Storytelling In Engineering Education

Abstract

Storytelling has a long tradition. In education and psychology, stories support learning and cognitive development and are an inquiry method for eliciting folk knowledge. In organizational and professional settings, stories are being used to facilitate change and innovation. A common thread is that stories are an effective tool for eliciting insider knowledge, engaging communities of learners around shared practices, and building new knowledge. We have been exploring the use of storytelling in engineering education. One aspect of our work is conducting research on pathways (stories) for becoming interdisciplinary engineering education researchers. Another aspect of our work is using stories to make visible what we as a community are learning about engineering education. In 2005 we designed and implemented an interactive session at the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference called "Communities in Practice -What are We Learning". The goal of the interactive session was to make visible and shared what we as a community are learning -a form of knowledge that is typically outside the realm of public presentations and publications. We did this by creating an interactive "poster story forum" on challenges experienced in engineering education research and strategies for success. In this paper, we provide an overview on storytelling, describe our use of stories for building community in engineering education, and summarize results from the evaluation of our interactive FIE storytelling session.