Understanding a Studio Environment: A Complex System Approach to

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Understanding a Studio Environment: A Complex System Approach to a Community of Practice Ashley Thompson, Brook Sattler, and Jennifer Turns University of Washington, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract – This paper looks at characteristics of a studio environment and the ways in which engineering pedagogies can begin to incorporate them. Using inductive coding, student reflection forms, in which students described their experiences with a studio environment as they developed professional portfolios, are analyzed. Based on our findings and using communities of practice and complexity theory as a theoretical lens, we describe how portfolio studios engage students in key elements of learning. In particular, the analysis of students’ reflection forms demonstrates that students validate each other’s experiences through peer interaction, engage in the negotiation of meaning, and make sense of their own identity. The paper provides insights into studio environments and their role in engineering education, an explanation of our research methodology, the results, a discussion of the results and the ways in which they relate to communities of practice and complexity theory, and a conclusion focused on possible implications. Index Terms – Complexity theory, Communities of practice, Studios, Portfolios INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND LITERATURE Engineers are often asked to work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams when working in industry. Despite ABET standards and the call for a new type of engineering education [1-3], typical engineering pedagogies often miss opportunities for providing these types of environments that foster teamwork and collaboration [4, 5]. In an effort to address these issues, researchers and educators have begun to explore the benefits of studio environments [6, 7]. The benefits of a studio environment can be far-reaching and implemented for a range of uses, but most commonly studios are used for design practice. Studios have been most widely used in the arts [8, 9] and provide opportunities for peer-feedback, group discussion, and teamwork. While much research exists on the benefits of studio environments in the arts, and to a lesser extent in engineering [8-12], there is a need for further research on the characteristics studio environments can provide for creating a more holistic approach to engineering education. In our current work, studios are used as an environment to encourage collaboration and peer-feedback as students create engineering preparedness portfolios based on their previous experiences. While portfolio development is of

interest in engineering education research and was the purpose (and subject matter) of these particular studio sessions, this paper does not focus on the benefits of portfolios (see [13-15]). Rather, this work focuses on the complex nature of the studio environment itself and the types of things students are saying about their experiences working in such an environment. Completing reflection forms during studio sessions, students responded to a series of prompts about moments of surprise, frustration, reward, and enlightenment while working on the portfolio on their own and while participating in the studio. In this study, we seek a deeper understanding of the characteristics of the studio environment, drawing from complexity theory and communities of practice as a way to inform our findings and understanding of the studio environment. In the following sections, we explain our methodology, explore the inductive results, elaborate on those results using communities of practice and complexity theory to help explain findings, and conclude with possible implications of the study. METHODS In this study, we investigated students’ experiences with the studios by analyzing data collected with reflection forms each session. Junior and senior engineering students (n = 63 participants) from a range of engineering disciplines participated in a not-for-credit studio that consisted of five sessions over a ten week period. The reflection forms, which were administered at the end of each session, gauged students’ experiences working on the portfolio at home and during the session by asking four questions: 1) What was Surprising, 2) What was frustrating, 3) What was rewarding, and 4) Were there any aha moments? This format allowed students to provide as much or as little reflective responses about the studio and their experience as they felt comfortable. Each student contributed 36 responses during the studio, resulting in over 2,000 responses (n = 63 participants times 36 responses per student) from students during three studios. Their responses were then transcribed into an Excel spreadsheet so that they could be more easily studied and analyzed. Performing an inductive analysis [16-18], the first two authors explored the data for emerging themes. Specifically, we analyzed the data based on the following research questions:

978-1-61284-469-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE October 12 - 15, 2011, Rapid City, SD 41st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F3H-1

