Experiential Learning in Riga

What an amazing week at Riga Technical University (RTU) in the charming capital city of Latvia!

I designed and co-delivered an intensive “Education Forum”, as part of the European University of Technology (EUt+) “Riga Week,” held December 1-5, 2025.

Here’s our Forum group on the final day!

This teacher training Forum brought experts from the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) and TU Dublin to help educators from EUt+ member universities experience and apply new pedagogical approaches.

We utilized innovative teaching methodologies—case studies, problems and challenges, service-learning, and arts-based, dialogical and reflexive approaches as well as games-based and flipped classroom formats—to integrate ethics topics into the courses we teach. And of course, we also practiced interdisciplinarity.

These are methods I’ve always used as an architectural educator, and ones we featured in the Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education, which I co-edited as part of the SEFI Ethics special interest group.

The SEFI Forum in Riga was inspired by the SEFI Ethics Symposium I hosted in Ireland last spring, which focused on putting the handbook to work.

Designing it, I drew from knowledge and experience gained at the Symposium. For Riga, I used a similar format—a fun and immersive three-day series of hands-on workshops and mini-keynote presentations. I am grateful to the SEFI experts who helped me design the SEFI symposium format, Drs. Diana Martin and Mircea Tobosaru. (Diana was also scheduled to help facilitate the Forum in Riga, but a winter flu kept her from joining us.)

Learning together — actively and fully engaged

Ultimately, 21 educators travelled to Riga from Cluj-Napoca, Sofia, Cassino, Darmstadt, Cartagena, Dublin, Troyes, along with Sarah from the UK. We assembled for the first ever SEFI/EUt+ Engineering and Technology Education Forum. Dr. Sarah Hitt (of SEFI), Miriam Delaney (of TU Dublin), and Edmund Nevin (of both) helped me facilitate the Forum.

Before the Forum got underway, Sarah Hitt and I delivered the opening address for the larger event. We used the same delivery format that Dr. Tom Børsen and I developed for our keynote at the recent SEFI conference, which you can watch here. Sarah is such a great collaborator. We worked really well together preparing and delivering the General Seminar address, debriefing between Forum sessions and passing the baton back and forth across the three workshop days.

In total, about 80 people came to the “Riga Week.” They arrived from all around EUt+, an alliance of nine technological universities across Europe. They came to work on projects, refine approaches, and align systems. Many who attended this particular EUt+ Week are involved in disciplinary clusters (like biomedical or electrical and electronics engineering).

And what a lovely place to hold a conference. Riga has stunning architecture and a lively Christmas market.

Riga design and culture — you might even glimpse Santa!

This alliance is one of the many funded via the European Commission to enable partnerships, collaboration, and some degree of standardization across European institutions. It is part of Erasmus, the teaching arm of the European Union’s development of higher education. (Up until now, I’ve been involved in programs funded under the parallel research arm.)

EUt+ is the brainchild of Dr. Timothèe Toury, the “Secrétaire général de l’Alliance Université de technologie européenne” (Secretary General of EUt+). He has played a central role in shaping the vision, leading it at global level, and advocating externally for what we do and how transformative we aim to be.

I think it was Timothèe who conceived the idea of combining our campuses into one streamlined university where students can (someday?) flow uninterrupted, taking modules on any campus that contribute toward their degree. That said, EUt+ can be seen as a genuinely collective effort. This includes the wider Secretariat General team (Drs. Rafael Toledo, Karine Lan, and others), as well as representatives from the member institutions, including rectors and colleagues, who have actively designed and contributed to substantial parts of the proposal and its development.

Although there are many university alliances funded by Europe, ours is unique in its vision for the members to unite into one single university. One organization—in multiple, extremely diverse, locations—with aligned curricula and a powerful and unique teaching approach that sets EUt+ apart. We want to foster an exemplary student experience and to advance engineering and technology knowledge-how across Europe, empowering our graduates with transferable skills like teamwork/collaboration, critical thinking, and project management. And, I hope, well-integrated arts, social sciences, and humanities approaches to boot!

This can’t happen without updating and enhancing the way engineering and technology are taught in our member campuses. Lecture-based approaches simply won’t suffice to equip the engineers of tomorrow.

Deeply meaningful learning experiences are required.

And that’s what our facilitation team aimed to deliver at the SEFI/EUt+ Forum.

Helping us organize behind the scenes was the EUt+ staff, particularly Timothèe, Rafael, and Karine but also Dr. Santiago Perez, Ms. Eleanor Asprey, and Dr. Emilija Sarma and a host of others helping on the ground, once we arrived in Riga. (Karine couldn’t attend but sent helpful hints throughout Riga Week by WhatsApp… an angel in my shoulder!)

At the SEFI Education Forum, teachers got the chance to experience the student side of the equation.

Forum participants each brought their own unique skills and ideas to the event, and shared them with each other. It was like a pot-luck dinner where everyone contributed!

For example, every participant (and facilitator) read several chapter of the Handbook prior to the Forum, so we could discuss these in groups. I designed these discussions like “book clubs.” The various book-club groups each designed an activity for all the other participants on some aspect of their assigned chapters. On the third day, each group facilitated their activity for the rest of us.

At the start of each of the nine working sessions that comprised the Forum, one participant delivered a 15-minute “mini-keynote” on a topic of particular relevance to the group.

Catching them in full action below:

Dr./Prof. Matthias Veit shared frameworks he and his colleagues in Darmstadt are using to facilitate curricular change.

Dr. Kalina Belcheva described learners as digital content creators in educational settings.

Dr. Sarah Hitt showed us how to use the Sustainability and Ethics Toolkits she developed for the Engineering Professors Council.

Dr. José Luis Serrano presented on using film excerpts to teach (test and challenge) physics concepts as presented in popular movies. He calls this activity “Bloopbusters”!

Ms. “soon-to-be-Dr.” Miriam Delaney showcased Building Change, a curriculum change initiate across all the schools of architecture in Ireland to support sustainability, housing, and climate resilience.

Mr. Edmund Nevin described an Erasmus project he’s part of, focused on supporting students in their transition from second to third-level education.

The Forum also included interactive workshops.

I started the Forum off with a mini-keynote on the Handbook followed by a workshop on applying targeted teaching methods to integrate ethics content into the subjects our participants teach.

Dr. Santiago Perez delivered an ethics game he developed, called Revolt.

We all learned so much, as described on the whiteboards.

At the very beginning of the Forum, following introductions, Sarah Hitt and I helped the group identify learning goals for the week. Together, we co-designed a strategy that used the pot-luck “dishes” we’d each brought with us (readings, keynotes, workshop outlines, prior experience and innovative spirit). At the end of the week, Sarah helped us assess how well we’d succeeded in covering the topics we’d defined.

I have to say, Sarah was an absolute superstar! She’s a natural leader and event facilitator. I invited her because she was an author on our handbook and she teaches at NMITE, the New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering, based in the UK. They teach using all the featured pedagogies, so I figured she’d have the necessary skills—but wow! Was I impressed beyond expectations!

Miriam and Edmund also did a fabulous job facilitating. Their (book club / workshop design) group discussions were lively and engaging.

I was also extremely pleased with the contributions my other TU Dublin colleagues, Mr. Keith Colton and Dr. Mayank Parmar, made to the Forum.

The Forum succeeded overall, though, due to the wholehearted engagement of the EUt+ educators who travelled from near and far! The 21 of us attending put in our all, and as a result we all left with new ideas and experiences and inspiration to evolve our teaching.

Some of us are already working on follow-up conference session and grant proposals together, and hopefully we’ll have more successes to report to you in the coming semester!

Thanks, EUt+, Timothèe, Rafa, and Karine, for working so hard to include use and showcase what SEFI engagement can give the EUt+ community!

Featured by shannonchance

Grab your popcorn! YouTube ethical & sustainable engineering

Our SEFI keynote about socially responsible engineering is now on YouTube!

It opens with the launch of our handbook on teaching ethics in engineering. Next, we discuss a strategy for making the necessary changes in engineering education to address turbulent times.

Below, I share fun pics of SEFI, as posting this is a chance to relive the excitement! From the launch:

A significant — unexpected — highlight of the SEFI conference was receiving the award for the BEST RESEARCH PAPER of the entire conference! I accepted the ward on behalf of my PhD student, soon-to-be Dr Sandra Cruz!

Here I’m being awarded by Professor John Mitchell and congratulated by my co-editors of the European Journal of Engineering Education.

The official photographer captured the conference vibe:

And the SEFI Director General, architect Klara Ferdova, captured and shared other behind-the-scenes moments, like Gillian Saunders-Smit and me at the Moonmin Museum:

And here are Klara’s photos of the keynote! An architect’s eye for structure and composition, Klara has!

And finally, here’s the official SEFI photo, showing the whole happy family!

If you’re interested in teaching engineering well, please join us for next year’s SEFI conference in Prague!

Featured by shannonchance

Material reuse in architecture

This past Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of reviewing studio work and giving architecture students feedback on prototypes they have been developing to reuse scrap materials from the woodworking shops at the School of Architecture, Building and Environment (SABE) at TU Dublin.

A cool transformer-type system that can be moved and easily set-up.

The students are helping support the circular economy, and learning to work together.

This is a vertical architecture studio, comprised of second and third year students.

A corbelled system that can be reconfigured dozens of ways.

Each team as allocated a collection of cast-off wood sheets or wood planks to use to make a small structure. The structure needed to be at least 3 meters in at least one direction.

This architecture studio is led by Marcin Wojcik and Kevin Donovan. The project is also tied to a grant from Ireland’s Housing Authority to study how to modularize materials brought to construction sites, but never used to allow them to be reused elsewhere. Marcin and Kevin are doing the grant-funded project with Noel Brady.

And I am an enthusiastic observer, doing what I can to help my colleagues get more involved in research.

Overall, the work I saw presented and the level of attentiveness and collegiality among the students were all highly impressive! They have done all this in just three weeks.

A pavilion for bird watching; intriguing lessons in tension and compression.

I was excited enough about the work I saw to convince Marcin to draft a short conference paper, which he accomplished over the weekend. It’s about the outcomes of this three-week assignment, how it has evolved over the years, and the implications of Friday’s presentations for the grant-funded project.

Kevin and I are editing Marcin’s draft today, so I’d better get to it!

Hope you have enjoyed seeing the students’ collaborative work! I was thrilled they agreed to let me post photos of them and what they designed and constructed.

Featured by shannonchance

Here’s to fairytale endings in Finland: Highlights of SEFI 2025

What an inspiring whirlwind week at the European Society for Engineering Education SEFI 2025 Annual Conference! The event was packed with meaningful presentations, deep and reflective conversations, intellectual rigor, and memorable community moments. Attending SEFI always feels like a homecoming to me, and this year’s conference certainly delivered, especially with the monumental achievements of my colleagues and students.

From Handbook to Keynote Stage

A significant highlight for me was being invited to deliver a keynote address at SEFI alongside Associate Professor Tom Børsen from Aalborg University. The address drew extensively from the Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education, which Tom and I co-edited alongside our phenomenal team of co-editors, Diana Adela Martin, Roland Tormey, Thomas Taro Lennerfors, and Gunter Bombaerts.

Our keynote, titled “Towards socially responsible, post-normal and reflexive engineering ethics education,” (video link here) called for a bold transformation in how engineering ethics is taught. We addressed the urgent need for engineering ethics education (EEE) to move beyond traditional, individual-focused approaches to embrace collective responsibility, reflexivity, and social justice. This is particularly critical in “post-normal times,” characterized by uncertainty, high stakes, and contested values.

