Towards a Learner-Centric Approach in Engineering Education

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Practice and Development

The month of April is approaching, and if you are an academic in the UK, your head of department will soon be knocking on your door with your allocated teaching for the next academic year. Not so many years ago teaching allocation was just a tick box exercise for the well-established academic. More often than not, you would be re-allocated the same course modules as the previous academic year, and for the greater part, there would be no further planning required. Your lecture notes for the module will already be available, and all you needed to do was to remember where you last deposited them come the start of the academic year in September.

In those bygone days, university learning and teaching was lecturer-centric. All the lecturer needed to do was to show up in lecture sessions and “profess and expound” his (typically it was a he) knowledge of the subject matter to a largely dumbstruck class. Outside of lectures students would then try to study and master what the lecturer had attempted to pour out on them. Their most reliable study guides were the past exam papers which served to show them what to commit to memory and what to discard.  It was a matter of teaching to the exam, and learning to the exam. Anything that was not examinable was quickly discarded. For the student, learning amounted to little more than committing theoretical facts to memory and mastering the technique of regurgitating the material back to the lecturer in the end of module exams. Those were the days.

Now things have changed. Employers have finally become convinced that they don’t really need knowledge parrots in their workforces. They need productivity, and not eloquent parroting. Theoretical facts alone are no longer enough for graduates to justify their place on the company payroll. What is needed is theoretical mastery, and the ability to apply that knowledge to meet the company’s commercial and social objectives. From day one, the graduate needs to actively apply the knowledge gained at university to real-life working contexts. For engineering graduates this means that they have to competently integrate their knowledge with input from other engineers and other professionals to come up with technically viable systems that meet specified commercial and environmental targets. To do so, the competent engineering graduate has to demonstrate sufficient ability and flexibility in re-adapting, re-moulding and re-applying knowledge to ever shifting commercial and social contexts. So, today, the big question for engineering academics is no longer: Do I have my lecture notes ready for the coming year? It’s now: How can I impart knowledge and understanding to this incoming batch of students so that they are able to actively apply it to new contexts, and after doing so, to be able to re-assess their current knowledge base and adapt it accordingly? And that’s not an easy question. But whoever said true learning was easy?

In a lecturer-centric environment the teaching of an engineering module falls into three neat categories. These are the lecture, where theory is transmitted to the student; the tutorial, where students work through theoretical examples to prepare them for the exam; and, lastly, the laboratory session, where students do standard activity-based exercises to verify concepts learned in class. There is no problem solving, something which practising engineers need to do on a day to day basis in their workplaces. Again, there is no analysis, and neither is there any context-driven selection of theory, two techniques that underpin engineering design. And this is problematic, as the bulk of engineering practice is dominated by analysis and design. Is it any wonder therefore that one of the bitterest complaint about engineering graduates is that they are incapable of applying the knowledge they acquired in their studies to practical work situations?

How then do you make learning worthwhile for both your engineering students and their future employers? Conceptually, this is very simple. Integrate your teaching of theory, with practical activities specifically designed to make students think about what they are learning, and applying that knowledge to authentic work contexts. In practice, this can be quite difficult, especially if you still subscribe to the age-old lecturer-centric idea that students learn all they need to learn from your lectures alone. Given that the standard module typically has 30 to 40 contact hours during which all teaching has to be done, this is a near impossible feat to accomplish. It’s now time to adopt the learner-centric approach. Let students be masters of their own learning, and use your lectures to guide the learning process instead. Use your lectures to signpost and to pace your students through the material, and bring in authentic work-related activities to focus your students’ learning. Remember, in the specification of typical university modules, students are expected to engage in 150 to 180 hours in personal study in each module. Ask your students if they ever do so, and the answer is largely negative.

For discipline specific modules, this may be easy to implement. You could think of a fairly exhaustive group project which students have to do throughout the duration of the course. In electromagnetics this could be the design of a novel antenna. A series of short projects focussing on modelling of electromagnetic fields in various configurations can be used to build up the necessary theoretical competence for students to design a full- fledged antenna system. Of course one thing immediately becomes apparent: for the students to analyse and model the various antenna components they have to be familiar with the software typically used for such work. Hence by using this learning delivery method, it also becomes necessary for students to become familiar with the software and methodologies used by antenna designers. Students therefore learn to master and apply specialised engineering theoretical knowledge to authentic work situations.

