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Sustainability transformations involve wicked issues characterised by an absence of definite problem framings or solutions. Engineers play a crucial role in addressing such situations. However, engineers often lack the emotional capabilities to navigate open-ended and complex issues adequately. In this paper, we focus on the emotional challenges in engineering students' learning on wicked sustainability issues. We explore how emotional scaffolding can support engineering students in co-creating new ways of handling wickedness via expansive learning. Using a combination of narrative description and systematic mapping of emotional interactions, we analysed video data from student group work on wicked sustainability issues. We identified seven types of educational challenges that triggered expression of a wide range of emotions, and observed diversity in how enacted emotions hindered or enabled learning. We concluded that emotional scaffolding must be viewed as a system, and educators should focus on creating favourable emotional learning environments rather than attempting to micromanage students' emotions through generic interventions. To support in navigating the complexities of emotional scaffolding for sustainability learning, we propose a classification of scaffolding intents building on leverage point thinking. It ranges from shallow adjustments to learning environments to deeper transformations of the emotional logic underpinning teaching and learning.

This chapter discusses the relationship between reason and emotion in engineering ethics education (EEE), focusing on psychological and sociological perspectives. It identifies some factors that have led to emotions not being adequately considered alongside reasoning in the research on, or practice of, engineering ethics education. The chapter argues that reason and emotion are essential to consider at multiple levels of social analysis, including the individual, interpersonal, and societal. To aid researchers and ethics teachers in better reflecting emotion alongside reason in EEE and better conceptualizing these connections, the chapter draws upon several integrating concepts. Ultimately, it suggests that EEE must engage more with sociology – and with moral and social psychology – to better incorporate emotions into research and practice.

Accelerating digitalization actualizes the importance of secondary science education in developing students’ digital abilities, such as retrieving and appraising scientific information online. However, there is little research and policy guidance on the purposes and challenges of teaching digital abilities in science classrooms. This article reports on a mixed-methods study that explored how upper secondary school students in Sweden reasoned about their digital abilities when searching for scientific information online. The results reveal three key themes: the role of scientific terminology in improving search accuracy, as students noted how precise terms yielded more credible results; the need for deliberate search strategies, including using questions or keywords depending on the context; and, the impact of selective exposure, as students became aware of how personalized results could reinforce existing beliefs and limit perspective diversity. Based on these insights, we introduce the concept of ‘digital versatility’ and outline a model, Digital Versatility in Online Searching (DVOS), that integrates essential digital abilities (source literacy, information abilities, and search abilities) with scientific subject knowledge. The DVOS model provides guidance for teachers in instructional planning and offers a basis for future research on digital abilities in science education.

The aim of this workshop is to leverage participants’ expertise and creativity to collaboratively develop (a) a better understanding of the diverse roles that material artifacts can play in positioning processes and (b) new methods for analyzing these roles empirically. Positioning researchers have recently begun to explore how people use artifacts to position themselves and others. In this workshop, we will draw on post-humanist theories to explore how artifacts become intertwined with human action and communication and positioned together, as human-material entanglements. As a concrete example, we will analyze a short video sequence in which five engineering students engage in small group learning while one of the students eats from glass bowl. We will explore how the student-bowl entanglement is positioned and how it, in turn, positions other students and artifacts. Based on the concrete experiences of analyzing the student-bowl positioning, we will then address three more general methodological challenges: (1) How can we analyze positioning processes involving human-material entanglements? (2)What implications arise for positioning theory more broadly and definitions of central analytic concepts? (3) How can we develop multimodal transcriptions of video data for analyzing and representing positioning processes that involve human-material entanglements?

This workshop uses Holland et al.’s (1998) theory of figured worlds and Lönngren and Berge’s (in print) theory of emotional positioning. We explore figured emotional worlds operating in engineering classrooms and imagine possible futures.  

Framing concepts: Figured worlds (FW) are historical, social, and cultural interpretations of practices that constrain actions and interactions and distribute individuals in social roles across landscapes of action. Used as a lens, FWs let us explore past and current practices and imagine possible futures. In this workshop, we transgress disciplinary and theoretical silos and imagine possible FWs of intersecting and transcending spaces where engineering, education, and social justice meet. Importantly, play is a central avenue through which individuals negotiate with, re-imagine, and change FWs. We actualize play through the concept of playful learning (Nørgård, Toft-Nielsen & Whitton 2017). 

