Umeå University's logo

What stories can we tell to help us rethink engineering education futures? How can we imagine what practices are possible? How can we transgress what hasn't served us, other critters, and the planet? These are questions that inspired us to develop a workshop in which we used collage-making to visualize narratives on current states and possible futures of engineering education. Grounded in Holland et al.'s (1998) theory of figured worlds and Lönngren and Berge's (2024) concept of emotional positioning, the workshop explored figured emotional worlds operating in and envisioned for engineering classrooms. In this paper, we critically examine reflections of activities from during the workshop and its outcomes to ask the overarching question, how can engineers and engineering educators interact with the figured worlds of engineering to (re)imagine our work, our futures, and ourselves? To answer this question, we consider the workshop a case through which we 1) map out the context and progression of the activity, 2) share examples of collages and their stories, and 3) offer and explore multiple dimensions of critical reflection, thematically analyzing the collages and discussing their use in how they prompted us to imagine, tell, and transgress stories about current and possible futures of engineering education worlds.