What if you are tasked with teaching fundamental concepts like engineering mathematics, electrical circuit principles, or principles of mechanics? The same approach can be adopted, but in this case the emphasis should be on using simulation and modelling software to support the teaching of theoretical concepts. For example, students can gain critical insights into the behaviour of physical systems by modelling the basic equations and formulae that are introduced in subjects like engineering mathematics and mechanics. In addition, the essential features of more complex systems can be abstracted and modelled by the basic theories introduced in the various courses on engineering fundamentals. System modelling using such software as Matlab can be used to inform physical laboratory work, thereby greatly enriching the delivery.

To sum up, a learner-centric approach might appear to be daunting, especially when measured against the laissez faire lecturer-centric approach of yester year. But it is what students and employers now need, and it opens up more ways in which we can engage with our students. Most importantly, it is ultimately the most fulfilling way of approaching learning and teaching in higher education.

Engineering Skills and Demand: No More Time for the Blame Game

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Policy and Advocacy, Practice and Development

For the past 10 years the Institution of Engineering Education (IET) has been compiling and publishing an annual survey on the skills and demand for engineers by industries in the United Kingdom. This year’s survey makes particularly depressing reading for the Engineering Education sector, particularly those of us in higher education. According to the survey, the issues and concerns that have been raised by industry regarding the quality of engineering graduates have remained consistently the same over the entire decade. These issues include the lack of business acumen, and the lack of practical experience and leadership and management skills. In short, year in, year out, engineering graduates are demonstrating an appalling lack of the “soft” and “work ready” skills necessary for them to take on productive roles in industry.

Over 50% of the surveyed employers say that engineering recruits fall short of the expected standard. Two thirds say that this now constitutes a threat to the viability of their businesses.  More damning, however, employers think that that current engineering graduates lack the sense of autonomy and responsibility needed in business, something which is generally viewed as a basic outcome of a well-rounded university education.  In addition, two thirds of the surveyed employers also feel that the UK education system, as it is currently constituted, is not able to deliver the skills required for technological change. More ominously, industry strongly feels that most of our undergraduate engineering programmes are out of date, and a large chunk of our programmes seriously lack the required technical depth. By and large, industry feels that our programmes are failing to develop the practical skills they need. In short, ten years of surveys, and ten years of recommendations, and what do our undergraduate engineering programmes get: A huge indictment – Not Fit for Purpose.

Most of us in higher education may feel that this is industry doing what it is best known for – putting the blame for everything relating to education and training on higher education. On the side of industry, ominous dark whispers are now making the rounds: is university education necessary for the development of industry? Some are even thinking of going it alone, citing the likes of famous university dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who went on to build  Microsoft and Apple respectively.

Of course, this is neatly forgetting that the outcomes of these two geniuses would have come to nothing without the culture of cooperation and cross-fertilisation that exists between universities and the technology industry in the United States. Which brings me to the point I want to make: What does the consistent failure of UK engineering higher education in the eyes of industry, and the attendant blame game actually mean? Simply this, there is a shocking lack of cooperation between higher education and industry when it comes to engineering education. Granted, there is some cooperation between a few academics and individuals in industry, but this is not a collaboration dictated by strategic concerns on the part of both universities and industry. It is opportunistic, and lacks the necessary policy and infrastructural support to make any lasting impact.  And the losers are the universities, industry itself, and the unfortunate undergraduate students, and, as a consequence, the entire UK economy.

Am I laying it a bit too thick? I don’t think so, and even the Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning (CAVTL)  has come to the same conclusion – it is time industry and the education and training providers  collaborated in delivering vocational education. The CAVTL was set up in 2012 with a remit to identify ways to improve vocational education and training in the UK. In its report, the CAVTL recommends that “vocational teaching must be characterised by a clear line of sight to work, and the VET system should operate as a two-way street (their emphasis).