Among other things, Tom and I urged the community to integrate non-Western and AI ethics, foster transdisciplinary collaboration, and empower engineers to challenge power structures and cultivate an ethics of care for people and the planet.

And regarding Tom, I was thrilled to watch him receive a major honor at SEFI: the 2025 Maffiolli Award. Tom has been instrumental in advancing the field of Technological Anthropology, and this award is so very well deserved! Tom won in the individual category, and my colleagues from UCL, led by Fiona Truscott, won in the group category. A very excitig night, all around!

The awards were presented at the conference banquet – the entertainment was superb! Singing Finnish engineers – a whole choir of them – who knew?

I knew about Tom’s award, as I’d been pulling for this outcome for over a year. Yet, other outcomes of the conference were a complete surprise…

The Power of Collaborative Research: Winner of the Best Research Paper Award!

My PhD student, the incredibly talented and astute sociologist Sandra Cruz Moreno, won the BEST RESEARCH PAPER award for SEFI 2025. I serve as her supervisor and was the co-author of this paper.

The recognition for excellent research was deeply validating, especially since the paper, “EVOLVING GENDER DYNAMICS IN TEAMWORK EXPERIENCES AMONG FEMALE ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN PBL SETTINGS”, was nominated in three separate categories, each with its own panel of judges: Best Student Paper, Best Diversity and Inclusion Paper, and overall Best Research Paper.

The paper reports one aspect of Sandra’s doctoral research, which has been funded by a First-Time Supervisor grant to me from TU Dublin. The funding allowed us to analyze the extensive interview data I collected since 2015.

Sandra’s study is crucial for understanding inclusivity in engineering education. It employed a longitudinal, qualitative social phenomenological approach combined with an intersectionality framework. Using data from 41 interviews with 22 female engineering students from seven countries at TU Dublin, Sandra explored how diverse students navigate challenges and evolve strategies during project- and problem-based learning (PBL) teamwork across their academic journeys.

A key finding was that while students’ confidence and participation increased over time, the women persistently faced gendered biases and cultural norms that influenced their perceived roles and credibility in teams. For instance, they reported often being relegated to non-technical tasks like presenting or report writing, while feeling required to constantly prove their competence regarding hands-on skills. This analysis led Sandra to conclude that focusing solely on individual resilience is insufficient; systemic structural interventions are also needed to promote inclusive educational practices and challenge embedded norms.

I was honored to accept the award in Sandra’s absence, celebrating the resounding endorsement of her work. This recognition is truly a cherry on top of our successful 3.5 years of teamwork.

You can download the paper here: https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/publications/evolving-gender-dynamics-in-teamwork-experiences-among-female-eng and cite it as:

Cruz, S., & Chance, S. (Accepted/In press). EVOLVING GENDER DYNAMICS IN TEAMWORK EXPERIENCES AMONG FEMALE ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN PBL SETTINGS. Paper presented at European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) Annual Conference 2025, Tampere, Finland.

Nurturing Community and Capacity

SEFI is always about nurturing the community, and I was pleased to contribute in several ways:

• Doctoral Symposium: I co-facilitated the full-day pre-conference Doctoral Symposium to support early-career researchers.

• Workshops: I delivered and co-facilitated multiple workshops, including one on integrating ethics into course delivery, a session on methodological approaches in Engineering Education Research, a workshop on the ethics of care, and a peer-review workshop for journal editors and aspiring reviewers.

The workshop I facilitated on intergrating ethics into your teaching

• Papers: I delivered Sandra’s paper while she joined online to address questions following the presentation. I also co-delivered a paper, titled “ACCREDITATION CONSIDERATIONS IN ENGINEERING ETHICS EDUCATION: BRIDGING GLOBAL STANDARDS AND LOCAL PRACTICES” (that you can download here https://researchprofiles.tudublin.ie/en/publications/accreditation-considerations-in-engineering-ethics-education-brid). You’d cite it as:

O’Gorman, L., Gwynne-Evan, A., Ridgeway, L., Rebow, M., & Chance, S. (Accepted/In press). ACCREDITATION CONSIDERATIONS IN ENGINEERING ETHICS EDUCATION: BRIDGING GLOBAL STANDARDS AND LOCAL PRACTICES. Paper presented at European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) Annual Conference 2025, Tampere, Finland.

• Supporting Swapneel Thite: I had the immense pleasure of facilitating the attendance of Dr Swapneel Thite, a recent PhD earner. Swapneel won the prestigious Best Paper Award for Volume 49 (2024) of SEFI’s journal, the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), for which I serve as Deputy Editor. He and his PhD supervisors published the “Design of a simple rubric to peer-evaluate the teamwork skills of engineering students” with us. Since I had already paid my registration fee, I was able to offer Swapneel the free registration given to me as a keynote speaker, helping him travel to SEFI to receive his award and meet the community. His paper, recognized for its rigor and practical utility (an easy-to-use instrument for peer assessment of teamwork), is well worth reading!

Meeting Swapneel Thite with SEFI incoming president, Emanuela Tilley

Post-Conference Finnish Discoveries

The conference officially wrapped up on Thursday, but the adventures continued. I attended the SEFI Board of Directors meeting, worked with colleagues on planning future SEFI events, and then headed to Helsinki.

I spent Friday exploring Aalto University and meeting colleagues there. Dr Xiaoqi Feng provided a personal tour and connected me with her colleagues—a bittersweet moment as she prepares for her new job at TU Delft.

Snapshots from my day at Aalto University — thanks Dr Xiaoqi Feng for the personalized tour!

My Finnish travels culminated on a serendipitous high note when I ran into early-career researcher Yousef Jalali at the remarkable Oodi, Helsinki’s new Central Library. Moments like this—a chance encounter in a vibrant cultural space far from home—gave Yousef and me a chance to reflect on the conference and help support each other as “researchers on the move” who have relocated ourselves far from home in the pursuit of academic excellence.

What an amazing community of inspiring educators SEFI is!

Wrapping up the day at the people-magnet library, Oodi, in central Helsinki and rurring into Dr Yousef Jalali.

From celebrating major awards and delivering keynotes to fostering the next generation of researchers and exploring expressive Finnish architecture, this SEFI was truly a testament to the powerful, collaborative community we have built in engineering education.

For me, SEFI 2025 was such a celebration of community and collaboration.

Looking forward to visiting Helsinki and Aalto University again soon!

Featured by shannonchance

Feel the spirit! STEM Ensemble at Dublin Maker 2025

Most years, right before the beginning of the new academic year, I have the chance to be part of Dublin Maker. It’s a festival that celebrates the creative flair of people from all around Ireland. I’ve been attending Dublin Maker since 2015 and it never fails to delight.

The 2025 edition of Dublin Maker happened last weekend at Leopardstown Racecourse, on the south side of Dublin.

David Powell explaining how the radio features work. It’s designed to facilitate continual upgrade and ongoing R&D.

The open, participatory nature of Dublin Maker really appeals to me. As an education researcher, I’m all about the social construction of new knowledge and Dublin Maker epitomizes this phenomenon!

The venue was packed this year, as usual, and I think we’ve benefited from the rain outside. I attended Saturday (of the two-day event) and observed thousands of visitors engaged in hands-on technology, arts, craft, engineering, and science learning.

The exhibition halls buzzed as makers of all ages shared their projects, demonstrated new ideas, and connected with other creative enthusiasts. Exhibitors showcased everything from polished inventions to prototypes and works in progress.

Postdoc Patricia (Patri) Lucha Farina, Assistant Lecturer Mayank Parmar, and Senior Researcher Harish Kambampati working together.

Heaven knows my colleagues always work to the very last minute, creating new aspects of their projects (even though they’ve all been enthusiastically working for months to prepare)! I’ve provided photographic evidence of our July meeting below. ⬇️

STEM Ensemble’s July meeting to prepare for Dublin Maker.

This year was no exception as our makers worked to perfect the biomedical engineering projects they’d brought to share. Several of our group’s new lecturers and researchers worked together on this table.

Our researchers, Mayank Parmar and Dr. Harish Kambampati, demonstrating biomedical technologies.

I typically help with communicating the ideas to a younger audience or contributing something that’s more on the artistic or spatial side (since I’m an architect, who loves to hang out with these creative engineering types).

In the early years of Dublin Maker, 2015-2018, you would’ve seen us under the banner of RoboSlam. Our booth usually has several tables of displays with hands-on activities, grouped together under some sort of theme.

One year, we hosted the “RoboSlam Cafe” where attendees could build their own robots from low-cost kits—we wanted to provide firsthand experience in robotics. We like to demystify how everyday “smart” devices are made by showing people what’s “under the hood” and making it understandable.

Two of my personal favorites among our past exhibits have been “fractleismus” (generating images from attendees’ sketches using a fractal algorithm) and the “vaporwave fotobooth”, both presenting creations by Ted Burke. ⬇️

The fortune teller and subsequent Talking Head booth developed by Shane Ormonde, which integrated AI, were also quite intriguing. The second of these demonstrated generative AI work in real time, back in chat, GPT was just emerging. ⬇️

Shane Ormonde’s fortune teller from 2019.

This year, our major theme was the “Spirit of Radio”.

My STEM Ensemble colleagues have been working hard to develop a radio that has analog feature features as well as AI enabled digital features. This is related to a project that Paula Kelly is leading to introduce senior citizens to AI and help them understand the technology.

David Powell with our new (left) and antique (right) radios.

The radios that we displayed this year were predominantly developed by David Powell, Keith Colton, Frank Duignan, Shane Ormonde, Ted Burke, Richard Hayes. Of course, many other people provided ideas and advice during our STEM Ensemble meetings.

I’ve been attending the meetings, although I can’t contribute much on this topic. Nevertheless, I go to learn and soak in the maker spirit!

Some of the STEM Ensemble at Dublin Maker, giving me a good laugh!

Since we’re no longer just about robotics, we shifted our name from RoboSlam to “Dublin STEM Ensemble”. Our group is associated within the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Technological University Dublin. It’s also associated with the university’s tPOT research group (“tPOT” stands for “toward people oriented technology”), to which I belong.

STEM Ensemble is group of staff, students, and alumni who reflect TU Dublin’s long-standing commitment to inspiring public interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Damon Berry holds tPOT and the STEM Ensemble together—he’s a great leader!

By engaging directly with attendees, our group encouraged new perspectives and fostered a spirit of creative inquiry.

We are hoping see you at Dublin Maker next year!

Featured by shannonchance

Ready for a Fulbright Award?

I highly recommend applying for a Fulbright Award, to Ireland or elsewhere in the world. I had a Fulbright award to Ireland in 2012-13 that was truly life-changing.

Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards are opportunities available to U.S. professionals, artists & scholars to research/teach, and carry out projects in more than 160 countries worldwide. Those 160+ countries send scholars and students to the USA, as well.

2026-27 U.S. Scholar Program
Deadline: September 15, 2025, 5pm EDT

2026-27 U.S. Student Program Deadline: October 7, 2025, at 5pm Eastern Time

Fulbright U.S. Student Awards are grants for U.S. citizens to complete postgraduate research or study over the course of 1 year in Ireland.

Featured by shannonchance

Our new Architectural Engineeing curriculum at NewGiza University

NewGiza University (NGU), located on the outskirts of Cairo, just released a video of me discussing the Architectural Engineering curriculum that I co-designed with Professor Emanuela Tilley, starting back in 2020: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMVKR4HvVQ0/?igsh=MWo1dDE3cTB4Y2cxeQ== (opens in Instagram):

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A post shared by Newgiza University (NGU) (@newgizauniversity)

Because of the pandemic, I did not have a chance to visit NGU before we started designing the curriculum. In fact, I didn’t get to visit until this past February, 2025, when I travelled over with two staff from UCL to provide feedback on the quality of the program’s delivery.

