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Session Description

This special session invites participants to consider how to develop students’ transversal
competencies in engineering education. Despite broad agreement about the importance of transversal skills for engineering students, such as collaboration and communication skills, from instructors, industry and accreditation boards (ABET, 2023; ENAEE, 2023; Kolmos and Holgaard, 2019; Passow and Passow, 2017), there are complexities in how they can be operationalized and importantly whether students are actually acquiring relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes. This session will assist educators to adopt innovative and effective strategies to address the required attributes in their courses.

This special session provides strategies to facilitate the explicit and deliberate integration of transversal skills in engineering courses. Participants will be introduced to a 3-phase framework (Isaac et al. 2023), which illustrates the importance of conceptual knowledge, declarative knowledge, and meta-level cognitive and emotional processes. Empirical work has shown that engineering instructors often overlook some of these key aspects required by students. The session will replicate the approach of this model, including case examples and micro-experiential learning situations (with LEGO blocks) that enable low-stakes experimentation and rapid feedback. Participants in this workshop will:

1. Reflect on their own practices for addressing transversal skills in their teaching
2. Improve their understanding of how to teach transversal skills
3. Analyze a case example on collaboration skills

The non-traditional format of the special session (i) facilitates the integration of experiential and interactive activities and (ii) provides an opportunity for more deeper reflection and discussion on transversal skills to support participants’ ability to transform their own practice. The session will conclude with some evaluation data from students and the sharing of resources to allow participants moderate the workshop in their own contexts.

Moderated by

1. Mr. Yousef Jalali

Speaker

1. Mr. Yousef Jalali

   EPFL

   Yousef Jalali is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Learning Sciences at EPFL. He received a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. His current research involves developing and documenting the impact of tangible activities focusing on particular transversal skills. He collaborates with EPFL Teaching Support Center (CAPE) to offer workshops linking research findings with educational practices.