The Role of Empathy in Supporting Teaching Moves of Engineering Design Peer Educators
- Conference
- Location
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Columbus, Ohio
- Publication Date
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June 24, 2017
- Start Date
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June 24, 2017
- End Date
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June 28, 2017
- Conference Session
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Student Division Innovative Research Methods Technical Session
- Tagged Division
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Student
- Page Count
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22
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--29004
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/29004
- Download Count
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691
Paper Authors
Emilia Dewi Tanu University of Maryland, College Park
Emilia Tanu is a recent graduate of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has collaborated with members of UMD's Physics Education and Engineering Education Research Groups, and researchers at Olin College of Engineering. While at UMD, she was the co-chair of the Women in Engineering Student Advisory Board and a student ambassador for the Clark School of Engineering. She hopes to eventually pursue graduate studies in Engineering Education. Her research interests include emotion in design and empathetic classroom practices.
Gina M Quan University of Maryland, College Park
Gina Quan is a doctoral candidate in Physics Education Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. She graduated in 2012 with a B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include understanding community and identity formation, unpacking students’ relationships to design, and cultivating institutional change. Ms. Quan is also a founding member of the Access Network, a research-practice community dedicated to fostering supportive communities in undergraduate physics departments, and an elected member of the Physics Education Research Leadership and Organizing Council (PERLOC).
Ayush Gupta University of Maryland, College Park
Ayush Gupta is Assistant Research Professor in Physics and Keystone Instructor in the A. J. Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. Broadly speaking he is interested in modeling learning and reasoning processes. In particular, he is attracted to fine-grained models of learning (based in microgenetic analysis, or drawing on interaction analysis). He has been working on how learners' emotions are coupled with their conceptual and epistemological reasoning. He is also interested in developing models of the dynamics of categorizations (ontological) underlying students' reasoning in physics. Lately, he has been interested in engineering design thinking, how engineering students come to understand and practice design, and how engineering students think about ethics and social responsibility.
Chandra Anne Turpen University of Maryland
Chandra Turpen is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park with the Physics Education Research Group. She completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder specializing in Physics Education Research. Chandra’s work involves designing and researching contexts for learning within higher education. In her research, Chandra draws from the perspectives of anthropology, cultural psychology, and the learning sciences. Through in-situ studies of classroom and institutional practice, Chandra focuses on the role of culture in science learning and educational change. Chandra pursues projects that have high potential for leveraging sustainable change in undergraduate STEM programs and makes these struggles for change a direct focus of her research efforts.
Abstract
Empathy is a diverse and complex phenomena by which humans relate their experiences to one another. This work explores empathy as a resource for engineering educators attending to student emotion within an engineering design environment. Our research setting takes place in a 3-credit pedagogy seminar (EDCI488E) for undergraduate engineering peer educators who are teaching concurrently in a first-year engineering design course (ENES100). The pedagogy seminar is modeled after the Learning Assistant Program developed at University of Colorado-Boulder. The seminar focuses on engineering content and pedagogy relevant to teaching engineering design (i.e. design thinking, reflective decision-making, and teamwork and collaboration). Our research analyzes for how empathy impacted peer educators’ teaching practices in the seminar. Using field notes, coursework, and videotapes of the pedagogy seminar, we analyzed the peer educators’ speech, gesture, and actions in video-recorded data. We present a case study of a role play activity in the seminar in which peer educators simulated giving feedback and critique to ENES100 students during a design review. We specifically analyze how a focal peer educator utilized empathy to recognize a tension between productive student learning and student emotion. Empathy supported the focal peer educator in developing new teaching moves that responded to the pseudo-student’s emotions. Our analysis focuses on identifying features of her empathetic practice, and how such features could support a variety of teaching moves.
Tanu, E. D., & Quan, G. M., & Gupta, A., & Turpen, C. A. (2017, June), The Role of Empathy in Supporting Teaching Moves of Engineering Design Peer Educators Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--29004
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