It was a whirlwind tour, considering that I arrived a day later than expected due to a British Airline delay.

In my two working days there, I got to observe the program the public relations folks at NGU captured the footage on this video.

Designing this curriculum, via a contract between Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) and University College London Consultants (UCLC) which pays for hours out of my timetable each semester, has been a real joy. It has required me to stretch, been , and develop new communication skills to explain complex concepts to people from a culture and language much different from my own.

Visiting the program and meeting the people who are delivering the content and the amazingly dedicated studentswho are forging the way by implementing a brand new curriculum has definitely been a highlight of 2025.

Many tanks to Dean Aly and the programme staff for welcoming us and helping us feel at home!

We three visitors also got a chance to tour the brand new Egyptian museum, lead by NGU’s architectural history, teacher. The experience was truly eye-opening and full of intrigue.

I look forward to a chance to visit NGU and Egypt again soon!

I have to say, none of this would’ve been possible without the Marie Curie fellowship I got to spend 2018 and 2019 working at UCL. The bonds I made with the folks at UCL in the Centre for Engineering Education have made such a difference in my and personal and professional life.

Being part of UCL has been so incredibly good for me, and good also for my employer, TU Dublin.

I am so honored to have had the chance to build an architecture program in Egypt and work with the people there who seek to build a stronger community of architects in Egypt. Thank you so much John Mitchell and Emanuela Tilley, for including me in this incredible project!

Featured by shannonchance

Active Learning underway!

We’re about to start the third and final day of the 2025 PAEE/ALE conference in Porto, Portugal.

It’s an annual meet up of Project Approaches in Engineering Education (PAEE), which has an active community of members particularly across Portuguese and Spanish speaking parts of the world, and Active Learning in Engineering (ALE), on whose Steering Committee I serve.

I’ve attended PAEE/ALE in San Sebastián, Spain, in 2015. And in Alicante, Spain (where I was a keynote speaker), in 2023. And in San Andreas Island, Columbia, in 2024.

It’s a small and energetic gathering—just the right size for getting to know people and have deeply meaningful chats and learning sessions.

At this year’s event, I chaired a session and delivered a paper on a bingo game I developed with Mike Murphy, Celina Pinto Leão, Mircea Toboșaru, and Mary Doddy Nolan. We decided to perfect the game during a workshop I delivered at the 2025 SEFI Ethics Spring Symposium that I hosted at TU Dublin, and to publish it for others to use. I’ll post materials once they are ready for wide-spread use.

The game is designed to help engineering educators expand the ways they conceptualize integrating ethics into the courses they teach. In the workshop, we explore integrating environmental and social sustainability, EDI, ethical theories and codes.

A day after the paper presentation, I ran a workshop with Inês Direito to test the game. The group shown below had such fun, and benefitted from having 90 minutes allocated to our workshop (thanks for that Diana Mesquita and team!).

I also had a chance to deliver, with Inês’ help, a workshop on securing international fellowships. This topic always gets a warm welcome from colleagues eager to learning about funding sources and tips for winning awards.

The PAEE/ALE 2025 keynotes have been outstanding (as usual with this conference)!

Keynote addresses by Xiangyun Du, the local teaching excellence center, and Jamie Gurganus were packed intriguing insights.

Professor Xiangyun DU’s fascinating keynote address.

Reconnecting with ALE Steering colleagues Miguel Roma, Valquiria Villas-Boas, and Jens Myrup Pedersen, (and Fernando Rodriguez and Luciano Soares who didn’t get to join us this year) is always a pleasure.

PAEE/ALE has been a highlight of my academic year the past few years.

Many, many thanks to this year’s host, the knowledgeable and vivacious Diana Mesquita, and the PAEE leadership including Rui Lima, for making the 2025 event possible.

If you’re interested in Active Learning pedagogies, consider joining us next year for the 2026 conference in Japan!

Featured by shannonchance

Reflections on the 2025 SEFI Ethics Spring Symposium: A Gathering of Global Engineering Ethics Educators

I’m honoured to have hosted a very successful 2025 SEFI Ethics Spring Symposium.

From March 24–26, my colleagues and I gathered at the Royal Marine Hotel in the charming seaside town of Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, for our small and cosy annual symposium. Mother nature blessed us with glorious weather, tasty and healthy food, gorgeous natural and architectural surroundings, an enchanting historic hotel, and new and renewed friendships.

Diana Martin, Mircea Tobosaru, and I organised the programme and all the details, demonstrating that collaboration is key to flourishing!

With 35 delegates from across the globe, this wasn’t just another academic conference—it was a meeting of minds and a celebration of our shared commitment to engineering ethics education.

*Soaking in the surroundings, past and present, with a tour by Roland Tormey.*

The symposium’s main goal? Strengthening our collective capacity to teach ethics to future engineers. A key focus was the Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education (RIHEEE)—a major collaborative effort by the SEFI Ethics special interest group. We reflected on what is presented in the book and considered how to extend its themes, translate into impactful teaching practices, and generate discussion more broadly in the places we live and work.

*Opening the Symposium and introducing the handbook.*

A Program Packed with Thought-Provoking Conversations

Over three days, we immersed ourselves in a mix of keynotes, workshops, and panels, tackling big questions from multiple angles:

Keynotes that Challenged and Inspired

Mary Nolan explored the role of care ethics in engineering, pushing us to think beyond traditional engineering thinking.
Paula Tomi examined the nature of truth, a concept that sits at the heart of both engineering and ethics.
Tom Børsen introduced us to techno-anthropology, showing how it intersects with engineering ethics education.

Workshops that Sparked Debate and Collaboration

Care Ethics—How do we broaden engineers’ notion of responsibility?
AI Experimental Philosophy—How can philosophy guide us in using and developing artificial intelligence?
The Archimedean Oath—Should engineers take an ethical oath, much like doctors do?
Quantitative Methods & Ethics—How can we effectively describe and report ethical impact?

*Peer-to-peer learning in action. Tom Børsen, to the right, was the co-lead editor of the handbook. Takehara joined us from Japan, and Miguel from Spain.*

Panel Discussions: Making Ethics Education More Practical

Our panelists had a specific challenge: dive into a self-selected sections of RIHEEE and critically assess its themes. We asked: What patterns do you see across the set of chapters in your section? What’s missing? How can can educators make use of the content? How can we help them do that? Can we translate theoretical insights into tangible strategies that can be applied in classrooms and institutions worldwide yet still reflect local culture and values?

Panel with Rachel Harding, Aaron Johnson, Magnus Kahrs (and Valentina Rossi, not shown)

There were so many very special aspects, including exploring care ethics in depth and applying care ethics, and the walking tour was truly spectacular.

A Literary and Cultural Interlude

Roland Tormey’s literary walking tour of Dún Laoghaire was a highlight for us all. We took a step back and immersed ourselves in the cultural richness of our surroundings. For many of us, this blend of intellectual and cultural exploration reinforced the broader ethical dimensions of engineering—how our work is always connected to society, history, and place.

Global Voices, Local Impact

The symposium truly reflected the international nature of engineering ethics education. We had voices from across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, with universities ranging from UCL and the University of Michigan to EPFL. At the same time, there was strong local representation, with a third of the attendees based in Ireland—TU Dublin, DCU, ATU, and Engineers Ireland all playing an active role. A special shoutout to my TU Dublin colleagues—Sandra Cruz Moreno, Marek Rebow, Rachel Harding, Mike Murphy, and recent PhD grads Diana Adela Martin and Darren Carthy—whose contributions helped everyone feel welcome.

What’s Next?

The energy and ideas sparked at the symposium will propel us forward onto new collaborations, where we apply what we discussed—via research and teaching and leadership and service—and continue building momentum and sharing what we’re learning with our colleagues back home, and indeed worldwide.

For those who couldn’t join us in person, the Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education is freely available in an open-access digital format. Whether you’re new to the field or a long-time educator, it’s a must-read:
🔗 RIHEEE Handbook

TU Dublin also just posted a webpage about the Symposium: https://bit.ly/3QQ74zd

For posterity’s sake, I am adding the symposium schedule as it was conducted:

Monday, March 24

09:00-09:30 Welcome and Icebreaker by host Shannon Chance

09:30-10:30 Handbook panel 1 (Foundations) moderated by Roland Tormey with panellists Mircea Tobosaru, Samia Mahé, and Mihaly Héder

10:30-10:50 Coffee break

10:50-11:30 Keynote on Care Ethics by Mary Nolan

11:30-13:00 Workshop on Care Ethics by Robert Irish, Ana Tebeanu, Sofia Duran, Vivek Ramachandran, Roland Tormey, & Alison Gwynne-Evans

13:00-15:30 Picnic Lunch & Walking tour of Dun Laoghaire led by Roland Tormey

15:30-16:00 Coffee break with snacks

16:00-17:00 Handbook panel 4 (Teaching Methods) moderated by Diana Martin with panellists Valentina Rossi, Aaron Johnson, Magnus Kahrs, and Rachel Harding

17:00-17:30 Wrap-up with synthesising activity

19:00 Dinner outing with colleagues departs from the hotel lobby

Tuesday, March 25

09:00-10:00 Handbook panel 6 (Accreditation) moderated by Shannon Chance with panellists Leah Ridgway, Louise O’Gorman, Alison Gwynne-Evans, and Marek Rebow

10:00-10:40 Keynote on Truth by Paula Tomi

10:40-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:15 Workshop on AI experimental philosophy by Krzysztof Sołoducha

12:15-13:00 Ethics SIG session led by Diana Martin and Mircea Tobosaru

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Handbook panel 3 (Specific Disciplines) moderated by Tom Børson with panellists Jacob Baneham, Miguel Romá, Mike Murphy, and Rhythima Shinde

15:00-15:20 Coffee break with snacks

15:20-16:40 Workshop on the Archimedean Oath by Valentina Rossi

19:00 Dinner outing with colleagues departs from the hotel lobby

Wednesday, March 26

09:00-10:00 Handbook panel 2 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives) moderated by Roland Tormey with panelists Sandra Cruz Moreno, Ronny Kjelsberg, Gaston Meskens, and Katherine Looby, with input from Riadh Habash

10:00-11:15 Workshop on Quantitative Methods & Ethics by Matheus de Andrade and Idalis Villanueva Alarcón

11:15-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-12:15 Keynote by Tom Børsen on “Techno-Anthropology and Engineering Ethics Education”

12:15-13:15 Ethics SIG session led by Diana Martin and Mircea Tobosaru

13:15-15:00 Lunch and physical activity

15:00-16:00 Handbook panel 5 (Assessment) moderated by Tom Børsen with panellists Takehara Shinya, Celina Leão, Ana Voichita Tebeanu, and Mary Nolan

16:00-16:20 Coffee break with snacks

16:20-17:30 Ethics SIG synthesis session led by Diana Martin and Mircea Tobosaru

19:00 Dinner outing with colleagues departs from the hotel lobby

Featured by shannonchance

Ethics and sustainability for architects and engineers

Last week, I presented the Routledge Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education at a World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development conference in Krakow.

Today, I get to share it via a presentation to the All-Ireland Architectural Research Group (AIARG).

Leaving Dublin on the train this morning from Heuston Station headed to the AIARG conference

Below is a synopsis of what I’ll say in my 15-minute presentation to the architecture educators today.