By  “a clear line of sight to work”, the CAVTL means that learners must be able to see “why they are learning what they are learning, understand what the development of occupational expertise is all about, and experience the job in context” (CAVTL 2013, pp. 7). To achieve this there must be genuine collaboration between industry and training and education providers (CAVTL 2013, pp. 7).  And, according to the CAVTL report, this can only happen if employers stop being just customers of vocational teaching and training, but move up and become actively engaged at every level in the creation and delivery of vocational programmes.

So what can we learn from the ten years of surveys on the engineering skills and demand for engineers by UK industry. Simply this, it’s no longer time to play the blame game. Instead, it’s now time for engineering schools and industry to work collabatively in the development and delivery of up to date, high quality, excellent engineering undergraduate programmes. And who knows, Silicon Valley, Shanghai, the Ruhr Region, and Tokyo will soon be knocking on our doorsteps.

References

The Institution of Engineering Technology (IET). (2015). Skills and Demand in Industry – 2015 Survey. Retrieved from the IET Website: http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/education/skills2015-page.cfm

The Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning (CAVTL). (2013). It’s about work…Excellent adult vocational teaching and learning: the summary report of the Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from Excellence Gateway Website: http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/content/eg5937#sthash.r8GaHa9l.dpuf

The Research-Teaching Nexus: Have we reached the tipping point?

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Practice and Development

Last week the Higher Education Academy quietly published a 65-page report entitled “Rewarding educators and education leaders in research-intensive institutions” by Dilly Fung and Claire Gordon. It was duly covered in the Times Higher Education, and caused a few mandatory murmurs on Twitter, but so far as I can see, it was soon forgotten by most of us in higher education. Perhaps I may be wrong and this is not the case. It may be that people are still chewing on the report’s contents and trying to make sense of it, just as I am also trying to do. After all, shocking news has a numbing effect and takes some time to register. However, whatever it is, reading through the report left me with a strong suspicion that at this point in time, UK  higher education might be tipping into a new era where the balance between teaching (or education, as the report authors prefer) and research is going to be sharply redressed.

Briefly, the report publishes the findings from a study set up to identify the challenges that research-intensive institutions have in ensuring that educators and education-focused leaders are appropriately rewarded for their work. To get answers to this question, the authors interviewed the pro vice chancellors (or their equivalent) responsible for education in ten Russell Group universities. In addition they also conducted two focus groups with Heads of Education Development in Russell Group universities, and also had an interview with an executive search consultant with experience in facilitating senior academic appointments.

By and large the main findings of the study collaborate the small but growing literature on education-focussed academics. This includes the fact that research is so highly esteemed in higher education that to all intents and purposes, what counts for reward and progression in higher education is performance in research. In fact, the research culture within research intensive universities is so deeply ingrained that there still exists in many institutions a distinct imbalance in academic promotion criteria. For instance, in some institutions covered by this study, on the research side, calibrated sets of criteria have been developed, but with respect to teaching and learning, these tend only to be cursorily mentioned or are even omitted.

What is interesting, though, is that this study clearly  reveals that “times are changing”  and higher education institutions need to be more “explicitly orientated towards valuing education alongside research” if they are to survive. The reasons for this are very clear. Over the past twenty years the government has introduced a series of policy papers, and put in place a raft of measures, including funding formulae, aimed at refocusing attention on the quality of teaching and learning in universities. The first salvo was the Dearing Report in 1997 which explicitly signalled that government was serious about reforms in teaching and learning in universities. This was followed by a series of policy papers which culminated in the opening up of the higher education market, and the introduction of student fees.

Most recently, in its 2015 Green Paper, the government proposed linking the student fees that universities can charge to their performance in learning and teaching as assessed through a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) that is still to be clearly defined. Suddenly, funding streams for teaching and learning are no longer guaranteed, just as base research funding is no longer guaranteed following the introduction of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).As the authors point out, it is now “highly likely that the TEF will fundamentally affect the external incentive structure in which UK HE operates” and this will in turn “affect the internal dynamics of institutional employment and career structures.”

Moreover, students are becoming increasingly savvy, and national and international league tables have become important considerations in their choice of a university place. In short, it means that a university department, or even an entire university, can rise or fall on the basis of a university league table. Research performance does contribute to a university’s position on league tables and on its reputation, but as one pro vice chancellor pointed out: “Unless we make the education offer … consistent with our research standing and our global brand, we have a long term existential problem.”

