Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are an essential part of engineering education, particularly as student numbers continue to grow. However, it’s not often that we stop to consider what teaching is like from their perspective and think about how we can support them as developing educators whose contributions matter.

In this episode, we speak with Harry Day, Sarah Plumb, Matteo Di Benedetti and Lucy Farquhar from the University of Sheffield about their work to transform the GTA experience. Drawing on research and practical experience, they explore how a more supportive, structured approach can benefit GTAs, academic staff and students alike.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn more about the how we can support GTAs in engineering education.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.30 Podcast Intro

0.55 Experiences with GTAs from Natalie and Neil

3.24 Introduction to Harry, Sarah, Matteo and Lucy

4.58 University of Sheffield, UK

6.29 What is a TA or GTA? Why are they used?

8.10 What are the challeneges involved in working with GTAs?

12.50 Lucy's exprience as a GTA

16.35 The importance of overcoming the challenges; training and community building

19.20 Introduction to the MIJ (Mattering, Integration, Justice) Framework

31.22 Provision for training and the need for discipline specific training

36.38 Identifying the key areas for development

49.50 The training model and its alignment

55.26 A roadmap of qualification requirements

1:06:40 The journey of a GTA from recruitment to their first time in the classroom

1:12:10 Diversity, equity and inclusion

1:24:13 Student Feedback

1:26:41 What is next?

1:32:29 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

Plumb, S., Day, H., & Di Benedetti, M. (2024). Effective development and recognition of Teaching Assistant practice: An aligned model. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Conference of SEFI, Lausanne, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14256709

https://zenodo.org/records/14256709

Matteo Di Benedetti, Sarah Plumb & Stephen B. M. Beck (2023) Effective use of peer teaching and self-reflection for the pedagogical training of graduate teaching assistants in engineering, European Journal of Engineering Education, 48:1, 59-74, DOI: 10.1080/03043797.2022.2054313

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2022.2054313

https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/oer-gtadevelopmentprogram/0-home?authuser=0

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Female students have long been underrepresented in engineering. However, the increasing use of project- and problem-based learning (PBL) approaches raises new questions regarding how power dynamics shape their lived experiences during collaborative teamwork. This episode features Sandra Ireri Cruz Moreno and Shannon Chance (Technological University Dublin). We talk about the winner of the ‘Best Research Paper’ at the SEFI 2025 Conference entitled “Evolving gender dynamics in teamwork experiences among female engineering students in PBL settings”.

Follow this link to read the full paper.

Timestamps

0.00 Podcast introduction

0.28 Introduction to the episode

1.12 Overview of the work and how it came about

2.44 Summary of the paper

4.48 The research gap

6.42 PBL at TU Dublin

8.30 Research aims and questions

9.02 Theoretical frameworks

11.50 Approach

16:00 Data collection and analysis

17.38 Findings

23.20 Implications for practice

24.57 Implications for research

Other resources

Cruz Moreno, S. I., & Chance, S. (2024). Exploring analytical frameworks to investigate power dynamics in collaborative learning in engineering education. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Conference of SEFI, Lausanne, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.14256915

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Engineering students are increasingly expected to work towards solving ‘wicked’ problems. Tacking such complexity can invoke a range of emotions and educators are increasingly required to support students in situations when they are confronted with uncertainty and value conflicts.

In this episode we speak to Johanna Lönngren, Associate Professor in Science and Engineering Education at Umeå University. Johanna is part of the Umeå Science Education Research (UmSER) group and focuses on the role of emotions in education for sustainable development, exploring how engineering students talk about, and collaboratively deal with, emotions when they work with complex sustainability problems.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn more about the emotions that engineers experience when tacking complex and wicked problems