Emotional positioning: Positioning describes the process of assigning rights and duties to individuals. Emotional positioning centers 1) using emotions to position self and others and 2) positioning self and others in terms of emotions (Lönngren and Berge in print). 

Workshop Structure: We illustrate framing concepts with examples from our research before using magazine cutouts to construct collages representing current emotional positioning within engineering classrooms and desired future emotional positioning participants wish to create. In groups, we discuss our collages, synthesize ideas, and close by collectively imagining ways moving from the present into possible future. 

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. J., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press.  

Lönngren, J., & Berge, J. (in print). Positioning, Emotions, and Emotional Positioning. In M. McVee et al. (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Positioning Theory (pp. 1–17). Routledge. 

Nørgård, R. T., Toft-Nielsen, C., & Whitton, N. (2017). Playful learning in higher education: developing a signature pedagogy. International Journal of Play, 6(3), 272-282.

This conceptual paper contributes to emerging conversations on the meaning of materiality and embodiment in positioning processes. We demonstrate how the positioning of an artifact, a banana, can become analytically inseparable from students’ positioning during small-group interactions.Methodologically grounded in multi-modal analyses of socio-material positioning processes, we empirically root this study in 23 seconds of video data, displaying a group of five engineering students in a project-based sustainability course. We ask (1) how artifacts become positioned with people as sociomaterial entanglements and (2) how artifactual positioning contributes to transforming abstract concepts into concrete understanding. Our analysis follows an artifact’s entanglement with students’ positioning in learning situations in processes of first- to second-, and third-order positioning. More concretely, drawing on the artifactual materiality of the banana, students move from an abstract level of understanding the concept of ‘social pressure’ in the context of Swedish fika to a concrete and embodied example of how social pressure operates for everyone and themselves. Mapping this process empirically and theoretically, we visualize how artifactual positioning facilitates learning, and we suggest multimodality as a methodological tool for further theory development and empirical research.

Background: The study of emotions in engineering education (EEE) has increased in recent years, but this emerging, multidisciplinary body of research is dispersed and not well consolidated. This paper reports on the first systematic review of EEE research and scholarship. Purpose: The review aimed to critically assess how researchers and scholars in engineering education have conceptualized emotions and how those conceptualizations have been used to frame and conduct EEE research and scholarship.

Scope/Method: The systematic review followed the procedures of a configurative meta-synthesis, mapping emotion theories and concepts, research purposes and methods, and citation patterns in the EEE literature. The review proceeded through five stages: (i) scoping and database searching; (ii) abstract screening, full text sifting, and full text review; (iii) pearling; (iv) scoping review, and (v) in-depth analysis for the meta-synthesis review. Two hundred and thirteen publications were included in the final analysis.

Results: The results show that the EEE literature has not extensively engaged with the wide range of conceptualizations of emotion available in the educational, psychological, and sociological literature. Further, the focus on emotion often seems to have been unintentional and of secondary importance in studies whose primary goals were to study other phenomena.

Conclusions: More research adopting intentional, theorized approaches to emotions will be crucial in further developing the field. To do justice to complex emotional phenomena in teaching and learning, future EEE research will also need to engage a broader range of conceptualizations of emotion and research methods, drawing on diverse disciplinary traditions.

This workshop will be an open space to share and discuss possibilities to act for fundamental, perhaps radical, change in engineering education – towards an education that not only fosters technological excellence, but also contributes to fundamentally transforming society towards more sustainable ways of living. We will engage participants in collaborative learning and co-creation activities to develop new knowledge, agency, and networks for educational change. To stimulate discussions, we will first introduce two approaches that are commonly used to drive transformation: humor and activism. Then we will introduce the “yes and”-technique which has previously been successfully applied for organizational development in higher education. This technique stimulates creativity and co-creation and will allow participants to explore and visualize unexpected possible ways for change as well as concrete suggestions on what more we can do to drive transformation in engineering education.