Presenting the handbook at the Association for Practical and Applied Ethics (APPE) in February

This handbook is a product of the global engineering education research community and the ethics special interest group within the European Society for Engineering Education, known as SEFI.

The engineering education research community considers architecture to be a field of engineering and welcomes participation of architects. They are highly engaged in pedagogical research and in implementing innovation active learning methods. That said, engineering education has historically been more compartmentalized and positivist than architecture education.

I identify first and foremost as an architect and teacher of architecture students and I have been welcomed warmly by this community since I moved to Ireland in 2012. I welcome you to join us!

Today, I’m here to tell you about a new handbook our ethics group has developed that can serve as a resource for you. I hope it will inspire you to draw some new ideas into the education you deliver.

The book was a community effort, with six editors and 99 other authors from all around the world. This map shows where our authors have lived and worked.

We’re working hard to hear and learn from voices outside the areas most active in engineering education research—here you can see the concentrations of activity in engineering ethics education.

Map I made to show where our authors came from

We six editors paid for open access so anyone in the world can download the book for free. The QR code below will bring you to the download page, or just click https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003464259/routledge-international-handbook-engineering-ethics-education-shannon-chance-tom-b%C3%B8rsen-diana-adela-martin-roland-tormey-thomas-taro-lennerfors-gunter-bombaerts

My title slide for today’s AIARG presentation

So what’s in the book of relevance to an architecture educator? What can you learn? What opportunities do you see for applying or adding to the content? Would you want to create a parallel text for architects? Would you want to join this community of education researchers?

This comprehensive compendium of the state-of-the-art of literature on engineering ethics education is divided into six sections. Most of these have something of interest to architects.

At the Krakow sustainable development conference

The first section discusses foundations such as ethical theories and the role of professional organization and their codes in helping define and uphold ethics. How we do this as individuals and communities is discussed. Environment and AI are also covered here in the first section.

Section two delves into interdisciplinary perspective that inform ethics and how we think about ethics in engineering and built environment. We discuss philosophy, sociology, decolonization, and critical theory, psychology and moral development, engineering design, law, and the like.

Section three touches on five overarching fields of engineering, with the first chapter on civil engineering holding the most relevance for architects. The areas of focus vary quite widely across the disciplines. Even as an architect, I found reading the entire set fascinating.

Section four on teaching methods can be extremely helpful for any educator wanting to integrate ethics into the modules they teach. We look at case studies, problem- and challenge-based learning, value-sensitive design, humanitarian engineering, arts-based, reflective and dialogical approaches. These aren’t mutually exclusive and as an architecture teacher, I combine these methods daily.

Still from video of me discussing the handbook at the end of February at NewGiza University

Assessment is perhaps the most challenging topic in the book. What are we seeking to assess in students with regard to ethics? How can we gauge students’ ethical competencies? What is the role of values, of culture?

The final section, on accreditation, is not as confined to engineering as you might expect. It critiques the increasingly globalized approach to education promoted by engineering accreditation bodies and global accords seeking to align engineering practices globally. The section questions whose voices get heard, whose have been ignored, and what we might be overlooking. We look at the history of ethics accreditation, how various cultures define what students should be able to demonstrate (social justice appeared in only Columbia’s documents of 12 countries studied). We end the book with a fascinating critical feminist standpoint analysis and a critique of how to personalize entities education to fit the local context.

Our engineering ethics education community welcomes you to get involved with us in applying and extending the contents of this book.

On behalf of TU Dublin, on March 24-26, I’m hosting an Ethics Spring Symposium about the book in Dun Loaghaire. You’re welcome to join us for a day or more. Just ask me for more info.

Colleagues including TU Dublin’s Emma Geoghegan and Noel Brady kicking off AIARG by presenting the Building Change project.

Featured by shannonchance

Explore the New Handbook for Engineering Ethics Teaching

The Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education, chock full of helpful research on teaching engineering students about ethics, will be published on December 4, 2024!

Over the past two years, I have edited this book in collaboration with five outstanding ethics scholars. Seeing it through to completion is one of the proudest achievements of my professional life.

The project involved 105 authors from around the globe. I led it alongside Tom Børsen, who immediately embraced the idea of a handbook.

The digital version of the book is already available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003464259

We paid the publication fee so that you can read it for free! We wanted to give everyone with a digital device an equal chance, regardless of where they live.

Of course, you are also welcome to order a hard-back print copy of the book from the link above. A discount is currently available. Moreover, a paperback version will be available in 18 months.

The book has six sections:

SECTION 1: Foundations of engineering ethics education (7 chapters)

SECTION 2: Interdisciplinary contributions to engineering ethics education (6 chapters)

SECTION 3: Ethical issues in different engineering disciplines (5 chapters)

SECTION 4: Teaching methods in engineering ethics education (7 chapters)

SECTION 5: Assessment in engineering ethics education (6 chapters)

SECTION 6: Accreditation and engineering ethics education (5 chapters)

The editorial team is pictured below (left to right): Gunter Bombaert, Roland Tormey, Shannon Chance, Tom Børsen, Diana Adela Martin, and Thomas Taro Lennerfors. It’s been a dream team!

This handbook was a project of the Ethics Special Interest Group (SIG) of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). SEFI members made it possible by contributing to their transcontinental networks of colleagues.

We editors started by sending out a survey, as far and wide as possible, to find out who was working in the field and might be interested in authoring a chapter. We held online workshops to identify what topics should be included and structured them into chapters. We invited a lead author for each chapter and asked the lead to invite three others to co-write the chapter. We asked that the chapter team have people from different places on it, and we aimed for transcontinental teams where feasible. We also asked the lead to consider specific people who had expressed interest in the topic. Our team ultimately included people of diverse levels and fields of experience and good geographical distribution. The people on many of the teams had not worked together before. Many lead authors served as mentors for early career researchers. We held numerous meetings online with the led authors of each section to cross-check, coordinate, and challenge our own thinking. The editorial team met weekly throughout most of the process, and the final result reflects the strong and knowledgeable engagement of many leaders in the field. Our team conducted a rigorous internal peer review, and the publisher conducted its own peer review twice during the process. Here’s what the reviewers said about our proposal:

“I believe this is a state-of-the-art milestone.”

“The lead authors are the key people in this vibrant community, and they have recruited a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of international authors for the handbook. This is the right time and the right people. It’s the dream team.”

“This would become the resource in this field.”

The final result is a true masterpiece, and I hope you’ll read at least some of it because the content is quite fascinating!

The Ethics SIG also hosts a Spring School around Easter every year, and this year, the theme of the Spring Symposium is “Growing the Field of Engineering Ethics Education and Research as a Community.” I am the local host for this March 2025 event, and we will spend the three days celebrating, applying, and extending the handbook’s content. Learn more about the Symposium and submit your interest in attending at this link: https://forms.gle/WngZ3DMi97FLtQaZ8

Date: 24-26 March 2025 (9:00-17:30 each day)

Location: Royal Marine Hotel, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland

Organiser: Shannon Chance (shannon.chance@tudublin.ie)

Capacity: 50 participants maximum

Whether or not you can join us in Dún Laoghaire, I hope you’ll peruse the content of this outstanding new resource and reach out to the editors and authors if you’d like more information or to get involved in what we do!

I am confident that this handbook will make a significant global contribution to engineering education. I therefore urge all engineering and architecture educators to become more explicitly involved in learning and teaching about ethics.

Featured by shannonchance

Elected: SEFI Board of Directors

The European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) announced the results of recent voting. I’ve been elected to serve on this prestigious organization’s Board of Directors for three years! Many thanks to Mike Murphy, former SEFI President and TU Dublin Dean, for prompting me to run, and to Una Beagon (TU Dublin), Inês Direito (UCL), and Tom Børsen (Aalborg University) for formally endorsing my candidacy. This post gives you a peek into my:

Colleagues on the Board
Motivation Statement
Candidacy Video

Colleagues on the Board

I met several other candidates at an August orientation meeting organized by the SEFI Director General, Klara Ferdova, including incoming Board members Stefan Krusche (who created a really inspiring candidate video!) and Annoesjka Cabo.

Darren Carthy, from Engineers Ireland, who earned his PhD at TU Dublin and has been part of TU Dublin’s CREATE research group with me, was also elected.

Helena Kovacs, an author of a chapter in the handbook I recently edited, was too.

I’ll serve under the leadership of the effervescent Nagy Balázs (President) and the energetic and accomplished Emanuela Tilley and Greet Langie (Vice Presidents). Sitting SEFI Board members who I look forward to collaborating with include Inês Direito and Roland Tormey.

Shannon Chance facilitating a workshop at SEFI 2024

Motivation to Serve

I first joined this community in 2012 at the SEFI conference in Thessaloniki, where I enjoyed a welcome so warm and enthusiastic that I decided to stay in Europe and embrace engineering education research (EER). I left behind a tenured professorship in the United States to join this vibrant community dedicated to enhancing learning and teaching engineering across Europe, and indeed influencing how engineering is taught far beyond Europe’s borders.

Group photo of participants (mentors and mentees) at the 2024 SEFi Doctoral Symposium, organized by Jonte Bernhard, Kristina Edström, Tinne de Laet, and Shannon Chance.

In my letter of motivation for this role, I highlighted three recent experiences that helped me prepare for the Board:

Chairing REEN – as part of the Research in Engineering Education Network’s Governing Board and its Chair for multiple years, I grew new skills and made positive contributions by significantly expanding REEN’s geographic representation, leading capacity-development initiatives (spawning EERN-Africa and organizing a series of capacity-building workshops for the nascent organization), supporting the delivery of REES (our bi-annual Symposium), and co-organizing events like the Big-EER Meet Up at the outset of the pandemic.
Cultivating our community’s publication skills by serving SEFI’s European Journal of Engineering Education as Deputy Editor, organizing and delivering workshops and doctoral symposia to the SEFI community to support newcomers to EER, guest editing special issues of IEEE Transactions on Education and the Australasian Journal of Engineeirng Educaiton (AJEE), and mentoring emerging scholars (as an individual and via SEFI and JEE).
Engaging with SEFI as a participant and leader – serving on the steering boards of the special interest groups for Ethics, Diversity and Inclusion, and Research Methods, helping organize the SEFI 2024 conference at TU Dublin, attending and presenting at Spring Schools, and – most recently – serving as co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education.

I sought to join the Board to:

Nurture collaboration and facilitate more mentoring and capacity-building programmes for teachers and researchers in engineering education.
Help educators infuse ethics and sustainability across engineering curricula.
Enhance diversity and inclusion in SEFI – for instance by developing additional channels for bringing people from Eastern European countries into SEFI and supporting SEFI members from low-income countries in participating fully in SEFI activities.

With my collaborative, can-do spirit — and my keen passion for supporting students’ design, epistemological, and identity development — I will use the EER projects I have underway on these topics to inform and enhance my work with the SEFI Board.

Candidacy Video

You can view my candidacy video, which I recorded between conferences in Mexico during summer 2024:

Featured by shannonchance

Capacity and Community Building as an Editor of a Special Issue on Engineering Mathematics Education

With a team of experts from four continents, I led the development of a newly published special issue of IEEE Transactions on Education on the “Conceptual Learning of Mathematics-Intensive Concepts in Engineering.” The issue has nine articles covering three categories: assessment, instruction, and learning.

If you teach mathematics concepts to engineering students, you’ll definitely want to check it out!