In short, in my opinion, the most important finding from this study by Dilly Fung and Claire Gordon is that it is no longer business as usual in higher education. Learning and teaching now count, and universities have to do something about this if they are to guarantee their survival in this brave new world.

When is an Engineer not an Engineer: A Study of Engineering Practice?

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Engineering Education Research

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8976-6202

My Christmas reading this winter was Trevelyan’s study of engineering practice in Pakistan and Australia (Trevelyan, 2010).  At the root of this study is the question: “What is the nature of engineering work, and what are engineers’ perceptions of their work?” Trevelyan’s findings suggest that engineers, both novice and experienced, hold a narrow view of what they consider to be appropriate engineering work. This view is shaped at university, and it is largely at variance with the bulk of engineering work carried out in practice.

Trevelyan analysed the practice of both experienced and recently graduated novice engineers, and, in line with previous studies, he found that engineers spend around 60% of their working time communicating with other staff. This places social interaction at the heart of engineering practice. The engineers in the study do not see it as such, and instead, they believe that in their daily work practice, they “hardly do any engineering” at all. When asked to define engineering work, most of the engineers believed that engineering involves doing “calculations, design-work and technical stuff”.

Both the novice and experienced engineers use a similar binary divide to categorise their work. In both their eyes engineering practice comprises mainly solitary technical work, which they value highly, and mainly mundane work involving communicating and collaborating with other people, which they find unfulfilling.

In fact, most engineers assigned to non-design work actually believe that they are not worthy of the title “Engineer”. For example, a novice QA engineer said of himself: “I am not an engineer, I don’t work in engineering.”  Similarly, an experienced software engineer said of himself: “I’m not an engineer any longer, I am a project manager for my company. I don’t write code and I don’t design software anymore.” When asked to define an engineer, the novice engineer believes that engineers are those who do the “hard core design and modelling which I don’t do.” Similarly the experienced software engineer believes that “you lose the respect of a lot of people who think that you’re an engineer if you are seen not to be writing code or doing any software engineering.”

The study also indicates that even senior management share similar beliefs on who is and who is not an engineer. For example an engineering manager at a mining and refining company that employs a wide variety of people with engineering skills had this to say: “We only have 55 engineers in this company.  … They do analysis for us.” However, in spite of this, he readily acknowledges all the other people who needed engineering training and experience to effectively do their work. This includes production supervisors, managers, production schedulers, the quality assurance team, and maintenance leads. Consequently, the engineering manager effectively relegated all the technical work that is non-analysis or non-design to an inferior status, even though it is critical to the whole engineering process.

This study therefore suggests that engineering practice is a socially enacted practice that is more than technical problem solving and design. However, practising engineers tend to frame their identity only in terms of problem solving and design. This identity is consistent with how engineering is defined in university, and is at variance with actual engineering practice. It is therefore apparent that the relationship between engineering practice and education needs to be revisited.

References

Trevelyan, James (2010) ‘Reconstructing engineering from practice’, Engineering Studies, vol. 2, issue 3, pp. 175 – 195.

2015 in review

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Reflections

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Engineering Education Research – Whither the UK?

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Engineering Education Research

As I have confessed in some of my previous blogs, I am unashamedly committed to Engineering Education. I like the best for my students, and I believe that it is an obligation for every engineering department to offer its students the best education possible.  However, I am also a realist, and I recognise the detrimental impact of the Research Excellence Framework on learning and teaching. The money is currently on research, scientific research that leads to technological innovations, and it makes academic sense to focus on research as opposed to teaching. Nevertheless, I remain hooked to Engineering Education Research, and am inspired by its potential to transform Engineering Education.

The case for improving Engineering Education within the UK and beyond is well documented[1]. First, sufficient numbers of students need to be channelled into engineering so as to provide the human resource for the technology-based 21st century economy[1].  More students need to gain access into   Engineering Education, and progression rates need to be raised by reducing the number of students who drop out. In addition, both industry and higher education need to reduce the leakage of qualified graduates into non-engineering careers.