Session F3H 1. What is the nature of student responses? 2. What is the prevalence of categories of responses? Because this was an exploratory study, the first two authors coded the data based on the emergent themes. We only analyzed the results where both coders agreed, which may underestimate the magnitude of the prevalence of such responses. In reporting the results, we looked at the percent of participants that mentioned issues of peer review, construction of identity, and negotiation of meaning. RESULTS In the results, we present the emergent themes and the nature and prevalence of student responses. The categories of the results are listed in order of their prevalence, based on the percent of students that discuss issues of peer interaction and feedback, issues related to identity, and grappling with the construction of meaning, within their reflection forms. I. Emergent Themes Students’ reflective responses ranged from issues of creating a portfolio to identifying self as a particular engineer within a specific discipline. As we analyzed the data, three themes emerged: (1) emphasis on peer interaction and feedback, (2) importance of negotiating meaning, and (3) issues related to the construction of identity. As students situated themselves amongst their peers through participation in the studio sessions, they reflected on the importance of uniqueness in the context of peer interaction and collaboration, they placed an emphasis on negotiating meaning and sharing knowledge, and they developed a sense of belonging to particular fields of engineering while valuing the diversity of others. In these ways, students seem to have gained an understanding of the more holistic nature of engineering in general. II. Nature and Prevalence of Peer Interaction and Feedback Most prominently, students discuss the rewards of peer interaction and feedback. Specifically, 73% of studio participants mentioned issues related to peer interaction and feedback at least once during the quarter. Variations of “getting peer feedback” were the most prevalent, especially when students talked about what was rewarding while working on their portfolios during the session. Some students indicated specific aspects of why peer review was rewarding, which included feedback as validating, motivating, and inspiring. One student explained that the feedback influenced her creativity— “communicating with a partner to get some new ideas; listen to other people's ideas.” Often students internalized this feedback as means for improving the portfolio and self. For example one student emphasized that “talking to other engineers [during the portfolio studios] and comparing

positive aspects of each other's papers” was rewarding. Students learned from each other’s suggestions and often helped each other better articulate one’s preparedness. One student explained that “it was useful hearing everyone else’s experience and suggestions. These suggestions gave me good ideas of how my own portfolio and evidence support claims.” Another student stated, “Contributions from other people helped me widen my understanding of certain things.” Comments referring to peer feedback were not just related to gaining feedback from peers. Many students indicated that it was just as rewarding to give feedback as it was to receive it. For example, one student explained the peer feedback was rewarding because he was able to “read what types of things other people wrote” while “getting some feedback on what worked and what didn’t in the personal statement.” Students’ comments were highly positive, and few students had negative things to say about peer review. What negative things they did have to say were about lack of time for more peer review, wanting more quality peer review, or receiving competing feedback about how to improve their work. For example, one student complained that he “only [had] time for one peer review” when asked what was frustrating during the session. Even when students did not have much to say in response to their experiences with the portfolio on the reflection forms, they still mentioned their appreciation for the opportunity to engage in peer interaction and feedback, whether it was receiving advice or simply getting to know other students in their field. For example, one student expressed an appreciation for “meeting a new person to network with in session,” while another student explained that he found “the group sharing and getting to know more EE (electrical engineering) students” to be rewarding. Most responses related to peer-feedback were evoked during the studio sessions (i.e. were in response to questions about working on the portfolio during the session). When working on their portfolio in their own time, students had fewer comments about peer feedback and interactions. When students did refer to those types of interactions (while working on the portfolio at home), they commented on the significance of peer feedback as influencing revisions and/or decisions that they made to their projects. III. Nature and Prevalence of the Negotiation of Meaning While student responses focused mainly on peer interaction and feedback when responding to questions concerning their experiences during the session, the value of shared knowledge was also quite prevalent. Comments related to the negotiation of meaning, or shared knowledge, were coded for 65% of the studio participants. In this study, shared knowledge, which is closely tied to Lave and Wenger’s definition of negotiation of meaning, refers to the act of creating a common understanding of an experience


