"Give me every idea you have": Building with improvisation in engineering education

Abstract

We engineering educators, as a community, are very interested in active learning pedagogies. Active learning is a very good match to engineering education in part because it is authentic to the working lives of engineers, and thus has potential to help our students to better transfer their education to their post-baccalaureate lives. Yet active learning has a significant psychological barrier to wider adoption. The transition from a controlled, scripted, and familiar classroom experience (i.e. the traditional lecture) to an unscripted, collaborative in-class learning experience is often difficult for instructors and students alike1. Active learning's practice literature and scholarship of teaching sometimes provide ideas about how to manage an unscripted class. Yet we lack a useful language for discussing and methodically improving the social, unpredictable component of our interactive classrooms.