Gary Benenson
City College of New York
This paper describes several efforts which engage engineering students both in teaching and in reflecting on educational issues. In one project, undergraduates serve as teaching assistants in elementary school classrooms, helping teachers support children's investigations of everyday technologies and the urban environment. Many of the participants in this program have expressed strong interest in becoming K-12 teachers. In the second example, graduate and undergraduate engineering students collaborate with the author in teaching an undergraduate course. In a new effort, directed more specifically towards certification, engineering undergraduates will work with exemplary secondary science and technology teachers.
In each of these cases, participants have regular opportunities to discuss and reflect upon their teaching experiences. In doing so, they develop critical thinking skills, participate in the development of innovative programs, and perhaps help to reform educational institutions.
At least at the level of national workshops and conferences, a new paradigm is emerging in engineering education. The new conception sheds the old image of students submitted to narrowly focused lectures and regulated by pencil-and-paper tests. Instead, engineering graduates should be prepared for life-long learning, where challenging real-world problems form the basis for both instruction and evaluation. As a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) Report puts it, ``The process of engineering education should change to use more effective pedagogical approaches and to engage students more effectively in the educational enterprise ... We seek changes that provide improved learning environments including: active learning, collaborative learning; modular learning; research, development and practice experience for undergraduates...''[1]
A related shift in thinking recognizes and values the increased diversity of engineering students. Although ethnic, racial and gender diversity are obviously of paramount concern, variety exists in other respects as well. The traditional assumption was that freshmen enter engineering school shortly after high school, complete the program in four or five years, and then seek employment as engineers. Engineering students now arrive via diverse pathways. Many have experience in related technical, non-technical or other professional employment; and their objectives may include ``careers in K-12 education, public policy, management and health care''[2] as well as engineering. Even for those who do seek employment in private- or public-sector engineering practice, a more inclusive concept of engineering education is called for. A recent National Research Council (NRC) report, for example, calls for graduates who ``have greater intellectual breadth, a strong sense of social responsibility, a penchant for collaboration and a habit of lifelong learning.''[3]
Changes in the curriculum and changes in the nature of the student body are mutually supporting. The following recommendation from the NRC report underscores this point: ``Establish a new culture and a new image for engineering education and practice that is humane and will attract and retain students, with a particular focus on women and underrepresented minorities.''[4] On the one hand, engineering education must reverse its own teacher-centered notion for the instruction of students. On the other, it must help to prepare students for a much broader range of work environments, including K-12 education. This paper outlines a strategy for achieving both objectives: including teaching as part of the undergraduate experience.
Nearly every engineering graduate will have to engage in the education of others during his or her career. Those who pursue an academic career will eventually have a major responsibility for university-level teaching. Many undergraduates will find pre-college teaching an attractive option, particularly in view of shrinking job markets. Even those students who find employment in industry will spend some portion of their time instructing customers, vendors, colleagues and support personnel. Most important, learning to teach provides an excellent vehicle for developing a broad range of competency in communication and collaboration.
The City College of New York (CCNY) has a student body which is uniquely ``non-traditional''. The average age is about 26, nearly every student has a job, about half are foreign-born and two thirds are African-American, Afro-Caribbean or Latino. CCNY is therefore an excellent site for these kinds of experiments. The following sections of this paper will describe three efforts to engage undergraduates in teaching. The first two descriptions are of ongoing projects, in which student involvement in teaching occurred as a byproducts, rather than as the primary goal. The third project, which is scheduled to begin in Fall 1995, is explicitly designed to motivate engineering majors toward careers in education.
