Systems Thinking, Community Engagement, and Collaborative Change Within and Beyond Engineering Education

Friday, October 28th at 12pm (VIRTUAL)

Please Register:
https://bit.ly/3BPSSOu

All attendees receive a FREE BOOK!

Abstract: This seminar explores intersections between systems thinking, community engagement, and collaborative change within and beyond engineering education by discussing three big questions:

What skills do we (and our students) need to address some of the complex, intractable, systemic challenges that we care about? How would we know what learning looks like?

What are some of the central values, imperatives, or habits of mind that comprise community engagement? Where do we fit in to address issues we care about?

What factors influence our capacity to collaboratively enact change? 

The seminar will be grounded in brief findings from research projects engaged with these core questions and will invite discussion about how we can prioritize these activities within engineering education and the opportunities for broader impacts.

Bio: Dr. Jake Grohs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member to both Learning Science and Technologies and Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics. Grohs currently serves as PI of two and co-PI of two NSF-funded education focused grants which involve partnering with different stakeholder groups on continuous improvement or collaborative change (e.g., K12 teachers and administrators, university engineering faculty). His primary research interests focus on systems thinking, including how individuals reason through complex ill-structured problems, how educational environments develop systems thinking skills, and how collaborative groups might apply systems thinking to enact positive change.