Workshop: From Excellent Teaching to Scholarly Teaching

Following our previous successful workshops, we are pleased to open applications for the sixth engineering education “master-class” workshop, funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, as well the UK’s Newton Fund. Our UK partner institutions in this initiative are the University College London (ranked 7th in the QS World University Rankings) and Aston University.
 
Over a period of 18 months, experts in various aspects of engineering teaching will be travelling from the UK to run a series of two-day residential workshops. These “master-class” workshops will be completely free to attend, and delegates will be provided with free overnight accommodation as well as all meals, etc. There will also be two ECSA CPD points available to those who request them.
 
We are now calling for applicants for the sixth workshop, titled “From excellent teaching to scholarly teaching to scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL): Putting it all to work in your practice”.  This “master-class” workshop will take place on November 13 and 14 at the Spier Wine Estate in Cape Town.
 
The workshop will be facilitated by: 

• Emanuela Tilley – Director, Integrated Engineering Programme, University College London
• Dr Inês Direito – Research Associate, Centre for Engineering Education, University College London
• Prof Jenni Case – Head of Department, Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town

In order for you to gain the most from these workshops, they have been carefully designed to maximise your opportunities to develop ideas, discuss with fellow educators challenges you face within your own practice and investigate ways in which your students can be prepared to work within the engineering community of the 21st century.

This interactive workshop is focused on supporting engineering educators who are keen to develop a scholarly approach to improving teaching and learning in their courses and/or curricula.  Scholarly teaching refers to teaching which is excellent in its impact on students but also broadly informed by the engineering education literature.  To capture the impact of your own teaching and provide narrative through reflection into the public domain is to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning.  

Drawing on their own work in engineering teaching, education research, course and curriculum development, the presenters will offer a broad overview of contemporary innovations in the field, as well as offer very practical suggestions on how to locate your work and gather the necessary evidence for it to constitute scholarship.  Workshop participants will identify an area where they would like to develop their work, and will engage practically to develop a plan to accomplish this.

Emanuela Tilley is the Director of the Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP) in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She returned to academia after working as a consulting engineer leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams in the design and testing of the world’s most unique tall towers and structures. Emanuela is experienced in developing curricula which embeds problem-based, research-based and design-based learning into engineering education.  Effective assessment and feedback systems for design-based engineering education and understanding the student learning experience of context rich, authentic problem/project-based learning pedagogy are the focus of her current research.

 
Inês Direito is Research Associate in the Centre for Engineering Education at University College London. As a psychologist working in engineering education research for more than ten years, her main interests are in gender and diversity; skills development; and the role of non-cognitive factors (such as grit, mindset and motivation) on students’ experience and engineering pathways. She has worked in several science and engineering education research projects with multidisciplinary and international teams.

Jenni Case is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in the USA.  Prior to her appointment in this post she was a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where she retains an honorary appointment.  With more than two decades of undergraduate teaching and curriculum reform work, she is also a renowned researcher in engineering education and higher education.  Her work especially on the student experience of learning as well as on topics around teaching and curriculum, has been widely published.  

We have limited the number of delegates who will be accepted to participate in each of these two-day workshops to 25 to ensure that each delegate gets the benefit of an intimate engagement with the presenters and their ideas. Should you wish to participate in this prestigious opportunity, please contact Hayley Mackrill on Hayley.Mackrill@uct.ac.za and apply to participate.
 
Applications close on Friday 2nd November and we will let you know directly thereafter if you have managed to secure a spot in this workshop.