Session F3H through the negotiation of at least two students’ understanding of a concept [19]. In these studios, shared knowledge and peer interaction are closely related since each session is characterized by peer feedback and interaction. There is an emphasis on the duality of peer interaction—both by giving and receiving feedback, students develop a sense of the importance of peer interaction as well as the importance of shared knowledge. One student demonstrates this overlap of sharing ideas and peer feedback: “After reviewing others' portfolio, I learned some new aspects of adding artifacts.” It seemed that students began to notice this importance of shared knowledge toward the end of the studio, typically after the third session and becoming more prevalent in sessions four and five, implying that as the studio progressed, students developed an appreciation for their peers’ unique perspectives. When students mentioned things related to shared knowledge, it was often in the form of communicating with others, gaining an understanding for the diversity of their peers, and exchanging ideas for ways to improve their projects by seeing others’ portfolio. This deeper understanding of peers helped students brainstorm ideas for their own portfolios. Often this insight elicited new creativity within students, which was based on viewing their peers’ examples. For example, students commented on the usefulness of peer interactions in helping create ideas and knowledge—“that others could see what some artifacts said about me that I didn't think of”; “being able to see what others have completed and use lateral thinking”; and “being able to see other people's work and their perspective on this portfolio studio.” Another student explained that “seeing other’s annotations makes [her] learn new stuff [since she] got really good feedback.” These examples demonstrate the overlapping nature of negotiating meaning and peer interaction. As students entered the process of negotiating meaning and sharing knowledge, they seemed to gain an appreciation for their peers’ positive qualities. When asked what was surprising, one student exclaimed, “How smart some of my classmates are,” indicating an appreciation for their knowledge and a respect for their peers. Another student indicated his surprise that “the peers in this [studio] are really creative.” One student expressed her appreciation for a peers’ advice: “When [it seemed] hard to give evidence on experience, someone suggested [using] pictures or recommendation letters. I believe they will help.” In using shared knowledge and contributing to the process of constructing meaning, students also grappled with issues of how they fit in and how they are unique (e.g., self compared to others), which is closely tied with one’s identity in general. IV. Nature and Prevalence of Identity In general, within the context of the portfolio studio, students dealt with many issues of identity (e.g., past

experiences, comparing self to others, etc.). Issues related to identity were mentioned by 40% of studio participants at least once during the quarter. These comments typically happened when students worked on their portfolio on their own (at home). Many students mentioned identity in relation to gaining and/or developing a sense of belonging to engineering as a profession. One student commented on how the process helped him better identify with engineering—“the process of gathering info and putting it together helps me visualize my future as an industrial engineer.” Another student explained that “writing the professional statement – reflecting on EE (electrical engineering) and how I fit into it” was rewarding while working on the project at home. Other students recognized how they were better prepared for engineering than they had originally thought—“maybe just how much better I know myself now than when I wrote my personal statement to get into the CS (computer science) major a year ago.” Few students commented about identity related issues during the session; rather, they made most comments in reference to their experiences with the project while working at home. In reflecting on past experiences in relation to one’s engineering preparedness, students were “thinking about why [they were] in engineering” and the qualities they possessed that made them qualified to be an engineer. They began comparing themselves to each, creating a shared notion of engineering identity. When students discussed issues related to identity as an outcome of the studio session, they often did so by describing belonging to a group of engineers within the studio. For instance, one student described a specific discipline and aligned himself with this discipline: “my group member is in my electrical engineering class.” As students began to identify with a field, they began to recognize the need to remember a broader audience— “suggestions for how to rewrite some of my text, [because] much of my portfolio did not make sense to people outside my department.” DISCUSSION As presented above, the following themes emerged from the data and are listed in order of their prevalence: peer interaction and feedback, grappling with the negotiation of meaning, and issues related to identity. In this section, we provide a general overview of the communities of practice theory that we use to interpret the results, then we look at each theme as aligned with communities of practice, and finally we use complexity theory to understand the results as a network of overlapping systems. I. Interpreting the results through Communities of Practice Building on social learning theory [20], Lave and Wenger explain that four elements–community, identity, meaning, and practice–are necessary when describing a community of practice, which support and occasion shared knowledge and


Session F3H learning [19, 21]. In reviewing the results of our study, it became evident that the emergent themes aligned with three of these four elements, namely: community (peer interaction and feedback), identity (issues related to identity), and meaning (negotiation of meaning). In terms of the fourth element, it seems that the studio itself can be seen as “practice,” in which students come together to work on a common project under the umbrella of engineering school in general. The three themes that emerged from the “practice” of the studio are investigated below, where we expand on their alignment with theory.

the studio environment seems to have a stronger inclination toward the type of support and structuring that students need in order to successfully engage in peer interaction and collaboration. The studio provides facilitated opportunities for peer interaction where students are encouraged to join the conversation of their peers, developing a better sense of the community that Lave and Wenger discuss as key elements to learning.