Having a large number of entrants into engineering careers is not sufficient by itself. The quality of the education offered should be such that students are motivated to learn about engineering and to aspire to pursue engineering careers. This minimises talent leakages, and also works as a powerful recruitment tool for new students as more potential students get to hear about engineering through word of mouth. Not only that, the Engineering Education of the 21st century needs to produce work-ready graduates. This means that engineering departments need to adopt learning and teaching approaches that equip students with the necessary technical and soft skills needed by employers.

Producing an Engineering Education system that meets the qualitative and quantitative requirements outlined above is not easy. To begin with, apart from superficial changes, Engineering Education has been remarkably conservative. As in the 1960’s, Engineering Education is still dominated by didactic, teacher-centred approaches to teaching. The lecture method is still dominant, and the expected role of the teacher is still to instruct the students and to give them the necessary facts. In turn, the role of the students is to passively accept the teacher as the expert, and to commit the knowledge into memory without questioning. Apart from introducing new innovative, student-centred, experiential teaching methods, a cultural change amongst both the academics and students is needed. Clearly, knowing the “why”, “what”, and “how” of educational change is not a trivial task. This requires time, effort, and investment in Engineering Education Research (EER).

As Henderson et al [2] suggest, implementing innovation in Engineering Education  requires well researched change strategies that involve long-term interventions, lasting a semester, a year, and longer, and that take into account the prevailing  values and belief systems within the target institution.  This therefore calls for well-resourced EER strategies.

Given the clearly enunciated socio-economic benefits of improved Engineering Education, one would expect that academics are falling over each other trying to embark on EER. There are 162 universities in the UK,  and of these, 108 currently offer engineering and technology undergraduate programmes [1]. You would be expecting a pipeline of funding to be flowing into EER, and, at a minimum, one would expect at least half of these universities to have well established EER research groups.  Sadly, this is not the case.  A 2013 survey of EER researchers [3] suggests that in the UK, EER is mainly carried out on an individual basis  by teaching and learning staff.  There is hardly any dedicated research staff or students. The survey also shows that 65% of those undertaking EER estimate they spend 20% or less of their time on this activity, which means that EER is still an academic hobby, and not a serious research undertaking as in the USA and Australia.

Simply typing in the phrase “Engineering Education Research Group” into Google quickly confirms the hobby status of EER in the UK. Out of the 110,000,000 search results, only five UK based EER research groups show up. It seems all EER research is taking place “across the pond” as it were. And this casts doubt on our commitment to Engineering Education as a nation. We are talking the talk, and not walking the walk. Should we not be following the age-old advice: “Put your money where your mouth is”?

References

[1]          EngineeringUK, “Engineering UK 2015: The state of engineering,” EngineeringUK, 2015.

[2]          C. Henderson, A. Beach, and N. Finkelstein, “Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, vol. 48, pp. 952-984, 2011.

[3]          J. Shawcross and T. Ridgman, “Publishing Engineering Education Research, HEA Academy Working Paper,” Higher Education Academy, 2013.

 

Not just Another Brick in the Wall – The Importance of Building Personal Connections with Students

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Practice and Development

A blog for the times. Learning should not just be about dispensing content to students. Learning is about making personal connections with students and creating an environment where both academics and students share in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

katharinehubbard's avatarthe academic teacher

When I first started writing this blog I chose to illustrate each post with a cartoon. The cartoon on my home page shows the ‘classic’ view of university teaching; the Academic Teacher at the board, presenting facts to a sea of faceless students. I have written before on the role of lectures in Higher Education teaching from an educational perspective, highlighting their flaws and the need for more active approaches to learning. However, perhaps the more damaging aspect of this image of education is the reduction of this diverse cohort of students to a homogeneous mass. In doing so it becomes easy to assume their needs are identical and to loose any sense of the individuals involved.

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Towards Effective Educational Leadership

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Practice and Development , , , ,

Introduction

Teaching is still very much the poor cousin of research within UK higher education. However, change seems to be on the horizon, and investing in teaching excellence may soon be a matter of life and death for universities. The tectonic plates started shifting with the publication of the Dearing Report  in 1997. Since then higher education teaching has refused to disappear from the public eye. For example, university teaching league tables that were once the scorn of academics are now firmly well established.  In addition, the National Student Survey, which was only introduced in 2005, now has a level of prominence almost equalling that of the Research Excellence Framework.  To add to this, the government has recently started talking about a teaching excellency framework for higher education, and has released a green paper on the future of UK higher education. It’s therefore quite clear that university teaching will never be the same again.

