Dynamic Framings in Novel Engineering Design Activities

• In Event: Reconceptualizing the Learning Spaces Created by Elementary Classroom Engineering

Abstract

In engineering design, knowing how to “make sense of uncertain design situations” (Schön, 1983, p. 40) is at the heart of the discipline; engineers in practice collectively bring structure to design situations by organizing, negotiating, and coordinating multiple aspects of the task (Bucciarelli, 1988; Schön, 1983; Stevens, Johri, O’Connor, 2014; Suchman, 1987). In classroom settings, however, students are more often given well-defined engineering tasks (Jonassen, 2014) and are tested on specific content knowledge or design processes (e.g., Massachusetts State Frameworks, 2012). I argue that students’ abilities to navigate “messy” design situations, i.e., those that are open-ended and ill-structured (Jonassen, Strobel, & Lee, 2006), are central to their development in engineering design. In this presentation, I show how a group of third grade students coordinate multiple kinds of epistemic activities in their pursuit of an optimal design solution.

The presented study is part of a larger research project entitled Novel Engineering. In Novel Engineering activities, students identify problems that occur in children’s literature and engineer solutions to help story characters. The activity is inherently open-ended and ill-structured: students scope problems that occur in stories and use classroom materials to engineer solutions. Previous findings indicate that students’ tacit sense of what is taking place in the activity – their framings (Goffman, 1974) – interact with their participation in disciplinary engineering design (Author, under review).

In this presentation, I discuss the complex dynamics that emerged in our fine-grained examination of student framing. I describe our development of a coding scheme to capture the nuanced dynamics of student framing on a turn-by-turn conversational basis throughout their design experience. In discussing findings, I show how students’ framings involve their coordinated attention their fictional clients’ needs, the organizational requirements of their classroom, and the technical aspects of their design solution. More specifically, I show how students collectively organize epistemic activities, such as researching the setting to understand the client's’ needs, constructing and testing prototypes, evaluating designs, and iteratively revising their design, to meet multiple criteria. The data indicate that students were not engaging in these activities by following a specific design process or predetermined set of practices; instead, their need to engage in these activities emerged in their pursuit of an optimal solution.
The presented findings have implications for attending to and supporting student engagement in disciplinary engineering design. Like engineers navigating a messy design situation, the students made in the moment assessments of the design situation and responded strategically by organizing engineering design activities. These findings warrant a shift in engineering education, from measuring students’ abilities to memorize design process steps to supporting students in navigating those steps in purposeful ways.

Authors

• Mary McCormick, Tufts University

• Jessica Watkins, Tufts University