II. Community—Engaging in peer interaction and feedback

It is important that studio environments foster team work and collaboration, negotiation of meaning, and the act of creating a shared knowledge or repertoire while centered on a central practice or subject. When Wenger talks about meaning, a particularly salient part of it is negotiation [19]. Specifically, Wenger defines meaning as (1) negotiated by the “interaction of two constituent processes,” (2) developed through our lived experiences in “social communities and active involvement in social enterprises,” (3) a process of reification – “giving form to our experiences by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness,’” and (4) existing as a duality in which “participation and reification must be considered as a pair” [19]. Within the studio, students began to negotiate meaning through several processes. In one manner, students grappled with their understanding of engineering identities by aligning with certain peers and seeing some studio peers as “other.” Still, some students struggled to make sense of their own identity as an engineer in more general terms by reflecting on previous experiences while at home, deciding whether or not they seemed to fit their understanding of what it means to be an engineer. Students became actively involved with their social enterprise by becoming a part of the studio and fully engaging with their peers in the form of peer feedback while others used peer interaction to develop ideas through brainstorming. The studio environment occasions opportunities to engage in the negotiation of meaning through peer interaction—this is a key element to the studio environment. The peer feedback process is a negotiation of meaning, involving ongoing participation by a diverse group of students, who are negotiating shared and individual meanings about what it means to be prepared to be an engineer. By looking at each others’ portfolios and having other students look at their own, students developed a clearer, and co-created, sense of what it means to be prepared for engineering. Reification in the context of the studio is the process by which students develop a shared and co-constructed understanding of what it means to be a prepared engineer— taking an abstract concept and negotiating a shared understanding. It is often true that most students would agree that engineering is the application of math and science to problems. While math and science are important foundations, their importance are often elevated over other

Becoming a part of the social phenomena of learning is crucial to developing a sense of community [19, 20, 22]. Social learning theory explains that a key part of learning is the social nature within which we learn and as such there is a constant intermixing of ideas. Specifically, community of practice theory posits that a community is defined by the presence of mutually engaged participants (i.e., students), a joint enterprise (i.e., University College of Engineering), and centered around a shared repertoire (i.e., working on a project within the studio) [19]. As seen in the reflection form responses, students placed a very high value on the opportunity to interact with their peers and to give and receive feedback. In this way, students voluntarily engaged with their fellow peers, creating new friendships and developing an appreciation for their peers’ diversity, a crucial step in the development of engineering students [23]. By allowing students from all departments of the College of Engineering to participate together within the studio, participants were able to identify themselves as a joint enterprise when they entered the studio on the first day. Interestingly, students began to develop their own micro-communities as the studio progressed based on their affiliation with departments within the college. Therefore, the studio environment seems to align itself as a Community of Practice. Within a studio setting, it seems intuitive that most participants would be centered on a shared repertoire – in our case it was creating a portfolio. In more traditional courses, it seems obvious that a central theme would exist – often times the course title provides such an overarching goal (i.e., to learn a subject). What the studio provides—distinct from traditional courses—is the opportunity for students to frequently engage in peer interaction during studio sessions. Often in traditional courses, peer interaction is limited to out-of-class activities with little guidance from instructors. When students are engaged in activities outside of class it is often in the form of group projects where tasks are of the “divide and conquer” nature [5]. Smith et al. explain, “Many faculty who believe they are using cooperative learning are, in fact, missing its essence. There is a crucial difference between simply putting students in groups to learn and in structuring cooperation among students,” [4]. Therefore,