Unlike universities, schools have been the focus for teaching improvements for a very long time. Hence it makes sense to learn from what has worked, and what has not worked in our schools. This can then be used as a starting point to beginning the task of improving learning and teaching in higher education. In this blog I make an initial start by discussing some of the lessons that I have gleaned from my former school principal. Sadly, he passed away on the 3rd of November 2015, but the various obituaries that have been published in his honour neatly summarise why many people, including former students and teaching colleagues, came to regard him as an influential educator.

Father Keble Hugh Prosser

Father Keble Hugh Prosser was the principal of my alma-mater, St Augustine’s Secondary School, Penhalonga from 1964 to 1990. His death sparked a major outpouring of grief, not only in Zimbabwe, but also in countries as far afield as the UK, Canada, Australia, the USA and South Africa. His death and subsequent funeral set social media ablaze, and led to obituaries in esteemed media outlets, including the UK Guardian newspaper and the widely respected Zimbabwe Financial Gazette.

Some Lessons from his Life and Work

Establish and build a tradition of teaching excellence

Keble Prosser built upon the tradition of teaching excellence at St Augustine’s Mission, and by the time of his retirement the name of St Augustine’s had become synonymous with teaching excellence all over Zimbabwe.

Make it your job to know your students

Keble Prosser personally knew each and every one of his students. He kept track of their performance in class as well as their behaviour outside of class. This enabled him to intervene and carry out corrective action before things got out of hand.

Keep track of teaching and student experience

Keble Prosser kept up to date with all the teaching taking place within the whole school. He did this through constant dialogue with both teachers and students. This ensured that teaching improvements were implemented on a continual basis.

Build effective learning relationships with students

Keble Prosser took a keen interest in students’ personal circumstances and would step in and assist whenever this was necessary. He would offer counselling to students facing personal issues, and often paid the fees of those students who fell into financial difficulties.

Build effective working relationships with teaching colleagues

Keble Prosser put time and effort into building good working relationships with his colleagues. This helped to foster a team that shared common values relating to teaching excellence and student experience.

Mentor and develop your junior colleagues

Keble Prosser empowered his colleagues, and mentored them to the extent that most of his colleagues went on to become successful heads of schools in their own right. This ensured that aspects of teaching excellence pioneered at St Augustine’s Mission were propagated to other schools as well, thereby raising the general standards of education nationally.

Ensure that your local community benefits from your educational institution

Keble Prosser ensured that the local community around St Augustine’s benefited. This was through employment, setting up a quota system for local pupils to get into the school, and turning the school into a focal point for the whole community within which they had a voice in its governance and direction.

Protect the school environment at all costs

Keble Prosser’s tenure coincided with the Zimbabwe civil war. He established rapport with both sides in the conflict, and this ensured that both warring sides largely regarded the school as a conflict-free zone. He risked his life in standing up for the school and its community, and the result was that St Augustine’s Mission became only one of a handful of schools that remained open throughout the war.

Conclusion

As educators living in non-wartime zones, we may never have to sacrifice life and limb in pursuit of our teaching ideals. However, even during peace-time we often need to guard against powerful interests that daily threaten our teaching practice. This may include unhelpful government legislation, competing business interests, and narrow-minded, populist political agendas. Speaking up may cost us our careers, but keeping silent may consign humanity to a bleak and hopeless future.

 

 

Peter Greene: Why I Am Not Quitting

Prof Abel Nyamapfene Reflections

For most people in the teaching profession, teaching is a calling. We are not in it for the salary (which is on the low side), neither are we in it for the prestige (again on the lower end) – we are in teaching for the love of teaching.

dianeravitch's avatarDiane Ravitch's blog

Peter Greene observes that there is a burgeoning number of “I Quit” letters by teachers. It has become a genre of its own. But he wants the world to know that he is not quitting.

Here is how his “I don’t quit” letter begins:

Dear Board of Education:

Just wanted you to know that I am not going any damn where.

