Let’s recalibrate our educational attitudes

Activity: Talk or presentation › Talk or presentation at a workshop, seminar, course or other meeting

Description

Designing education for meaningful engagement with society.

As educators we naturally teach new knowledge capable of meeting societal challenges, whether it be in the domains of health, resilient cities, digitalization, and energy, to name but a few. Of course, there’s a strong desire to ensure that our students are fully equipped with the latest tools to allow them to contribute to society.

But what of societies’ role in the educational process? Can we better extend our academic confidences to involve society in more meaningful and mutually beneficial ways? Is a recalibration, a slight tweak, of our current educational practices in order? Would that be as impactful as finding totally new knowledge and methods?

Like me, can you identify scenarios in your own courses where students seem better equipped in offering answers to society, but less equipped in conversing with society to ask what the questions are? Education has made huge strides forward over the last decade, but could it be that we don’t value engagement enough? A value that would help our young professionals in identifying why, and for whom, they are innovating in the first place?

In this Meet & Eat, Craig Martin will discuss the challenges and benefits involved in recalibrating an educational design studio to better engage students with communities. He will describe his latest project in the Buitenhof neighbourhood of Delft that took place in September 2022.

Challenges:
• Can you teach students open-mindedness?
• How to teach students the value of societal engagement in a technical landscape?
• Can we better overlap the expectations of society and academia?
• Is what we know as educators, more important that what society needs?

Topic:
• Community engagement & co-creational methods with students.
Period21 Mar 2023
Event titleTeaching Academy - In the spotlight
Event typeSeminar
LocationDelft , NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Educational Ecotone
  • Societal Challenges
  • Engagement
  • Research Fatigue
  • Transdisciplinary
  • Societal Skills
  • Future Engineers

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