On assessment, you can discover principles for designing rubrics. Regarding instruction, you can learn (a) how textbooks differ in their explanations of differential equations and (b) how concept maps can support the transfer of learning. You can read about (c) integrating real-life engineering examples into mathematics education, (d) using e-Textbooks, and (e) using software to help students bridge the gap between procedural skills and conceptual understanding of the Laplace transform. On the theme of learning, find out how to overcome misconceptions regarding (a) Stoke’s theorem, (b) exact differentials, and (c) sample mean.

I served as the organizational lead, and endeavored to support my team in learning journal-editing skills. Dr Farrah Fayyaz (working from Canada) served as the project’s conceptual lead. Dr Anita Campbell (South Africa), Dr Nicole Pitterson (USA), and Dr Sadia Nawaz (Australia) were also instrumental in producing such a high quality compilation.

As described in our guest editorial for this special issue, our leadership team implemented a range of innovative, collaborative models for capacity- and community-building while shepherding this project from conception to completion. My own focus was on cultivating these models, as mathematics education is not a primary focus of mine (although it is for the other four editors). The capacity-building model, and the recommendations for IEEE and other editors of special issues that are included in the guest editorial, were my primary contributions with this project, and a source of pride and joy for me.

I look forward to the future compilations that Farrah, Anita, Nicole, and Sadia will curate. Together, the editorial team hopes to read many more articles in this cutting-edge realm of research, and watch the ongoing success of the authors who participated in our capacity- and community-building activities.

(AI-generated image)

Featured by shannonchance

Meaningful moments in Mexico City: Coyoacán, Teotihuacán, Xochimilco canal boats, Barragan, Kahlo, and more!

My colleague Emma Geoghegan and I spent the most magical three days in Mexico City with the family of my PhD student, Sandra Ireri Cruz Moreno.

On Sunday morning, following the ASCA conference, a short night’s sleep, and a tasty “petite dejune” at a French cafe in Querétaro — and with organizational assistance from Sandra — Emma and I boarded a bus headed to north Mexico City.

Sandra and her family met us at the bus station. Sandra’s lovely dad, Jose, brought a second car to the station so our luggage could go directly to their home while we went sightseeing in the other family automobile.

That was both very thoughtful and exceptionally fortunate, because I had bumped into a colleague from the ACSA conference, Ayad from Washington State, at the bus station. I asked Sandra by text if we could invite him along with us for the day. Ayad wanted to see the pyramids and was having trouble arranging transportation. We managed to squeeze six people into the family car!

We arrived at Teotihuacán with two hours explore. The State of Mexico explains, “Teotihuacan is a vast Mexican archaeological complex northeast of Mexico City. Running down the middle of the site, which was once a flourishing pre-Columbian city, is the Avenue of the Dead. It links the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun, the latter two with panoramic views from their summits.” (Although we didn’t make it to the Museum of Teotihuacan Culture in time to see the artifacts that “include pottery and bones,” I was able to see these type of artifacts later in my trip.)

As the pyramids closed for the day, our merry little band headed for a nearby cave restaurant, applauding Sandra’s magnificent planning skills. Our meals arrived in clay pots. These and the guacamole were tasty and delicious! The restaurant staff explained the spiritual beliefs surrounding the place and we lit candles in honor of our ancestors.

Dropping Ayad at his hotel, we proceeded to Sandra’s parents’ home in a neighborhood of Coyoacán, where Emma and I spent three nights. It was lots of fun getting to know Sandra’s family and learning about Mexican culture!

Everyone in the family is vivacious and full of joy. They enjoy sharing food and conversation and learning about other people. We had many meals at home with (papa) Jose and (mama) Vice (ve-say). Staying in their home and getting to know them was a rare treat!

On the second day, Sandra and Jose brought us to tour Luis Barragan’s home and studio. We thank our TU Dublin colleagues for insisting that we visit some Barragan projects! His home and studio are stunning and so well connected to the landscape. Immensely peaceful and beautifully furnished. The spaces and threshold conditions are truly breathtaking. This ranks at the top of all houses I’ve visited, an assessment shared by Emma.

The garden across from the Barragan house was also stunning. We visited it before the house tour, after a brief walk around the neighborhood.

Following the house visit, we toured the central city by car, enjoyed lunch at a vegetarian restaurant with Jose and Sandra, drove past the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and visited the Plaza of Three Cultures with ruins of Aztec pyramids and a colonial church built from stones taken (stolen) from it.

After resting and catching up on work a bit at the family home, we went for a meal out in the center of Coyoacán, the “Coyote place,” where Frida Kahlo lived her early and late life. The town has lovely, spacious, bench-filled, and festively illuminated public plazas and we enjoyed tacos and mariachi. Sandra even danced for us! Being surrounded and serenaded by seven musicians and a dancing sociologist was a truly remarkable experience!

At every step, Sandra navigated the way and cheerfully achieved her ambitious plans to make our visit seamless and deeply meaningful. She has a charming way of convincing people to help find a way where needed, and that proved immensely valuable.

For each morning of our stay, breakfast was an elaborate family affair, with all members of the family cooking and chipping in to (1) care for baby Nicholas (who turned 20 months old on our final day here) and (2) feed two curious foreigners with a wide array of Mexican food types.

The meals and the camaraderie were remarkable. Sandra, her husband Carlos, and her parents all have such passion for learning and sharing. Emma and I absorbed many valuable lessons about the diverse language and cultural groups in Mexico, and about pre-Colonial Mexico, Spanish colonialism, and the blending overtime with Mexico’s indigenous peoples. (Querétaro where we’d been for our conference, has many spectacular colonial buildings, for instance, but also benefits from local culture pre-dating the area’s invasion by Spain.)

Painting by Vice’s sister of a revolutionary.

In the cracks and crevices of our stay, Emma and I managed to keep our work on track, too. I had a meeting with colleagues at University College London and Newgiza University online Tuesday morning. I also managed to submit a couple peer reviews that I’d completed while flying to Mexico.

On our final day in Mexico City, we headed with Carlos, Nicholas, and Sandra to the UNAM university campus (where our colleague Dino from the ACSA conference is Dean of Architecture). Both Sandra and Carlos studied on this campus.

UNAM has 300,000 students—just imagine that! They have a famous library building by an Irish-Mexican architect, Juan O’Gorman. There were many tourists and tour groups visiting the exterior of Gorman’s library building while we were. And although the campus buildings were closed for break, there was plenty to enjoy with the lively facades, architectural forms, mosaics, and well-kept grounds. These were lovely to behold.

The largest faculty at UNAM is philosophy and all the students seem socially motivated. The art on campus reinforces this theme of social activism. And it resonates with Sandra’s dad, a retired sociologist, as well. Incidentally, Sandra’s mum is a retired doctor and their house is above her former clinic. Their home and neighborhood were very interesting to see!

A construction by architecture students.

After touring campus, we visited the San Angel neighborhood to see three houses designed by Juan O’Gorman. One was for himself, and the other two (joined by a bridge) for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The two artists lived in separate houses, joined only by the roof-level bridge, three stories in the air. This pair sits on a lot beside O’Gorman’s own home. The three make a nice assembly. They’re in an upscale neighborhood and fenced off with an aesthetically pleasing row of cacti.

Homes of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Juan O’Gorman.

Next, our hosts brought us to a former-courtyard house designed by Luis Baragan that has been turned into a restaurant. The most dramatic feature was the glass floor, providing views into the volcanic terrain below the house. There’s also a large yoga room in the complex that I’d love to give a try!

We wrapped up the day with a visit to Xochimilco Ecological Park next to Coyoacán, near the home of Vice and Jose. In the park, we took a ride in a colorful flat-bottomed boat.

Boat ride at Xochimilco Ecological Park.

Then we walked around and visited a demonstration garden that uses pre-Spanish technology for growing produce and flowers. Mexico City is on land reclaimed (infilled) from lakes. Xochimilco still has its lake, whereas the other lakes are entirely gone—which has created havoc for the water table and aquifers of the area.

In order to farm on water, ancient inhabitants developed floating gardens atop mat-raft foundations covered with soil. Early examples of this construction type were rectangle-shaped floating gardens separated by canals for transporting goods to market, although this demonstration garden is fixed in place and circular in form. Nearby are thousands of booths of flower sellers who still cultivate the land and water.

Ecological Park of Xochimilco and agricultural exhibition garden.

Because the park closed, we headed home and had light dinner with the family.

The next morning we enjoyed one final, magnificent breakfast with our hosts. Then Carlos, Sandra, and Nicholas drove us onto our next adventures.

They saw me off from the Mexico South bus terminal and Emma from the international airport where she flew home to join friends and family for a trip to one of Ireland’s Aran islands.

What spectacular and heartfelt memories Emma and I now bring with us — these experiences will enrich our work as architectural educators, researchers, program leads, and curriculum developers. We are grateful to Sandra, Carlos, Vice, Jose, and Nicholas for sharing their lives with us!

Featured by shannonchance

Studying architecture in Mexico with Emma and ASCA

I spent last week exploring architectural topics and sites in Mexico, alongside my TU Dublin colleague and Head of Architecture, Emma Geoghegan.

Early morning walk to the conference venue.

Emma and I met up in Mexico, to attend a three-day conference in Querétaro, a UNECSO world heritage city and one with a population similar in size to our home base of Dublin, Ireland.

The conference was hosted by the Technológico de Monterrey and the US-based Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). I was a member of ACSA from 1999-2014, when I taught architecture in the States. I have represented ACSA with the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) and am still invited to serve annually, though the trip to the USA is prohibitively long.

Yet, this summer, I wanted to attend the organization’s conference to reconnect with ACSA, brush up on my architectural vocabulary and earn continuing education credits to support my Virginia-based architecture license, extend my professional network into Latin America, and learn more about the homeland of my PhD student, Sandra Cruz.

I asked Emma to join me for the trip, and she submit a paper to ACSA that was successful and, subsequently, very well received! Based on her submission, she was also invited to serve on an international panel of architectural education leaders (administrators and deans). She presented her ideas to the entire assembly of this ACSA International conference!

Emma’s work and her engaging delivery were a hit in both sessions. Her paper presentation garnered a packed, standing-room only, no-more-space-to-enter-the-room crowd. This was likely due to the popularity of both her engaging panel discussion and her paper topic (educational transformation for resilience and long-term sustainability, with a focus on housing and environment).

But before all the sessions got rolling, on Thursday morning, Emma and I started our conference experience with an Open House tour. Architects and developers from Querétaro taught us about the architectural and urban design history of the city and brought us to visit several contemporary architectural projects. We got to tour a mixed-use housing project, an environmentally sensitive adaptive reuse project, and a courtyard house turned into an art museum that was chock full of artistic treasures that combine painterly style with contemporary themes!

The Open House tour was followed by an opening reception and keynote address in Querétaro’s very famous and protected Teatro de la Republica where (at least part of) the country’s constitution was signed. The keynote by Tatiana Bilbao was thought-provoking, with the architect advocating liberation from named or pre-determined programmatic elements, to produce evocative enclosures for inhabitants to mold and adapt. The open reception was at another architectural heritage site, the Museo Regional de Querétaro.

The second day started with the Deans’ panel on “tradition and radical innovation” that included Emma, followed by paper sessions. I attended the sessions on “Future + Post-Industrial Cities.” These two sessions were held at the university’s modern campus on the outskirts Querétaro. We travelled there and back by bus.

After a relaxing lunch break, we enjoyed afternoon paper sessions in a magnificent former cloister now used as the Mueso de Arte de Querétaro. I attended “Spatial Decoding: Beyond Measurement” and “Experiments for Urban Futures.”

