Poetry Writing in Engineering Education: Results and Insights From an Exploratory Study
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual Conference
- Publication Date
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July 26, 2021
- Start Date
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July 26, 2021
- End Date
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July 19, 2022
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Industrial Engineering
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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18
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--37585
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/37585
- Download Count
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465
Paper Authors
Elif Akcali University of Florida
Dr. Elif Akçalı is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida (UF), where she is also The Cottmeyer Family Innovative Frontiers Faculty Fellow. She is an industrial engineer, a visual artist, and an explorer of the interplay between thinking and making in the arts and engineering. In 2013, Dr. Akçalı was selected as the Creative Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Florida, and spent two semesters in the School of Theater and Dance (SoTD). After this experience, Dr. Akçalı began experimenting with the use of arts-integrated teaching and learning methods in engineering education.
Mariana Buraglia University of Florida
Mariana Buraglia has both a master’s and bachelor’s degree from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida (UF). She is passionate about science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education and research. Through the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), she led an outreach program to promote STEAM education for elementary to high school students. She also served as a facilitator for a Girls Who Code (GWC) chapter and as a teaching assistant for four semesters of a programming fundamentals course. She is a strong proponent of fomenting divergent thinking in the engineering curriculum specifically by leveraging the arts.
Andrea Essenfeld University of Florida
Andrea Essenfeld is a recent graduate from the University of Florida's, earning her bachelor's degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering in December 2020. Her undergraduate research focuses on creativity tests and divergent thinking. She is passionate about how the mind learns and expresses itself, and thus has been working most recently in the engineering education domain.
Jade Williams University of Florida
Dr. Williams is a Lecturer in the Dial Center for Oral and Written Communication at the University of Florida (UF). She has an active research program employing qualitative and arts-based methods to investigate the complex and powerful relationships that exist between human communication and biology, health and well-being; conflict management and negotiation; crisis Communication in Emergency Medical Teams; human resilience; narrative identity and constructions of self and other as well as stereotypes and stigma. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Williams presents workshops and seminars, both locally and nationally, on a variety of organizational and interpersonal communication-related topics. She is also the Director of the UF Dial Center Ambassador Leadership Program.
Abstract
To cultivate creative thinking and communication skills development, we created and incorporated two poetry-writing assignments into two sections of a required, upper-level undergraduate course in an industrial and systems engineering program. The first assignment, due at the beginning of the semester, asked students to write a poem about themselves using a specific poetic form. The second assignment, due at the end of the semester, asked students to write a poem about a technical topic from the course using the same poetic form. At the end of the semester, the poems from 61 students who gave their consent to participate in the study were collected and entered as data. We analyzed a subset of these poems for themes qualitatively using open and axial coding and constant comparison. In this paper, we discuss the specifics of the chosen poetic form, describe our approach to content analysis using a mixed-methods approach, present our preliminary findings, and discuss potential benefits of poetry-writing to creative thinking and communication skills development in engineering education.
Akcali, E., & Buraglia, M., & Essenfeld, A., & Williams, J. (2021, July), Poetry Writing in Engineering Education: Results and Insights From an Exploratory Study Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37585
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