Warner Wednesday Talks: Socially Engaged Primary Engineering Education – Engineering Spaces and “Where the Wild Design Problems Are.”

Presenter: Alexander Stiller, Postdoc at Bielefeld University

Arik and Topçu (2022) found for education that pre-established open-ended questions, problem scenarios or stories are the dominant approaches in the engineering design process. Despite big steps in taking up social aspects in epistemic engineering practices (Cunningham et al., 2023), pre-determined design problems are post-hoc situated to social context(s). Although findings related to design problems for primary school are available (McFadden & Roehrig, 2019), there has been little research into the relevance of these challenges in primary engineering education to local social contexts and students' experiences (cf. Tan et al., 2019; Topçu et al., 2024). In this talk, Alexander will share his work in establishing a social or hybrid space as a starting point to elicit social aspects of learners' diverse experiences.