The entire time, Emma and I were meeting lovely and passionate architecture educators from Mexico, the US, and Canada, as well as graduate students from around the world. We also got to know and admire the host for the next iteration of this ASCA International conference that will be held in Brisbane, Liz Brogden.

Liz, Emma, and I were guests of the conference organizers for tapas and drinks Friday night at Hercules, a former textile factory converted into an entertainment venue. We had the pleasure to sit between Michael Monti, the executive director of ACSA, and Luis Francisco Rico-Gutierrez, Dean of Architecture at Iowa State, who brought this conference to his hometown of Querétaro. Luis carefully assembled a conference program with cultural, social, urban, and critical feminist underpinnings.

ACSA Director, Michael Monti, who has a doctorate in philosophy and expertise in Heideggerian phenomenology!

Bravo to these leaders for pulling off such a magnificent event in collaboration with the local organizers, including Roberto Íñiguez Flores, and the DC-based ACSA team!

Programming for the third day ran 9 AM to 10 PM. We attended paper sessions, including Emma’s, at the Centro de las Artes de Querétaro Santa Risa de Viterbo. We started off with “New Imaginaries, Speculations, Machinations” where Emma spoke. Then I attended “Housing, Dwelling and Domesticities.”

After lunch I attended “DESIGNING DISSENT: Feminist Counternarratives in the City.” This critical feminist urbanism panel session was particularly insightful. It was held with one presentation in English and two in Spanish. There were AI-generated English subtitles at the second of these, but for the one without subtitles, I put my Duolingo to work.

I have been studying Spanish using Duolingo for 254 days now, in preparation for this trip. I understand reasonably well, although I can’t yet speak in Spanish. My elementary knowledge of Italian interferes with my ability to start sentences in Spanish, but I persevere. The helpful slide images helped me deduce more complex meanings.

I also attended “Co-creation with AI.” Then, this third and final day wrapped up with an all-conference panel on contemporary issues in Mexican design at the outdoor amphitheater at the cloistered museum. The title was “ILLUMINATING THE OVERLOOKED: Unconventional Practices for Responsible Futures.”

The AI session included a presentation on utopias.

The closing reception was held at the Museo de Arte de Querétaro courtyard. After it, Emma, Liz and I headed for a last supper together that didn’t end until after midnight. We’re learning Spanish ways!

As a side note, I always try to stay central and conserve my budgets when I select hotels regardless of who is paying. This was no exception and I picked a cheap and cheery courtyard hotel in the city’s historic core. It is nestled among the cultural heritage conference venues. Thankfully Emma is the best of sports and appreciated the authenticity as it was, as you’ll recall, cheap and cheery. It is surrounded by nice eateries which we enjoyed.

Thanks a million to everyone who contributed to the organization of this conference — including Luis, Roberto, and ACSA’s Michael, Michelle, Eric, and Danielle — and to the local students, architects, teachers, and residents who came out in force. Their enthusiasm and collective effort made our visit to Querétaro extraordinary special.

Emma and I look forward to seeing all our new ASCA colleagues — Sharon, Dino, Liz, Luis, Mariam, Diana, Ifioma, Faye, Tania, Jori, Erandi, and many others — at the ACSA International meeting in Brisbane in 2026!

Featured by shannonchance

Discovering Portland with ASEE

My colleague Diana Martin wanted to attend this year’s American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in Portland, so I submitted a proposal to organize a panel on our forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education. The panel got accepted but Diana couldn’t travel—thus I made the trip alone.

Traveling solo forced me out of my shell (I don’t chat much with strangers when traveling).

Another benefit was that, since Diana had insisted on flying via Seattle, I saw the Pacific Northwest scenery for the first time.

I scheduled myself a day upon arrival, before the conference started, to adjust to the time zone (but it took much more than a day). I’d booked a “shoebox” room at a hip hotel in a shabby-but-central neighborhood and I had the great fortune of arriving after all the shoeboxes were occupied.

I got upgraded to a spacious and luxurious room at the Hoxton in Chinatown! Although I wouldn’t recommend the Hoxton’s location for a woman traveling solo due to the night scene on the surrounding streets, I kept my wits about me and used high levels of caution, and I cane through unscathed. I took an Uber after my division’s evening social the last night because the sun was setting, making it too late to risk walking alone.

Dramatic scenery off the tip of my Alaska Air wing.

With the extra day, I got to explore the city a bit before ASEE kicked off.

My hotel, right at the gate to Chinatown.

I bit the bullet and paid $16 to enter the Chinese Garden, after the $25 to visit the modern art. Expensive! But very interesting!

I also wandered the streets in the Pearl District.

I found my way to the city’s hilltop park, with its Holocaust monument and Rose Garden. My calendar alerts pulled me back to reality. Before I could enter the Japanese Garden, I had to scurry to the conference center by bus.

The best part of every ASEE, to me, is the Division Mixer, followed by Taste of the Town, on opening night. It’s the best time to find everyone in one place.

With friends from SEFI Summer School, Xiaoqi Feng and Hanna Aarnio, and Michael Loui, former chief editor of JEE.

The main reason I made the trip was to meet with the authors of the ethics handbook. The conference organizers provided a very snall room in a satellite building, so the audience really had to work to locate us. But some found the way, as did our authors. About 20 (of our 105 authors) attended this 2024 ASEE conference and 15 served in our panel. It was truly delightful to meet them all—many for my first time!

I know their work though—and I have read, and copy edited, every one of their chapters. Such exceptional work they contributed!

Here’s who presented chapter number (section number and chapter topic included:

Kari Zacharias, 3(1) individual and collective

Jeff Brown, 5(1) professional organizations and codes

Shannon Chance, 6(1) environment

Julianna Gesun, 10(2) psychological foundations

Susan Lord, 16(3) electrical and electronic engineering

Dayoung Kim, 17(3) chemical engineering

Stephanie Lunn, 18(3) software engineering

Madeline Polmear, 19(4) lit review of teaching methods

Aditya Johri, 20(4) case studies

Adetoun Yeaman with Bill Oakes, 23(4) service and humanitarian

Sarah Hitt, 24(4) arts-based

Adetoun Yeaman, 27(5) attitudes and character

Sarah Junaid, 30(5)

Rockwell Clancy, 31(5) behavior and culture

Sarah Junaid with Madeline Polmear, 33(6) contextual mapping

Madeline Polmear, 34(6) licensure

Jillian Seniuk Cicek, with Robyn Mae Paul and Donna Riley, 35(6) feminist critical analysis

I attended sessions of the Ethics and Architectural Engineering divisions. I also took a walking tour with Architecture colleagues to study the bridges of Portland.

Overall, I enjoyed ASEE this year more than I had expected. It was a bit smaller than last year’s conference (when over 5000 people attended) and the smaller size was welcome. I also knew many of the PhD students who attended — far more than shown in the pics (Eugene, Luis, Siqing, Em)…. I either got carried away in the moment and neglected to take photographs, or some selfies I thought I took disappeared. (Or, maybe, my selfie thumb let me down!)

Until next time, the memories will have to do.

Here’s to a successful meet up! Maybe I’ll see you, too, next year at ASEE in Montreal?

Featured by shannonchance

New Deputy Editor for EJEE

I’m part of a truly amazing team of journal editors leading the European Journal of Engineering Education.

I’ve been serving for the past couple years as Deputy Editor of EJEE, alongside Professor/Dr Jonte Bernhard and our fabulous Editor-in-Chief, Dr Kristina Edström.

Under Kristina’s lead, the journal has truly excelled. The latest Scopus data show EJEE’s ranking increasing from 150/1469 (89th percentile) to 115/1543 (92nd percentile) in the past year. The journal’s Citescore increased in this period from 5.8 to 7.3 due to a couple of very insightful and popular articles. It will be a challenge to maintain these ranking—but, as we’re firmly about supporting authors and providing useful, scholarly publications for our community, high rankings are icing on the cake, but not our central focus.

In my time as Deputy, I have helped bring several valuable members to the editorial team, one being Dr Diana Adela Martin (who was just named one of seven star reviewers for the US-based Journal of Engineering Education for 2023) and, more recently, Dr Matheus Oliveira De Andrade. Both of these early-career scholars currently work at UCL, although Diana accepted the role of Associate Editor prior to joining UCL.

The work these two have been doing as Associate Editors for EJEE is exceptional!

Shannon, Mat (right behind me) and friends at SEFI Ethics Spring School 2024, in Berlin this past March.

Mat leads the maths education at UCL Engineering, teaching over 800 entering engineering students *at once* each year! At EJEE (and on special projects I’ve led for other journals) Mat provides extremely relevant, accurate, helpful, and high quality feedback as a peer reviewer. He’s knowledgeable about qualitative ressearch methods but he’s been absolutely crucial to moving EJEE’s quantitative (statistical) work forward. In this realm he knows many things the rest of the community needs to learn. He has insight, vision, and a passion for helping people and nurturing their success.

Yesterday, Kristina and I met with Mat to discuss training events and support materials geared toward aspiring authors, as well as editors and peer reviewers.

Three happy EJEE editors after yesterday’s meeting!

His ideas, experience, and knowledge wowed Kristian and me—again!

And as a result, Matheus Oliveira De Andrade has just been appointed Deputy Editor of EJEE!

I am elated that Mat accepted this role! I can’t wait to support the roll-out of his initiatives. (His enthusiasm is contagious, as is his smile!)

In November 2024, we will launch the online training for authors—stay tuned for details. This is an opportunity no one in engineering education research will want to miss!

Featured by shannonchance

Discovering Belfast with EERN UK & Ireland

Believe it or not, I’ve never visited Belfast. Well, I did once tour the Titanic Museum and the dry dock where the Titanic was constructed—was engineered. But I’ve never come to the city itself, and my subtle avoidance has stemmed from my Irish Republic ideals. For the sane reasons, Aongus has also never visited the city, despite living in this tiny island most of his life.

Now, engineering has brought me to Belfast. The past couple of days, I’ve been part of the 2024 symposium of the Engineering Education Research Network (EERN) for the UK and Ireland.

Hats off to EERN bringing these countries together to celebrate and enhance engineering through meaningful education! EERN UK welcomed their Irish cousins in formally around a decade ago, updating their name to include both “sides” of Ireland.

Kicking off the event with organizers Alan and Roger.

Ulster University’s Alan Brown hosted us downtown—for two days of conversation “Beyond Boundaries: Inclusive, Sustainable and Outward Looking Engineering Education”. What a fabulous theme! Alan did a phenomenal job organizing and shepherding this event.

During EERN, my PhD student Sandra Cruz presented a thread of her research, and Diana Martin and I facilitated a workshop/panel discussion on the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education with authors Dr Sarah Hitt and Dr Natalie Wint.

The handbook panel facilitated by Diana Martin and myself, with author panelists Sarah Hitt and Nat Wint.

I caught up with dozens of people I’ve collaborated with in the past, and made new friends and colleagues who I’ll complete projects with in coming years.

I also discovered the beauty of Belfast. I immediately phoned Aongus when I arrived and discussed traveling here together in the fall.

The train journey here provided spectacular scenery and the city is lively and architecturally significant. There are also many lovely public spaces.

It’s nice to find new nooks and crannies to explore on this isle, and I have many adventures and collaborations to anticipate.

Learning about the Ethics and Sustainability Toolkit with Sarah Hitt and Emma Crichton.

Thanks Alan, Roger, Becky, Jane, EERN, and Ulster University for a top-notch platform for engaging discussion!

