Instructional Strategies for Incorporating Empathy in Transdisciplinary Technology Education

Abstract

a MA in Graphic Design from Savannah College of Art & Design. His research focuses on the role of student experience in informing a critical design pedagogy, and the ways in which the pedagogy and underlying studio environment inform the development of design thinking, particularly in relation to critique and professional identity formation. His work crosses multiple disciplines, including engineering education, instructional design and technology, design theory and education, and human-computer interaction. Dr. Marisa Exter, Purdue University, West LafayetteMarisa Exter is an Assistant Professor of Learning Design and Technology in the College of Education at Purdue University. Dr. Exter's research aims to provide recommendations to improve or enhance university-level design and technology programs (such as Instructional Design, Computer Science, and Engineering). Some of her previous research has focused on software designers' formal and non-formal educational experiences and use of precedent materials. These studies have highlighted the importance of cross-disciplinary skills and student engagement in large-scale, real-world projects.Dr. Exter currently leads an effort to evaluate a new transdisciplinary degree program which provides both liberal arts and technical content through competency-based experiential learning. Terri S. Krause, Purdue UniversityTerri Krause has a BBA from the University of Notre Dame, with 30 years experience in business and industry; and, a MSEd in Learning Design and Technology from Purdue University. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue, is a Graduate Research Assistant, and is serving on the evaluation team for a new transdisciplinary studies program that incorporates real world cross-cultural challenges into a values-based instructional environment with the goal of reaching practical and sustainable, ethical solutions.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Instructional Strategies for Incorporating Empathy in Transdisciplinary Technology Education AbstractIn the past decade, there has been an increasing focus on the ethical content of designed artifacts, including the ways in which engineers and technologists are responsible for considering ethical issues relating to the end user or context for which they are designing. Creating sustainable postsecondary ethics education has been an increasing focus in engineering and technology education scholarship, with the goal of developing students' ability to understand and make ethically-sound design decisions through evidence-based instructional strategies.In this study, we focus on the ways in which a transdisciplinary educational experience might encourage the development of empathic ability by documenting the activities of undergraduate technology students as they sought to develop an off-the-grid toilet for the "developing" world. Students were exposed to multiple instructional strategies that encouraged them to reconsider their notion of "difference" as it might apply to t...

Action on Diversity: A Content Analysis of ASEE Conference Papers, 2015–2016

“…Similarly, open-ended surveys were also used as a form of collecting qualitative participant responses. Some unique forms of data sources were online blogs (Jafer, 2015), online forum posts and emails (Blaser, Steele, & Burgstahler, 2015), student artifacts (Gray et al, 2016), panel proceedings (Genalo et al, 2015), and reflective journals (Brewer et al, 2015). Through these examples, we see that in order to contribute to these divisions and the conversation on diversity we can look beyond the conventional methods of obtaining information and incorporate novel data sources.…”

Revealing Students’ Ethical Awareness during Problem Framing

“…), or lack the empathy to fully understand the needs of the diverse user populations they are designing on behalf of (Gray et al . ; Gray et al . ; Walther et al .…”

Moving Towards Individual Competence From Group Work in Transdisciplinary Education

“…Some of this lack of clarity around potential outputs (and the alignment of a problem statement to these outputs) was resolved in productive ways through student engagement in research. Students' research skills had been strengthened in previous semesters with nominal growth 34 , but in this new semester, students were beginning to see how this additional awareness of complexity may require work prior to making artifacts (which was their area of comfort). Joel illustrates this awareness of the impact of research on the design process, and the need to execute these elements to get to an appropriate problem that could be solved in the following quote-he reveals the shift in mindset that came with utilizing user research to foster a better understanding of the problem he was trying to solve: One instructor saw this student's role in facilitating this process as being "a lot like new dissertation students"-moving a student "to something [they] could actually accomplish instead of this giant thing, which is not a bad thing by any means, but let's find the piece of that you could actually do something with" (Kelly-instructor; EndofSemesterInterview).…”