Abstract
With widespread industry feedback on engineering graduates’ lack of technical skills and research demonstrating that higher education does not effectively facilitate the development of open-ended problem-solving competencies, many educators are attempting to implement measures that address these concerns. In order to properly formulate sensible interventions that result in meaningful improvements in student outcomes, useful educational measurement and analysis approaches are needed. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) has rapidly emerged as an effective, theoretically informed ‘toolkit’ offering a suite of dimensions through which to observe, analyze, interpret, and design teaching and learning practices. LCT Semantics has been used to help engineering educators unpack both levels of engineering knowledge abstraction and the complexity of engineering terms, while LCT Specialization focuses on knowledge practices (using the epistemic plane) and enables a visualization and differentiation between kinds of phenomena and the fixed versus open-ended methods with which to approach a particular phenomenon. Drawing on a range of initiatives to enable an improved practical grasp of fluid mechanics concepts, this paper presents a description and graphic LCT analysis of student learning that has been designed to anchor the ‘purist’ principles underpinning applied fluid mechanics concepts (such as in piping and pump network design) by way of concerted ‘doctrinal’ practices, and the exposure to more open-ended practical situations involving peer learning/group work, allowing educators to visualize the code clash between the curriculum and the world of work.
Highlights
Science and engineering education battles with a number of disjunctures in purpose, epistemology, and implementation
This paper aims to accomplish two objectives: it firstly draws on the experience and observation of interventions carried out in a second-year fluid mechanics module, as it plays out in the final Capstone research project, to draw insight into fluid mechanics teaching more generally
We suggest that Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) offers a practical set of tools through which engineering educators can interrogate forms of knowledge and knowing
Summary
Science and engineering education battles with a number of disjunctures in purpose, epistemology, and implementation. Cumulative knowledge building requires both a diversity of ideas and a shared means of navigating among these—in other words, multiple repertoires and an expanding collective reservoir [7] To have these tools to hand, as a rephrasing of ‘practical reasoning’ [8], is to have access to the tool that solves the problem, while having a deep and conscious understanding of the scientific and epistemic underpinnings: the ‘know why’ that is essential for 21st century complexity [9]. LCT dimensions to visualize teaching strategies intended to facilitate improved learning outcomes, illustrated using examples from fluid mechanics, with the intent of giving educators an additional tool for analyzing their practices and curricula, and potentially bridging gaps between the curriculum and the world of work
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