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.17 Podcast Intro

0.42 Experiences with student emotion from Natalie and Neil

3.45 Introduction to Johanna

8.23 University of Umeå

10.28 Wicked problems in engineering

15.08 Brining wicked problems into engineering education

19.15 Emotions in education

25.19 Emotion as social; implications for methodology

29.18 Emotions associated with wicked problems

32.18 Positioning theory

34.55 Emotional scaffolding

40.52 Studying and evaluating the use of emotional scaffolding

47.37 Techniques to help students deal with emotions associated with wicked problems

54.11 Supporting engineering educators in providing emotional scaffolding

56.54 Future work

1:00:40 Takeaways from Johanna

1:02: 18 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

https://wickedproblemsteaching.wordpress.com/.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2025.2474046?scroll=top&needAccess=true#d1e164

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feedback and peer review is a key part of university life for both educators and students. Despite this, there are still gaps in our understanding how to best provide and make use of feedback. This episode features Ruth Fisher and Divya Naya, both from the University of New South Wales. We talk about the winner of the ‘Best Practice Paper’ at the SEFI 2025 Conference entitled “Using multistage peer reviews to provide feedback and improve student learning” which Ruth and Divya co-authored with Javier Videlo Mario and Shamim Aryampa.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.27 Introduction to the episode

1.18 The context of the research

2.44 A summary of the work

3.40 The need for the work

6.20 How did the peer review process work?

10.00 How was the process evaluated?

12.37 Grading students' feedback

13.29 The main research questions

14.30 The findings

19.16 How did educators' feedback practice change?

21.06 The findings; educator reflections

24.28 Key takeaways

29.55 What's next?

Follow this link to read the full paper.

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Concerns for student mental health have grown over the last decade, particularly within engineering disciplines, which are often associated with heavy workloads and difficult assessment. There is subsequently an increasing need to understand the stressors that impact engineering students, and the ways in which we can support them to thrive.

In this episode we speak to Karin Jensen, an Assistant Professor and Faith Gacheru a first-year graduate student, both from the University of Michigan. Karin was awarded a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on undergraduate mental health in engineering programs and recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by US President Biden in January 2025, whilst Faith recently presented a poster entitled A Mixed-Methods Study to Support Undergraduate Engineering Student Well-Being at ASEE 2025.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn about stressors within engineering education and ways by which to encourage help-seeking behaviour.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.23 Podcast Intro

0.45 Experiences with student mental health from Natalie and Neil

2.32 Introduction to Karin and Faith

7.06 University of Michigan

9.38 Key definitions, terminology and use of language

15.27 How concerns regarding mental health have changed

20.11 The role of engineering culture

24.21 Making changes at different levels of the system

26.32 Measuring stress and identifying stressors within engineering education

34.53 How do educators perceive mental health concerns

36.51 Thriving

38.09 Translating finding into teaching practices

47.21 How is the research being used to support other educators

48.29 Staff mental health

51.09 Future work

52.33 Takeaways from Karin and Faith

55.54 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

Details about Karin’s lab and work can be found here https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/ including The Engineering Stress Culture (ESC) Scale, a 10-item measure of undergraduate student perceptions of engineering stress culture and The Undergraduate Engineering Stressors Questionnaire (U-ESQ) (https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/research-well-being/)

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Despite the increasing magnitude and frequency of disasters, it remains unclear whether civil engineers possess the ability to understand disaster risk and design resilient infrastructures.

This episode features Anup Shrestha from Water and Development Research Group, School of Engineering, Aalto University (Finland).

We talk about the winner of the ‘Best Student Paper’ at the SEFI 2025 Conference entitled “Are Disaster-Prone Countries’ Undergraduate Students Prepared? Insights from a Civil Engineering Program in Nepal” which Anup co-authored with Julia Sundman, Josias Láng-Ritter, Maija Taka, Olli Varis (Aalto University) and Sudeep Lamsal (Sagarmatha Engineering College).

The paper considers the degree to which undergraduate civil engineering students in disaster-prone countries are adequately prepared. The research involves the use of a questionnaire to evaluate Nepalese students’ knowledge of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), resilience concepts, and related competencies. Students were found to exhibit DRR knowledge, but had limited opportunities to participate in DRR courses, workshops, or training. Whilst they possessed the basic concepts of resilience, there was a notable gap in their ability to apply these concepts in designing resilient structures. The research team thus suggest that additional efforts focus on integrating these competencies into engineering curricula.