Together with Jim Neujahr of the CCNY School of Education, I direct an NSF-funded Teacher Enhancement Project known as City Science Workshop. The goal of the project is to develop strategies for using the urban environment, including everyday technologies,as the source of material for elementary school science. Over the past three years, we have been working with 75 elementary school teachers from 20 schools in Harlem and the South Bronx. We have conducted investigations of both the natural and built environments; and design/technology activities related to structures, mechanisms, locomotion and flight, mapping, and the organization of space and time in the school.[5]
We seek to develop children as inquirers who can make sense of their environments through scientific investigations and as designers who can alter the environment by planning and testing their own interventions. As teacher educators, we want teachers to develop for themselves the same skills we want children to develop, and then to support children's design and inquiry activities. Teachers attend an intensive summer workshop in which they engage in their own investigations of the immediate environment and then support similar work by children from a NCAA summer sports program. The summer experience is followed by academic-year workshops, which consist of further investigations and sharing of classroom experiences.
In implementing City Science activities in their classrooms, teachers require a great deal of support. Most find both the method of teaching and the science and technology content to be unfamiliar. In order to facilitate the transition, City Science has recruited 30 undergraduates, from Engineering and other disciplines, to serve as teaching assistants in the participating classrooms. Their roles are to aid in supporting cooperative learning groups, provide technical assistance and advice, and join the teacher in reflecting on classroom practices and activities. Every teacher in City Science is offered an undergraduate teaching assistant for three hours per week during his or her first year in the program.
However, the teaching assistants also require considerable support, so that they can both further the goals of the project and have positive educational experiences themselves. The college students generally attend a summer workshop with the teachers, as well as separate academic-year seminars, which offer opportunities to reflect on their classroom experiences. The students are also invited to join the teacher workshops and field trips during the academic year. One summer, we took 15 newly recruited students on a field trip to a second-grade classroom, which had already been participating in the project for a year. It was a revelation to them to speak with eight-year-olds about how they made bridges from newspaper, and used a video camera to study the use of playground equipment in the school yard. Their teacher later made a photo display of the visit, which was entitled ``The Experts Teach the College Students''.
One of the undergraduates, Paul Mikolay, was a Civil Engineering major when he worked in the program two years ago, but is now working towards certification as a high school chemistry teacher. His experiences in City Science were pivotal in his decision to become a teacher. He recalls:
``The things about the City Science approach that I found useful were that we were using students' prior knowledge of their own environment, that we tapped into this knowledge and made them aware of it and that students worked in groups on long term explorations. It was revealing to me how students could get excited about an exploration, and take responsibility for different jobs within the group. We were always working with concrete things and then going to abstract representations. Seeing teachers use the City Science approach made me realize that they have the freedom and power within the classroom setting to create something meaningful, despite whatever restrictions are present. That was exciting for me as a prospect for what I might be doing in the future.``For example, I could see that some of the fifth graders were really ready to make abstract representations on paper of things they might build. They wanted the drawings to look like true representations of what they were planning. The fact that they were doing this almost spontaneously shows the power of putting them in a position where they could use their bodies and minds in working a project that had some meaning to them. I realized that had I been the teacher, these students could have really started applying some mathematical thinking in the projects they were doing, and could have begun to use this kind of thinking in general. The potential that I sensed then is part of what motivates me now.''[6]
Paul Mikolay is not an exception. A majority of the 30 students have expressed interest in pursing careers in education, about a third have taken steps to do so and three have already become K-12 teachers. This outcome is all the more striking, because it was an unintentional and unanticipated result of the project, whose primary focus is on in-service teachers.
The new Manufacturing Processes course at CCNY is described in a previous paper.[7] Over the past two semesters, the course has been completely revamped to include laboratory experiences with computerized manufacturing equipment, including a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) lathe, a CNC mill, a Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system, an articulate arm robot and an industrial-grade Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA). Most of this equipment is newly acquired, and none except the articulate arm robot had been used in a course prior to Fall 1994. The tasks of installing hardware and software, learning to use them, and developing course materials could not possibly have been done in time by the two faculty members and one graduate student originally associated with the project.