Yes, a lot of people have worked hard to turn my job into something I barely recognize, and yes, I am on the butt end of a whole lot of terrible education policy, and yes, I am regularly instructed to commit educational malpractice in my classroom.

But here’s the thing– you don’t pay me nearly enough for me to do my job badly, on purpose.

I’m not going to make children miserable on purpose. I’m not going to waste valuable education time on purpose. I’m not going to teach…

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Help! Is there an Engineer in the house?

Prof Abel Nyamapfene For the Student , , ,

I love those old Victorian movies, especially those with a romantic bent. Invariably, the movie plot involves a scene where a young lady swoons, and faints, usually during a ball. Someone tries to revive her, but with no apparent success. Suddenly a dashing young man comes over and takes charge. The young man is a medical doctor, and soon the young lady is well again. And everyone is forever grateful to the young medical doctor. Even today, such scenes happen in real life. For instance during the recent Rugby World Cup held in England, a rugby fan had a heart attack, and this would have been fatal had it not been for a ‘hero’ doctor who miraculously appeared and gave him the breath of life (BBC News, 23 September, 2015).

But who has ever cried out for an engineer in a moment of need? Certainly not my wife, or my sister, or my  brother, or my two daughters.  Certainly I can’t think of any ordinary person ever expressing a sudden and dire need for an engineer in their life. And who has ever seen an engineer, anyway? Of course there must be engineers around in the community. I, for certain, am one of this elusive breed of professionals, but people see us and look through us without ever knowing that we exist, or worse still, without ever giving a second thought on our role in society. We engineers are there, but we remain invisible. Faceless, unknown, unacknowledged, we go through our lives. Just like spies, someone would say. But even spies are known in Hollywood.  Who has never heard of James Bond? And we do not normally call them spies, anyway. They are intelligence officers, and most of us are quite certain we know what they do in their day to day work, and they are certainly an intelligent lot.

But what about engineers? Certainly there are many films which showcase a lot of exotic technology, including the James Bond movies, but it’s almost impossible to get a film where an engineer is a hero, or where the word  engineer is explicitly mentioned. One post on the Internet can only think of the movie Apollo 13, and notes: “it is the very rare film where the engineers are heroes.”  So, we can safely conclude that even Hollywood is unaware of the existence of this profession called engineering.

But surprisingly the handiwork and brainwork of engineers abounds everywhere. Just take a look at the skyscrapers in our cities, and the cars, buses and trains that brought us to work today, and even the computer systems that are now indispensable for any modern-day work activity. Yet even these artefacts bear no reference at all to their creator – that elusive engineer, quietly, and mysteriously working away in the background. Even when a brand new car is launched there is scarcely any mention of the engineers who carried out the important work. Even when Land Rover launched its Range Rover Evoque series, the only person specifically named was the creative designer, former Spice Girl band member, Victoria Beckham. Where are the engineers who developed the vehicle’s superb transmission system, or worked night and day developing its unique aerodynamic features? Just silence, just a blanket silence.  Even when it comes to buildings, we hardly ever hear of the structural engineers, and the building services engineers who together design the infrastructure that make the building a reality. All we hear of is the building’s architect.  For instance, just across town is London’s answer to the seven wonders of the ancient world. This is the Shard, London’s highest building. And only one name springs to mind – that of Renzo Piano, the building’s architect.  Where are the engineers?

But once every year we try to remember the engineers in our midst. For example, in case you didn’t know, this week, 2 Nov to 6 Nov 2015, is Tomorrow’s Engineer Week. This is a week set aside to raise public awareness of engineering, especially amongst the youth and children. During this one week individual engineers, engineering organisations and educational institutions will compete to tell our children all the good things about engineers. Universities will organise sessions for school children where they show them how to do intricate things with maths and science. Newspapers will outdo each other telling us that engineers are found everywhere, even in professional tennis, Formula One, and in all the other things that we have come to take for granted. Then, after one week, we go back to our deafening silence. The elusive engineer goes into hibernation, waiting to be wheeled out once more into the public domain this time next year. Like a religious ritual which everyone seriously participates in, but which no one believes in. Thus goes the engineer, always necessary, ever voiceless, ever elusive, a figment that resides in the dark recesses of the public mind, except for that one week called Tomorrow’s Engineer Week.