Reflecting-on-learning

Recently I attended a professional development seminar mostly for engineers. Leading up to the meeting I felt tired and worn out, so I hoped that the meeting would involve minimal activity, allowing me to just glide through it. Receiving what I wished I found my mind wandering to the type of professional development--or learning, as it is--that I was experiencing. It was not unlike what the ASEE report we read this week described; a lecture based format with minuscule interactivity. In the report its suggested that actual curriculum should be made more engaging for students. The report also emphasized the need for professional development to prepare engineering educators for an environment that involved not only constant technological innovation, but one that involved constant educational innovation as well. Although this particular meeting was not for engineering educators (it was for grad students), I think the need for engaging material also applies to professional development, and I know from reading articles about workshops like Rigorous Research in Engineer Education that such work is undertaken in many professional development activities. After finishing formal schooling, its hardly as if our minds solidify and we no longer need material to engage us in order to learn from it, that is still strongly the case.

But one other thing occurred to me as I sat and thought about this session. Actually developing a more interactive, engaging presentation or workshop is considerably more laborious than the typical lecture style presentation. That may seem obvious, but it has important implications. The presenter who came in worked in industry and then government labs doing engineering research. He is clearly a very busy person. Developing a more engaging presentation would take a lot of his time, and in many cases, practically speaking people may not have that time. Trying to change the culture of engineering may not only encounter outright resistance by those who do not see the value in making such changes, it runs into practical complications that may equally result in pronounced resistance. That is, its going to be hard to convince others that the old way of doing things is so bad that people should invest that much more of their scarce time and resources into developing more engaging material to help push engineering as a whole forward. I think this is an important point to consider, because it points to potential roadblocks beyond the more obvious outright resistance toward the establishment of a more vivacious and broader culture of educational innovation. Practical considerations can act like an invisible net that capture the energy and spirit that carry dramatic potential, rendering it fractured and enervated. Nonetheless, practical considerations cannot be ignored or merely canceled out, so they'll have to enter the solution space as well for this complex problem.