To deal with this massive development effort, we recruited about 20 undergraduate Mechanical Engineering students. Working in small groups, they interacted with vendors, ordered and/or fabricated accessories and components, learned to use the equipment, wrote tutorials and taught what they had learned to the faculty members. As these students became more and more knowledgeable, it made sense to engage them as facilitators in the laboratory course. During the Fall 1994 semester, two undergraduates, both of whom were registered for the course, and one graduate student served as facilitators in the laboratory. This group expanded to eight during the current (Spring 1995) semester, including six undergraduates: two who are currently taking the course, three whotook it during the Fall term, and one who has yet to take it.
During the first half of the laboratory course, students engage in three two week tutorials, which introduce them to the operation of the articulate arm robot, the CNC lathe and the CNC mill, respectively. There are also demonstrations of the SCARA robot, the CIM system and an injection mold machine. This introductory sequence is followed by an extended project, in which each group selects a piece of equipment, and uses it to implement an original design or investigation. Several of the tutorials and the demonstrations are led by undergraduate facilitators, and these students also participate in review meetings with project groups, read their logs and final reports and contribute to the evaluation of their work. I meet with all eight facilitators immediatelyafter each lab to review both logistical and pedagogical issues. These meetings have at times turned into debates about pedagogical issues such as when to provide information and when to let students learn for themselves, how to assess students' work, how to respond to students' questions, the educational value of each exercises, and how to motivate greater student effort.
One of the facilitators, Edmund Haywood, has been teaching the operation of the CNC mill, programmed using MasterCAM computer-aided design and manufacturing software. He participated in the writing of the MasterCAM Mill Tutorial, and taught it to three different groups of students, along with two other undergraduate facilitators. The tutorial begins with a ``cookbook'' set of instructions showing how to program the machine to mill a pocket with the raised letters ``ME'', for ``Mechanical Engineering''. Students are then asked to perform an exercise which requires them to apply what they have learned: mill a pocket with their own initials recessed, not raised. This excerpt from Ed's journal begins with a description of how he and the other facilitators taught the tutorial to the first of the three groups:
``Instruction to the students started with a brief explanation of what the mill and MasterCAM do. The students had problems following the instructions because they had never seen the software and were not familiar with the terminology being used. Instead ofcausing further confusion and wasting time, we got the students started on the tutorial, answering any questions they had and explaining the concepts as they reached them. This seemed to work a lot better and they seemed to understand the few basic thingsthey did. Near the end of the class, the students were frustrated, mostly due to the fact that they had to understand so much so fast.``After encountering several problems with the first MasterCAM and mill group, the methods and strategy for the second and third groups were altered. First, all the missing and ambiguous parts of the tutorial were changed and deliberate mistakes were added, and methods of recovering from them, so that students would learn how to undo their own errors. Also, the biggest change occurred by changing the instructional method to helping rather than instructing. It seems that the members of the third group benefited the most due to all the things the facilitators learned. Each facilitator took one subgroup of 2 or 3 students. Then we let them do the exercise while watching them. The students were not as afraid to try new aspects of MasterCAM with the facilitator there. We would ask the students questions like what they wanted to do and how they would go about doing it. The students I worked with learned a lot and were able to explore the menu on their own for different ways to do tasks. There was a point when the students wanted to do more than the exercise required just to apply the new things they learned. I believe the best way to help the students is to let them do what they feel is right, but to make sure they know what they did, and what else they could have done.''[8]
After reading a draft of this paper, Ed remarked that this experience has already been very helpful to him in his job as a mechanical designer. When he had to teach a software package to a colleague last year, he became frustrated and eventually did all of the work himself. As a result of his teaching experiences at CCNY, he has found it much easier to share his knowledge with co-workers at his workplace, and has become generally much more confident in his interactions with others. ``I realized a lot of things about myself,'' he said.[9]
The experiences of the City Science project and the Manufacturing Program provide a fortuitous glimpse into the possibilities for engaging engineering students in teaching, but neither project was developed with that goal in mind. Both projects lack any systematic evaluation of the impact on the participating students, and neither has the resources to support students who decide to pursue careers in education. Although both projects placed students in innovative settings, neither focused explicitly on the learning environment for the undergraduates. This section describes a new project, ECSEL Teaching Experiences, which will begin to address these issues.
