Unpack Personal Experiences
Employ the knowledge students bring to the classroom.
By Vanessa Svihla, Yan Chen, and S. Pil Kang
In their professional careers, engineers confront design challenges with multiple possible solutions, which stem from the varied ways that they frame problems. In engineering courses, however, students repeatedly learn to solve problems with a single right answer.
In their everyday lives, students commonly face challenges that can be framed in different ways. For instance, many students have negotiated the difficulties of unreliable cars or inconvenient public transit to reach a job.
Researchers call such everyday experiences “funds of knowledge.” But both students and faculty often fail to notice the relevance of these experiences in the classroom.
As part of an effort to revolutionize our chemical engineering program to better meet the needs of our diverse students, we developed pedagogical strategies that engage students’ funds of knowledge.
- We activate students’ experiential knowledge by explicitly telling them their everyday problem-framing and -solving experiences are useful in course assignments.
- We offer accessible yet realistic socio-technical design challenges that invite students to frame problems in various ways. Examples in our revised first-year course include proposing entrepreneurial applications of a recently developed antimicrobial material and designing an emergency response system to filter a rural community’s water supply.
- We position students’ everyday knowledge as salient. For instance, in the former example, we encourage students to consider their own experiences with infection, and in the latter, we warn them that if no one on their team is from a rural community, they will need to find other ways to understand the community’s needs to avoid proposing a solution that fails.
We wondered how our students approached problem framing prior to formal design instruction. A performance-based assessment in the first week of class asked students to frame—not solve—an everyday problem: dirty dishes sitting in a dishwasher develop foul smells. We identified diverse problem-framing approaches. While many students leapt to a solution, a majority also listed requirements, identified the underlying cause, or simply generated ideas about the problem and solution. This suggests to us that students develop problem-framing strategies in their everyday lives—strategies we can activate and build upon.
We compared our approach to the previous version of the first-year course, in which students completed two design challenges: (1) an over-constrained coffee maker redesign challenge and (2) a fun but irrelevant challenge of making a toy car out of food. Students in the revised course tasked with framing and solving the complex socio-technical problems described above were significantly more adept at important problem-framing strategies, such as identifying underlying needs.
We compared our first-year students who completed the socio-technical design challenges and senior capstone students who selected their own design problem. Both groups lacked prior formal design education. Students completed the same performance-based assessment at the beginning and end of their courses. Surprisingly, first-year students showed significantly more growth in considering stakeholder roles and planning next steps, while seniors decreased their attention to underlying needs. We suspect this result may reflect the seniors’ engagement with the original technically focused coursework that did not activate their funds of knowledge.
Writing prompts like “What in your background motivates you to become an engineer” can help reveal students’ funds of knowledge. Faculty can activate students’ everyday experiences by providing opportunities to frame socio-technical design challenges in varied ways.
Vanessa Svihla is an associate professor with appointments in the Organization, Information & Learning Sciences (OILS) program and the Chemical & Biological Engineering (CBE) Department at the University of New Mexico, where Yan Chen is a postdoctoral fellow in the CBE Department and S. Pil Kang is an associate professor in the OILS program. This article was adapted from “A funds of knowledge approach to developing engineering students’ design problem framing skills,” in the April 2022 Journal of Engineering Education and is supported by a National Science Foundation grant (EEC#1623105).
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