Greetings from a lurker who is seeking advice, sage, jocular, or otherwise
:)
My name is Jason Foster and I recently graduated with a Master's degree in
Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo
(http://www.systems.uwaterloo.ca). My thesis was titled "Understanding and
Improving Undergraduate Engineering Education." I am now trying to map out
a plan for acquiring a PhD, with the eventual goal of teaching, and
researching the teaching of, undergraduate engineering students. Hopefully
some of you will be able to provide some guidance and suggestions as I
develop this plan.
My area of interest lies at the intersection of design, systems, complexity,
and engineering. My focus (or "angle" if you prefer) is on how teaching
and learning takes place, and can be enhanced, within and among these
different areas. Over the last 6 months, this mailing list has discussed
in detail the topic of design, and has touched on issues of systems (via
the work of Peter Checkland), complexity, and engineering. Accordingly I
hope that you might be able to point out gaps in my assessment of my
situation and avenues I can follow to develop my plan.
If I had to summarize, perhaps unfairly, my findings as I have tried to
develop my plan, it would be as follows: there don't seem to be organized
research communities devoted to the discipline-specific pedagogy of any of
my areas of interest. This is not to say that there aren't people,
research groups, and funding bodies devoted to, for example, engineering
education. However those groups do not offer degrees in engineering
education. Similarly finding individuals who have published extensively in
the journals devoted to engineering education who have also supervised
students with engineering education as their focus has been extremely
difficult. The situation with respect to complexity and systems education
is that the notion of a discipline-specific pedagogy does not appear to
exist. If anyone is researching this topic, I haven't been able to find
them.
My questions for the list follow from the summary just given:
- Is there a researched (or even identified) discipline-specific pedagogy
of (engineering) design? If so, where would one go to find it?
- Is there a community of researchers focusing on the discipline-specific
pedagogy of design? If so, where are they hiding?
- Are there institutions that offer research degrees in the
discipline-specific pedagogy of design?
- Is there a community of researchers focusing on the intersection of
design, systems, complexity, and engineering?
- More broadly, what would you do in my shoes? :)
Any assistance, advice, pointers, etc. would be gratefully appreciated.
Hopefully you can expose some blind spots in the approach I have taken to
my search.
Jason Foster
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