This project will be funded under the Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership (ECSEL) Years 6-10, which is scheduled to begin next semester (Fall 1995). It seeks to motivate fifteen engineering students to consider careers in education by assigning them as teaching assistants in high school and junior high school classrooms. A key lesson of City Science is that the mentoring teachers must be selected very carefully. As Paul Mikolay put it, ``Since leaving City Science, I've visited a number of traditional classrooms. If I had seen them first, I would have just gotten depressed.'' Five teachers have been selected, who are implementing inquiry- or design-oriented science or technology programs which employ cooperative learning, alternative assessment and project-based approaches. One of these teachers, Alyssa Melnick, was a City Science teaching assistant while she was studying architecture at CCNY. She is now teaching architecture at an experimental junior high school.
Another pre-requisite for a successful apprenticeship program, based on the experiences of City Science and the Manufacturing Program, is that the participants must meet regularly to discuss the pedagogical issues which have arisen. This new program will also involve the mentoring teachers in some of those discussions. A component which was missing from the previous projects is that the mentors will meet beforehand to discuss how the classroom activities might be structured to provide more focused experiences for the undergraduates, and to determine the roles they will play in each classroom. Time will be allocated before the undergraduates arrive to explore these issues, and afterwards, to evaluate them.
From the undergraduates' point of view, City Science provided considerable motivation, but very little tangible assistance to those who decided to seek certification as teachers. A serious mismatch occurred, because City Science was focused on elementary education, while secondary teaching licenses are far easier to obtain by students who have not majored in education. The ECSEL Teaching Experiences project, by contrast, deals with secondary education, and will provide some of the coursework needed for certification. Participants who seek licenses will be provided with information and assistance.
Uri Treisman has said that ``Universities study everything except themselves.'' [10] One of the most disappointing features of academic life is the lack of discussion about educational issues among faculty. Many students, by contrast, are very eager to discuss what they see as the strengths and weaknesses of the educational process, particularly in their own classrooms. In both City Science and the Manufacturing Program, discussions about teaching experiences often turn to the quality of the learning experiences in the courses they are taking.
The students who engage in teaching and reflecting on teaching can offer interested faculty members opportunities to examine and refine our own thinking about education. One of the Manufacturing facilitators, Ossama Othman, has been carrying on a written dialogue with me about my use of alternative assessment:
``It really becomes difficult to know what to expect with non-traditional teaching styles as your own, at least for those who are used to the `old' style. Let me explain... While journals serve an excellent purpose, in the sense that students are forced to review what they have done, and whatever successes, or the lack thereof, have been achieved, I find that my confidence in the knowledge that I may have gained from the manufacturing class to be less than in a class in which I may have received a high grade on an exam.''[11]
Engagement of undergraduates in teaching can benefit the educational process in some very fundamental ways. Not only can the teaching assistants develop much greater ownership of the thought and language of their discipline, but they can also become a bottom-up force for institutional change. Bruffee makes this point in his discussion of peer tutoring: ``Peer tutors can be sensitive to institutional issues to a degree-and to a depth-that many other members of the academic community, faculty and students alike-tend not to be. Even without thinking much about it, some peer tutors will learn collaboratively how to affect and change their academic environment.''[12] The teaching assistants described in this paper generally have more freedom and authority than peer tutors, who are more constrained by the limits set by the professor. As the teaching experiences concept begins to catch on, there may be a profound impact on our institutions.
The participation of many CCNY colleagues, including students, has made this work possible. I am particularly grateful to faculty members Jim Neujahr, Alan Feigenberg and Ben Liaw; Valter Neto, Alyssa Melnick, Paul Mikolay. Alexis Stern and Herbert Seignoret, who were teaching assistants in City Science; and Ossama Othman, Dejan Milentijevic, Melvin Cartagena, Marcus Charles, Aladin Ebraheem, Christine Lacombe, Frantz Jules, Eric Schaefer, Edmund Haywood and Rebecca Wang of the Manufacturing group.