Featured by shannonchance

Living like royalty at SEFI Summer School 2024

Four days of learning and laughing at Cumberland Lodge at the UK’s Great Windsor Park—the hallmarks of a great event!

The UCL Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) hosted the 2024 doctoral Summer School on engineering education research (EER). It was second doctoral Summer School delivered via SEFI, the European Society for Engineering Education. The first Summer School, held in 2022, was organized by SEFI Vice President Greet Langie, and conducted at the Irish College of KU Leuven in Belgium.

The UCL team organizing the 2024 event sought to provide a collaborative learning environment similar to 2022’s event. We selected Cumberland Lodge, a former royal residence dating back to the 17th century that is used today for educational programs for young people. The Lodge promotes discussions around ethics and social justice.

Cumberland Lodge is surrounded by the vast Windsor Great Park. Windsor Castle is located at one end of the Great Park, beside the village of Windsor. It is a spectacular place — a real joy to experience and a tranquil sanctuary just outside the borders of London.

To facilitate the 2024 School, John Mitchell of UCL brought together current and past UCL staff. He also welcomed guest experts from the US and Australia who volunteered to help. Together, our team provided structured training for this year’s 29 PhD student-participants. The students are all working on research degrees in engineering education, and they travelled to Windsor from across Europe and indeed across the globe.

In addition to representing perspectives from various corners of Europe, participants also brought experiences living and studying in South Africa, Mexico, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Iran, the USA, and elsewhere!

Sid and our gang at the end of the week.

Overall, the UCL team hosting, organizing, and facilitating the 2024 Summer School included exemplars Prof. John Mitchell, Dr. Diana Adela Martin, Prof. David Guile, Dr. Natalie Wint, and our centre manager Helen Bhandri. UCL honorary appointees Dr. Inês Direito and I (Prof. Shannon Chance) also pitched in wholeheartedly, facilitating several sessions each and supporting sessions conducted by others by, for example, facilitating discussion in breakout groups. Inês is now employed at the University of Aveiro and I at TU Dublin, yet we are always treated as full member of the CEE team. John Mitchell is an incredible leader who enables us, helps keep us officially recognized as honorary (researcher and professor, respectively) and helps achieve cohesion across our team.

From beyond UCL, Prof. Greet Langie (SEFI Vice President) and Dr. Jan Peters, MBE (a consultant with Katalytick in the UK) provided informative and engaging sessions. Prof. Anne Gardner (an Associate Dean who is involved with the Australasian Association for Engineering Education, AAEE) and Dr. Diana Bairaktarova (Associate Professor at Virginia Tech) participated fully as well, and helped facilitate breakout groups throughout the week.

Since finishing the event, the CEE team has received thank you notes from many of the participants. One came from Sid and another from Yash. They are studying at Purdue University, and I met them both at REES in India this past January.

Yash wrote to say that “As a first-year Ph.D. student and new entrant into the field, I felt warmly welcomed into the European Society of Engineering Educators and thoroughly absorbed in the program and its activities.” He praised “the design of the activities and the schedule,” which he said “offered a great balance of information and a chance to reflect and discuss with other members during the afternoon walks or even during the evening free time.”

Yash also loved the evening quiz that Diana Martin facilitated. She had contacted EER superstars and requested photos from their grad school days. Guessing their identities was a hoot, and Yash said the activity “was very creative and personally valuable because it gave me an opportunity to see [these well-known scholars] when they were my age or starting their careers in research.” He praised the way Diana, “filled the room with … energy and enthusiasm made the activity come to life” and I couldn’t agree more!

Yash described the value of elements from the workshops Inês and I conducted on literature reviews and positionality statements, as well, and also the sessions on ethics by Diana Martin, Nat Wint, and Cumberland Lodge staff.

During the week, I also delivered session on the structure of dissertations, differences in the way PhD education is structured around the Western world, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and research paradigms — and another on incorporating gender considerations in your research and teaching. The first of these two sessions included small group discussions and a debate comparing the merits of qualitative and quantitative research.

John Mitchell and the UCL team provided guidance on selecting journals to publish in, preparing articles for publication, and conducting peer reviews. David Guille delivered a highly provocative session on “assembling your theoretical lens.” Earlier in the week, Greet provided the opening welcome to the school and a brief orientation to SEFI. Jan taught us about CliftonStrengths and facilitated a race-car-building competition.

David Guile on assembling theoretical lenses.

Near the end of the week, we provided a session where “all the organizers shared their journeys into the field of engineering education,” which Yash described as “very powerful. … Such exchanges are rare and provide a chance to view the person, the human being behind the researcher. It made me feel that I belong in this field of engineering education because I, too, share similarities and seeing someone who has become successful by overcoming similar challenges is very encouraging.”

I wish we had recorded these stories because they were so rich and heartfelt. A dozen participants came to me on the day following this journey session with thanks for our openness, collegial spirit, and willingness to share what they described as valuable insight.

An example was emailed to us by Alison from the University of Cape Town: “Thank you for a magnificent four days. I so appreciated being part of a community and learning from each of you…. I am inspired and excited to consolidate what I can contribute in South African engineering education…. I also SO appreciated each one of your stories and the way in which you demonstrated a complementary and accepting team – working to one another’s strengths – with space for others to contribute. It makes for an inviting and exhilarating ecosystem for us all to grow in.” High praise, indeed, and accurate!

Yash, Sid, and Alison have attended prior engineering education events, but some newcomers to our global EER community were part of this cohort, too — like Somayeh, who is currently studying at Umeå University. You may know that I have a distinct interest in supporting women from the Middle East who study engineering in Europe because I’ve come to know many at TU Dublin.

Somayeh is from Iran, although studying in Sweden today. She wrote “It was an honor for me to have a talk with you and be in your energetic class. I have learned a lot and [the experience] made me challenge myself and rethink about different aspects of my research.”

Following the event, I was delighted to hear from Somayeh’s PhD supervisors, Johanna and Maria. They emailed thanks to our team for taking great “care of our PhD student Somayeh during the summer school. She returned home with a lot of new knowledge, but also greater self-confidence, sense of belonging to the field, and sense of legitimacy as a PhD student. We knew she’d be in the best of hands, and we’d like you to know that your hard work has made a big difference for her (and us as supervisors)!” This I feel is the highest praise possible, and written by a scholar I admire immensely.

I loved my conversations with so many of the students — Luis, Julia, Hannah — the list goes on and on. So many fabulous memories!

It was a huge honor to be part of these emerging scholars’ education and to be so well received and appreciated. It was an invigorating week, and I learned tons myself!

It was also healthy. I enjoyed several enchanting walks through the forest with colleagues. I particularly enjoyed a long walk with Eugene, a PhD student who teaches engineering at a community college in California and studies at Purdue University, and another long walk with the whole cohort. The scenery of this park is spectacular and the conversations were deeply intriguing.

A walk and talk with Eugene. Twin smiles and shared passion for serving ‘non-traditional’ college students.

The peaceful setting with fresh air, healthy food, and collegial banter brought out the best in us all. I will seek to return to this special place.

During the week, I had so much to do. I actually taught two online night classes for BIM students at TU Dublin — as part of my Research Methods module. I’m fortunate to have a knowledgeable colleague, Claire Simpson, helping me deliver the module (particularly since a storm dropped the Thursday night connection several times).

Cumberland Lodge took great care of me, preparing dinner plates Tuesday and Thursday, since my three-hour class overlapped dinner time in the Harry-Potteresque dining room.

Wrapping up the School with Inês and Diana B.

It’s been nine days since the Summer School ended, and honestly, I’m still a bit worn out! I did spend some time exploring London with Inês and Diana B after the School — after all, it was Diana’s first time in London!

And my fabulous partner, Aongus Coughlan join us and also came to meet my colleagues, Dr. Lelanie Smith and Dr. Nicky Wolmarans from South Africa down near the Engineers Professors Council on Savoy Street (before their two-day symposium on integrated engineering curriculum design, also organized by UCL’s CEE). Looking forward to seeing Lelanie and Nicky in South Africa in November 2025 (yes, we plan ahead!)!

In all, the School will go down in my memory as a highlight of 2024 and I couldn’t be happier that John Mitchell included me and that I got to work with this incredible cohort and facilitation team.

Featured by shannonchance

Engineering together in Kos island, Greece

The global EDUCON conference, organized by IEEE (the institution for electrical and electronics engineers) is underway on Kos island, just off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey.

Great to convene with Dr Homero Murzi of Virginia Tech and current Chair of REEN!

I’m here this week with my colleagues Inês Direito (University of Aveiro and UCL), John Mitchell and Diana Martin (UCL). Across the four of us, we’re facilitating 5 of the 16 workshops scheduled for this conference.

Pics from our engineering ethics education handbook workshop — the first session of EDUCON 2024.

We’ve been having a great time connecting with colleagues from the University of Monterey (Mexico), EPFL (Switzerland), India, Singapore, across Europe and the Americas.

Dr Rucha Joshi, who I met in Hubli in January, and her fabulous momma! Just look at our dazzling smiles!

I had great fun interacting with participants at my grants and fellowships workshop, the systematic literature review session I delivered with Inês, the ethics handbook session I delivered with Diana, and supporting the publications and research design workshops spearheaded by John.

Snipet of the workshop on literature reviews with Dr Inês Direito.

I’ve never attended EDUCON before and there’s a more technical bent to it than the more education research focused conferences I typically attend, so I met many new people in addition to reconnecting with friends I mead recently at REES (in India) and SEFI (locations across Europe).

One of our papers (that I co-authored with Inês and John and our colleague Dr Rob Lawlor) hit 10,000 downloads from the publisher’s website during EDUCON. Participants in the breakout group I facilitated for John’s workshop on IEEE publications were super enthusiastic about celebrating this achievement with me! They asked to take my picture—here’s our reenactment of that moment.😊😊😊😊😊

I’m headed home shortly, for end-of-academic-year wrap up and catching up on loads of tasks that have piled up while I was networking and collaboratively generating new knowledge. I’m full of inspiration and optimism!

I even met colleagues organizing the LACCEI conference I’ll attend in Costa Rica this summer, and coordinated to provide a couple extra workshops there, in addition to the papers my PhD student Sandra Cruz and I are delivering.

The grants and fellowships workshop was a ball—we all had good laughs.

Bumping into Dr Jorge Torres Gomez (from Cuba and TU Berlin) during post-conference walk on the beach — a chance to further our discussion about bibliometrics forecasting and survey design.

Featured by shannonchance

Boosting engineering education in Aveiro, the Venice of Portugal

Portugal has vibrant networks of academics engaged in engineering education research. This week, I got to be part of that community, thanks to the generous support of the American Corner, on a four-night visit funded by the US Embassy in Portugal.

In and around the fabulous hotel, located on a canal in Aveiro’s historic center.

Flying into Portugal on Saturday morning, I settled in and toured the area over the weekend with my dear colleague (formerly of UCL) Inês Direito and her partner Gonçalo. Inês and I continually collaborate on research — and our bond grows stronger with each project and every passing year.

Snapshots of our explorations in Aveiro… Inês and Shannon always having a ball!

On Monday morning, I delivered a keynote address on “Boosting Engineering Education: How Research Can Make Engineering Education Better” and then facilitated a hands-on workshop on “Integrating Ethics, Sustainability, and Inclusion in Your Teaching.” In all this, I was the guest of honor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Aveiro (UA).

I was impressed that 25 teachers and students participated in these morning events, as they happened during a week without classes at UA. Despite having the flexibility to work from home this week, people traveled to campus from all across the engineering disciplines at UA — and visitors traveled in from Lisbon, Porto, and Setúbal to partake as well.