For the full paper, follow this link:https://acris.aalto.fi/ws/portalfiles/portal/202473945/SEFI2025_040.pdf

This is the third episode from the new SEFI Podcast: Publication Spotlight series which aims to complement our normal, longer length shows. In these episodes, we speak with authors of recent publications to bring you up to date with some of the latest work within engineering education.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction

0.27 Introduction to the episode an publication

1.08 How the work came about and the research team

4.25 Summary of the work

5.18 The research gap

7.36 Disaster risk reduction (DRR)

10.58 The research questions

12.10 Methodology

13.38 The findings

16.58 Implications for engineering education research and practice

20.24 Contextual differences

22.48 Staff and student perceptions to integrating DRR and resilience

26.27 What's next?

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The rising complexity of modern societal challenges has intensified interest in interdisciplinary engineering education.

In this episode we speak to Professor Anette Kolmos (Professor in Engineering Education and PBL) and Dr Henrik Worm Routhe (Postdoctoral Researcher) from Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark, about InterPBL and the different approaches that can be taken to interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn about the many different ways in which we can integrate interdisciplinary projects into our engineering courses.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.25 Podcast Intro

0.52 Experiences with interdisciplinary from Natalie and Neil

2.30 Introduction to Anette and Henrik

7.20 Aalborg University (AAU)

9.18 Introduction to InterPBL

13.00 Examples of the challenges associated with interdisciplinary project work

14.34 Aims of the InterPBL project

17.04 Interdisciplinary in engineering practice

21.00 Definitions

24.25 Cognitive trust and boundary objects

31.00 How does interdisciplinary work impact identity?

35.28 A typology of interdisciplinary projects

48.32 Students' motivation

50.57 Leadership

55.21 Assessment of interdisciplinary

58.41 Implications for staff and capacity building

1:00:50 Measuring the effectiveness of interdisciplinary learning and teaching

1:05:40 Introducting interdisciplinary in your own context

1:09:56 Mega-projects (M-Project) and broad interdisciplinary

1:15:25 Key Takeaways and implications from Anette and Henrik

1:25:38 What is next for research in this area?

1:28:48 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

A small sample of papers which focus on the InterPBL project are linked below

This paper focuses on student learning outcomes of interdisciplinary work

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10171180

This provides insights from a narrow interdisciplinary curriculum project named “leadENG

https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/interdisciplinary-problem-based-projects-for-first-year-engineeri/

This paper focuses on development of leadership competencies

https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/752930995/17_ijee4479.pdf

These papers focus on the different project types

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/15/2/138

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2023.2267476

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Although recognised as a priority for engineering education, implementation of Sustainable Development (SD) in curricula has been mixed and limited.

This episode features Marie Paretti from Virginia Tech and Maya Menon from the EdTech startup NextWork. We talk about a paper published in the European Journal of Engineering Education entitled “Understanding instructor decision-making in engineering education for sustainable development: a comparison of institutions in Denmark and the United States” which Maya and Marie co-authored with Jennifer Case and Andrew Katz. The study compared the external, internal (institutional) and individual influences on instructors’ decision-making, in relation to the incorporation of SD into the courses they teach within institutions in two different national contexts.

This episode is the second in our series of episodes that take on a new format and are released at intervals along with our normal longer length shows.

For the full paper, follow this link: https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2025.2486189

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction

0.29 Introduction to the episode an publication

1.25 How the work came about and the research team

3.12 Summary of the work

4.02 The research gap

5.16 The research questions

7.27 Terminology; Sustainability, Sustainable Development and the UN SDGs

10.50 Theoretical underpinnings

13.58 Comparative Case Study Methodology

18.04 Data sources and analysis

21.12 The findings

29:49 Implications for engineering education practice

32.31 Implications for engineering education research

35.23 Goodbyes

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.