Tech University and his research focuses on enriching engineering education through the humanities.

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Michael Scott Laver Rochester Institute of Technology

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Michael Laver received his bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette in 1996 in both history and psychology, and his Masters and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. He is currently a professor in the Department of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has taught at RIT for 15 years.

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xueni fan Texas Tech University

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Abstract

In this presentation, we explore the lessons learned from two courses entitled “War, Machine, Culture, and Society: History and Engineering in the Second World War,” which integrate engineering problem-solving within a World War II history course. This comes as part of a larger project to bring the humanities and engineering into deeper conversation with one another. For this project, we are especially interested in the aspect of teaching aspect of such a course, wherein an engineering professor and humanities professor “share the stage” in a classroom, especially given that STEM disciplines and humanities disciplines present and value different kinds of knowledge. Frome a framework of “epistemological identity,” we use classroom observations, focus group data, and analysis of syllabi to probe into the ways that instructors from radically different disciplines develop coursework together and navigate the classroom space. For this WIP, we are currently engaged in the data collection and analysis phase, and anticipate being finished by the end of the semester. We believe this work has important implications as we see more work calling for inter/transdisciplinary considerations in engineering, the development of greater social and emotional skills for engineers, and various iterations of STEM plus the arts and humanities. As these movements continue to gain momentum, we will need to better understand how to better integrate various disciplines into engineering; this project will discuss difficulties and successes from practitioners doing this work, considering especially the ways that knowledge is constructed, conveyed, and valued by practitioners in the classroom.

Cruz, J. M., & Carrell, J., & Laver, M. S., & fan, X. (2024, June), Navigating Epistemological Borders: Considerations for Team Teaching at the Intersection of Humanities and STEM Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47792

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