III. Negotiation of Meaning—Creating shared knowledge


Session F3H important skills, such as considering broader contexts and developing lifelong learning skills. As students participated in the process of creating a shared understanding of what it means to be a prepared engineer, they began to break away from the oversimplified notion of the engineer as math and science and began to encompass a broader definition of engineering as creative, diverse, etc. IV. Identity—Grappling with issues of identity Wenger explains, echoing Albert Bandura, that “learning is, in its essence, a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing,” [19, 20]. Community should help to define learning [19]. Allowing students to see themselves as part of the community is crucial in developing an identity that is closely tied to their practice [24]. Doing so enables students to engage more fully in the conversation surrounding engineering identity and preparedness. While it is important for students to develop an identity that is closely tied to a sense of belonging to a community, they should also be able to remain distinct in who they are and how they can contribute to their community [19, 25]. Through the lens of communities of practice, student responses, which were coded according to the notion of identity, are closely related to students’ ability to see themselves as part of the engineering field. Many students began to align themselves with a particular discipline (e.g., electrical engineering, industrial engineering, and computer science). While students began to develop this sense of identity that was closely tied to their particular degree, they maintained a sense of individuality and uniqueness. In particular, students began to identify their own strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, they began to see how their collaborative skills could strengthen their projects by capitalizing on each other’s stronger qualities. In this way, students began to develop a positive sense of identity in relation to their community—realizing their contributions to their peers, and likewise, their peers’ contributions to their own projects. In our studio, students’ responses about identity were most noted while they were working at home, indicating that the subject of the studio may be the reason for identityrelated comments on the reflection forms. However, it seems reasonable that, when centered on a different subject matter within a similar environment that fosters reflection and peer interaction, similar outcomes may occur. IV. Complexity Theory as an alternate explanation Wenger explains that “clearly these elements are deeply interconnected and mutually defining,” when referring to community, identity, meaning, and practice [19]. Complexity theory helps to explain the overlapping of elements.

Educational research has pointed to complex systems theory as a means for understanding the engineering learning environment [25-28]. It explains that certain elements must be present in order for a complex system to exist. Davis and Sumara identified a non-exhaustive list that helps indicate a complex system at work in an educational context; it includes: large number of agents with rich, nonlinear, and neighboring interactions; history dependent; and opportunity for positive and negative feedback loops [25]. Using this list, it is possible to view the studio as a complex system, which is dependent on the collaborative environment itself as well as the interaction of students as agents. As described in complexity theory, we can look at the students as being a large number of agents which are interacting during the studio sessions. During the sessions, students have the opportunity to work with a number of different peers, each with their own history. As they bring their own, unique experiences with them to the studio sessions, students’ histories impact the types of interactions that they have—helping to explain the overlap between negotiation of meaning and peer interaction. As students enter into the conversation of negotiating meaning and sharing their knowledge with their peers through feedback and interaction, they impact other students’ sense making while other students in turn impact their understandings of what it means to be an engineer. This helps to explain why negotiation of meaning and identity related responses overlap. As students begin to categorize themselves with others and associate with a particular field of engineering, the emergent nature of the studio environment is elucidated. The results demonstrate the emergence of many complexity theory principles within the studio environment. Further, the above indicators of a complex system at work (e.g. large number of agents; history dependent; and feedback) help provide a better understanding of the results based on the inherent overlap of themes related to peer interaction, shared knowledge, and identity. The rich interaction of the neighboring themes demonstrates their interconnectedness and helps us to understand why each element of communities of practice (e.g. peer interaction, negotiation of meaning, identity, and practice) is important in occasioning the emergence of knowledge and fostering learning. CONCLUSION While the portfolio studio is unique in that it was a not-forcredit course and centered around the construction of a professional portfolio, a studio environment that fosters reflective practice and allows for students to work together to solve problems may have similar affordances. This research encourages us as engineering educators to think more deeply about ways in which students engage in critical issues of communities of practice in a studio environment. This is quite promising in that key dimensions of learning define communities of practice. An examination of the unique affordances of this environment could be quite


