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Self Authorship and Reflective Practice in an Innovation Minor

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Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

Innovation and Reflection

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--28815

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/28815

Download Count

700

Paper Authors

biography

Chris Gewirtz Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Chris Gewirtz is PhD student in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. His research interests start with how culture, history and identity influence assumptions made by engineers in their practice, and how to change assumptions to form innovative and socially conscious engineers. He is particularly interested in humanitarian engineering, where American engineering assumptions tend to fall apart or reproduce injustice.

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biography

Lisa D. McNair Virginia Tech

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Lisa D. McNair is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she also serves as co-Director of the VT Engineering Communication Center (VTECC) and CATALYST Fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT). Her research interests include interdisciplinary collaboration, design education, communication studies, identity theory and reflective practice. Projects supported by the National Science Foundation include exploring disciplines as cultures, liberatory maker spaces, and a RED grant to increase pathways in ECE for the professional formation of engineers.

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Kirsten A. Davis Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9929-5587

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Kirsten is a PhD student in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she also completed her master's degree in Higher Education. She has previously worked in industry in the field of IT analytics and has experience with corporate recruiting. Her primary research interests are engineering study abroad, developing intercultural competency in engineering students, and international higher education.

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Ramon Benitez Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Ramon Benitez is interested in how engineering identity and animal participatory design can be used to recruit Chicano K-12 students to engineering professions. Benitez completed his BS in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and is now a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech (VT). Benitez seeks to understand how to best instruct and assess ethical reasoning of engineering practices and engineering responsibilities, including wildlife and humanity, in our definitions of public good.

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Abstract

This project describes a minor in Innovation that is being introduced in an engineering department as a part of a new general education curriculum initiative. The minor connects three existing courses from different colleges to form the core course sequence. The theories of self-authorship (Baxter-Magolda, Three elements of self-authorship 2008) and reflective practice (Schön 1987) served as guiding principles for an ethnography of each of the classes. These theories are meaningful to students of many disciplines, are relevant to the development of innovators, and have implications for the future design and effectiveness of the minor. Furthermore, the structure of the minor will be situated in a framework of “academic plans in sociocultural context,” as described by Lattuca and Stark (Lattuca and Stark 2011). This framework models the interactions between faculty, learners, instructional resources, assessments and other factors relevant to the “shape of the curriculum” within an educational environment. We chose this framework to situate the findings from an ethnographic study of the three core courses. A protocol that references reflective practice and Baxter Magolda’s Learning Partnerships Model, which is based on self-authorship, was developed for ethnographic classroom observation. The collected data will help us better understand the educational environment and educational processes (Lattuca and Stark 2011), as well as the actors situated within them. In this paper, we offer an analysis of pilot data to better understand how the classes might align with desired outcomes - such as student development of self-authorship, reflective practice, and capacity for innovation. Using this analysis, we identify possible implications for (a) adjustment of academic plans, and (b) evaluating and adjusting the educational environment, both described by Lattuca & Stark’s model.

Gewirtz, C., & McNair, L. D., & Davis, K. A., & Benitez, R. (2017, June), Self Authorship and Reflective Practice in an Innovation Minor Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--28815

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