Session F3H critical to informing and transforming traditional classrooms. What studio characteristics can be transferred to traditional classrooms? And in what ways can engineering educators incorporate these lessons learned? There exists an opportunity for our teaching to provide a more holistic approach for our students – one that incorporates aspects of a studio environment, allowing time for students to engage in some of these key elements that lead to a community of practice such as rich peer interaction, opportunity to negotiate meaning, and discussions that encourage the redefinition of engineering identities. In order to promote a similar studio, the environment should provide opportunities for rich interactions among peers where students are able to join the conversation, foster an appreciation for the shared knowledge or negotiation of meaning, and facilitate the identification of students within the group in order to envision their own understanding of what it means to be an engineer. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation through grant REC-0835836, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Ashley Thompson, and the Ray J. Bowen Professorship for Innovation in Engineering Education (held by Dr. Jennifer Turns). The authors wish to thank Kathryn Mobrand and Deborah Kilgore and the students whom participated in the study. REFERENCES ABET, Criteria for accrediting engineering programs, Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. 2008. Special report: The Research Agenda for the New Discipline of Engineering Education. Journal of Engineering Education, 2006. 95(4): p. 259-261. The Engineer of 2020. National Academy of Engineering. 2005, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Smith, K.A., et al., Pedagogies of Engagement: Classroom-Based Practices. Journal of Engineering Education, 2005. 94(1): p. 87-101. Berenson, S.B., et al., Voices of women in a software engineering course: reflections on collaboration. Journal of Educational Resources in Computing - Special Issue on Gender-Balancing Computing Education, 2004. 4(1): p. 1-18. Bordogna, J., E. Fromm, and E.W. Ernst, Engineering Education: Innovation Through Integration. Journal of Engineering Education, 1993. 82(1): p. 3-8. Kellam, N., A. Babcock, and D. Gattie, The Engineering Learning Environment: A Proposed Model, in American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2008: Pittsburgh, PA. Kuhn, S., Learning from the Architecture Studio: Implications for ProjectBased Pedagogy. International Journal of Engineering Education, 2001. 17(4 and 5): p. 349-352. Little, P. and M. Cardenas, Use of "Studio" Methods in the Introductory Engineering Design Curriculum. Journal of Engineering Education, 2001. Wilson, J.M. and W.C. Jennings. Studio Courses: How Information Technology Is Changing the Way We Teach, On Campus and Off". in IEEE. 2000. Constantino, T., et al., An Interdisciplinary Design Studio: How Can Art and Engineering Collaborate to Increase Students' Creativity? Art Education, 2010.

Kuhn, S., The software design studio: an exploration. Software, IEEE, 1998. 15(2): p. 65-71. Sattler, B., D. Kilgore, and J. Turns. "I Have Never Spent Time to Think About What I Have Gained From My Projects": Linking Portfolio Development and Life-Long Learning. 2010. Washington, D.C. Turns, J., Occasioning the Emergence of Knowledge and Promoting Motivation for All Students: Applying Instructional Principles to Engineering Situations, in American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2011: Vancouver, BC. Turns, J., B. Sattler, and D. Kilgore. Disciplinary knowledge, identity, and navigation: the contributions of portfolio construction. in International Conference of the Learning Sciences. 2010. Chicago, IL. Boyatzis, R.E., Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development. 1998, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Corbin, J.M. and A.C. Strauss, eds. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Vol. 3. 2008, Sage Publications: Los Angeles, CA. Patton, M.Q., Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. 3 ed. 2001, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Wenger, E., Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, ed. J.S. Brown. 1998, New York: Cabridge University Press. Bandura, A., Social Learning Theory. 1977, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Lave, J. and E. Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, ed. J.S. Brown. 1991, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Haller, C.R., et al., Dynamics of Peer Education in Cooperative Learning Workgroups. Journal of Engineering Education, 2000. July: p. 285293. Baillie, C., et al., Advancing Diverse and Inclusive Engineering Education Practices through Interdisciplinary Research and Scholarship. Journal of Engineering Education, 2011. 100(1): p. 6-11. Adams, R., et al., Multiple Perspectives on Engaging Future Engineers. Journal of Engineering Education, 2011. 100(1): p. 48-88. Davis, B. and D. Sumara, Complexity and Education. 2006, Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gattie, D.K. and N.N. Kellam, Engineering Education as a Complex System, in Complexity Science and Educational Research. 2008: Athens, GA. Kellam, N., J. Walther, and A. Babcock, Complex Systems: What are they and why should we care?, in American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2009: Austin, TX. Kellam, N.N. and D.K. Gattie, Developing a Systems Understanding of Education through Ecological Concepts, in Complexity Science and Educational Research Conference. 2008: Athens, GA.

AUTHOR INFORMATION Ashley Thompson, PhD Student, Washington, [email protected]

University

of

Brook Sattler, PhD Student, University of Washington, [email protected] Jennifer Turns, Associate Professor, University of Washington, [email protected]