Images from campus, the keynote and workshop.

After lunch Monday, the Engineering Education Research team at UA and I headed to the administration building to meet with the university’s Vice-Rector for Research and an expert from UA’s Research Support Office. We discussed grant proposals and laid the foundation for upcoming initiatives that we plan to launch at UA.

Wrapping up that exciting meeting, we skipped across campus to the sleek, modern library, designed by Alvaro Siza, where the American Corner has a recording studio. In a session moderated by Inês, a few of us (Inês, Pedro Fonseca, Anikó Costa, and I) discussed what engineering education is, and why it is crucial for solving societal challenges in the 21st century. We also considered what role interdisciplinary collaboration plays in engineering education, and how can we, in higher education institutions, can facilitate it more effectively. Finally, we chatted about how interested people can get involved in engineering education research.

You can view the recording at: https://www.youtube.com/live/n8CiEIQ5DuI?si=g5Q1y-lunxW45zhz

On air from the American Corner with Inês Direito.

On Tuesday, the EER team and I set to work refining our plans to secure funding for our projects. We had the treat of bumping into a pair of scholars who currently hold the type of grant we aim to secure, and they agreed to share their experience and insight with us. I’m looking forward to meeting them at the end of the summer to learn more!

Reflecting on the visit from the boarding gate at Porto airport, I realized that I’d had the most marvelous time in Aveiro. Every single person I met helped make the trip special—from the driver Casimiro, to Inês and Gonçalo, the hotel staff, Sandra the librarian in charge of the American Corner, to UA’s engineering education research team, the energetic and ever-smiling Robertt, Barbara, Inês, and Carla. Colleagues Bill and Val, and Val’s spouse Frank, all traveled from the Lisbon area for research meetings while I was there, helping make the experience that much more special!

Always learning, with Val, Inês, and Bill!

I am bursting with energy for our upcoming projects, and hopeful what the future might hold for our team.

Featured by shannonchance

Architecture educators in India

The architecture teachers at KLE Tech are really enthusiastic about teaching and about learning to do educational research. A number of them attended the engineering education conferences held at their institution in January — the IUCEE conference on engineering teaching and REES, the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, which focuses on research about engineering teaching.

KLE Tech’s lovely Dipanwita Chakravarty was the most enthusiastic among them, delighted as she was to find an architect speaking on a panel at REES.

That architect was me! 🙂

Dipanwita found me soon after I presented, asking me to meet her architecture colleagues. She spirited me away from the events at REES, to meet Deepa Mane and Rohini Mligi, tour a room archiving their architecture students’ work, and then meet even more colleagues for an animated chat about research and curriculum design. And tea! Such excellent tea!

Here’s a glimpse of that afternoon’s tour and interactions:

In that initial discussion in their faculty boardroom, we talked about different types of research they are doing and their interests surrounding architectural accreditation.

They asked me to help them build momentum and capacity to do education research, as they were enjoying seeing work presented at REES but were not quite sure how this type of research would look in the context of architecture rather than engineering.

We decided we needed a group identity. We envisioned collaborating with the engineering education research center on their campus (which has its own building, as it’s the leader in this realm in India). We also envisioned becoming active members of India’s IUCEE (the corollary of ASEE or SEFI for India).

As a step forward, we asked Dr/Prof Vijayalakshmi M., one of the main organizers of IUCEE and this event, if we could start a special interest group for architecture (and design?) within IUCEE. She was supportive. She gave us the Indian head shake and said: sure, just get started, and let’s see how it grows!

Meeting with Dr/Prof Vijayalakshmi M. about setting up a special interest group in IUCEE.

It was a very satisfying exchange, and I returned to REES for the day, happy and energized. I toured KLE Tech’s building for technical engineering later that day alongside the always-smiling, always-energetic Dipanwita Chakravarty and my colleagues from near and far.

I received a welcome email from Dipanwita with a paper of hers that I am finally getting around to reviewing (there’s be so much to do since I returned home!).

The next morning, the architecture staff spirited me away again!

They’d assembled an even larger group to discuss what education research is, how education research differs from technical research on architecture and engineering (like the work they are already doing on thermal comfort and architectural heritage conservation), and how they can get started doing this new type of research.

Here are the lovely photos they took of that impromptu seminar along with a photo of our whole group after that meeting.

You can see they made me feel like a rock star! The meeting was so much fun.

We’ve had a gap in communication since the conference ended, because I was on the lecture circuit (lol!) and then getting caught up back home and inducting a new cohort of BIM BSc students.

But my KLE architecture colleagues and I plan to hold online meetings in the near future to discuss examples of educational research in architectural education. I’ve agreed to help them envision, plan, and get started conducting education research.

One of the architects in the group emailed me later, asking me to share my own examples.

Reflecting on this request, I fear my own examples in this realm pale in comparison to my engineering education research. Architecture teachers tend to publish conference papers showing how they taught their class, and of these, my favorite among my papers reporting what might (optimistically) be called research-informed teaching or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) would probably be Writing Architecture: The Role of Process Journals in Architectural Education and Beginning with Site in Architectural Education.

However, engineering education research is more rigorous than SOTL.

Although ‘engineering education’ conferences will allow the publication of reports on ‘how I taught my class’, the ‘engineering education research’ journals want empirical research studies. You have to collect and analyze data in a rigorous way. An example of this type of work is the book chapter Designing the Identities of Engineers, for which I collected surveys and compared results statistically between ‘engineering’ and ‘engineering technology’ students. The biggest difference I found, and my team reported, was that the ‘engineering’ students envisioned themselves as designers, whereas the ‘engineering technology’ students did not.

Another worthwhile example is my conference paper, where I first reported the design of the study as the Background and Design of a Qualitative Study on Globally Responsible Decision-Making in Civil Engineering and then published the results in a few different ways. The journal article Above And Beyond: Ethics And Responsibility In Civil Engineering reports what the civil engineers I spoke with discussed about ethics, whereas Opportunities and barriers faced by early-career civil engineers enacting global responsibility provides a more holistic report of what we found overall. The official ‘industry’ report of the study is called the Global Responsibility of Engineering Report and it was published by Engineers without Borders UK.

My primary research group, the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), embraces architects as if they are engineers, which is a reason I identify so strongly with SEFI. Yet, SEFI doesn’t have a special interest group in architecture or architectural engineering, even though the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) does have an Architectural Engineering division. ASEE’s Journal of Engineering Education rarely publishes research on architecture education.

In contrast, SEFI’s European Journal of Engineering Education, for which I am Deputy Editor, has been reviewing an increasing number of articles on architecture and construction-related topics in education. I suspect that’s partially because I have the interest, capacity, and collegial networks to help support such articles’ review, refinement, and publication. But I also have amazing mentors in my Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Kristina Edström, and co-Deputy Editor, Dr. Jonte Bernhard. They are encouraging me to build capacity in this realm. And they understand that building the cadre of reviewers with expertise in this area takes time, patience, and much enthusiasm!

Our merry band of editors has ample patience and enthusiasm!

A past EJEE editors’ dinner in Dublin, with Dr. Kristina Edström and Dr. Jonte Bernhard (right), me and Diana Martin (soon to be appointed Associate Editor after impressing Kristina and Jonte!).

[Edit after posting: SEFI just launched a new journal that does publish SOTL papers, see: https://sefi-jeea.org/index.php/sefijeea/announcement/view/1! It says, “The SEFI Journal of Engineering Education Advancement offers a route to share ideas, emerging research, practice experience and innovations in the engineering education field.”]

In reflecting on what publications I have of my own that truly relate to architecture, I have identified Using Architecture Design Studio Pedagogies to Enhance Engineering Education as a favorite of mine. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to find on search engines and the platform to download it is far from user-friendly. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but you can download it by clicking the title and see how you like it!

Another relevant work of which I am very proud is Comparing the meaning of ‘thesis’ and ‘final year project’ in architecture and engineering education. Yet this paper is more conceptual than empirically based and, thus, isn’t the best place to start the discussion with my colleagues at KLE Tech. I am delighted to report that it’s garnered nearly 1300 views since it was published, just 5.5 months ago.

A good place to start our discussion might actually be Comparing Grounded Theory and Phenomenology, an article I think is one of my best but has a very long and obscure title that I haven’t bored you with here!

My KLE Tech colleagues have a keen interest in architecture accreditation. These days, I am more engaged with engineering accreditation than with architecture accreditation (having uploaded a conference paper earlier today on engineering ethics accreditation, in fact). But in the past, I’ve been quite involved with the USA’s National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), and my colleagues at KLE Tech are using NAAB’s guidelines to help them structure their programs. One day, they may seek affiliate designation from NAAB.

Near the end of REES, I found myself again spirited away to the now-familiar meeting room of KLE Tech’s architecture building to discuss accreditation options with Sharan Goudar and another colleague.

Discussing accreditation with Sharan Goudar (right) and colleague.

A text from Sharan encouraged me to finally craft this blog post, in fact. He responded to my recent blog Why India? Inspired by IUCEE and KLE Tech with a request for me to remember the architects:

Like Sharan, I, too, cherished the moments were shared in Hubli and I look forward to opportunities for more such moments, and a bit of hard (but fun and rewarding) research work, to boot!

My work with VIT Chennai and Dr. Nithya Venkatesan of the Internationalization Office may enable another trip to India, and I will make every effort to include a flight across to KLE Tech’s architecture department while I’m there.

These KLE architecture teachers are lovely, lovely people, and I look forward to getting to know them better and collaborating with them in both research and teaching.

Featured by shannonchance

My favorite Chartered Construction Manager

If you’ve known me long, then you have gotten to know my partner, Aongus, over the years. It’s likely that you know we like to enjoy life and have a good time….

But you also likely know we’re hard workers! We love learning new things, stretching, and exercising our skills.

Today, I am taking the opportunity to brag about this lovely fellow.

He started working on a new credential during the Covid lockdown, earning it just before Christmas. He’s now officially a Chartered Construction Manager and a full Member of the Chartered Institute of Building in Ireland and the UK. He gets to use the letters after his name:

Mr. Aongus Coughlan, MCIOB

This is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in the European system (the Level 7 ordinary bachelor on the Irish framework), so it represents a boatload of work. When he sat for the five-day exam, he did so well that they bestowed the designation of distinction, but earning this full credential required much more than just passing that exam. He also had to document his experience in detail, and pass high levels of scrutiny.

I couldn’t be prouder of Aongus!

He’s an all-around fabulous guy. He’s always thoughtful and considerate. He’s a great cook and a deeply caring companion. He’s good-natured and kind, never pouts, and always carries his own weight at home and at work.

And now the world knows he’s also an excellent manager!

Well done, baby! Studying is a very good look on you!

Featured by shannonchance

Why India? Inspired by IUCEE and KLE Tech

You might be asking yourself why I went to India at the start of the New Year. As you may recall, I served on the global Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN) for five years. During that time I chaired REEN’s governing body but before I started chairing I served on a sub-committee to recruit and select host/locations for our Research in Engineering Education Symposium (REES).

Hosts of REES 2024 (and the upcoming REES 2025 that will be in El Paso). Can you feel the energy?

REES is generally held every other year, and we go to locations around the globe. REES is a way to meet new people, extend our networks, practice new research skills, and share what we find as we research engineering education. The symposia help attendees learn about engineering education in new parts of the world and they help the community in each region where REES meets to gain momentum. REE Symposia help people entering the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) to meet people who have been doing EER longer.

Two of the main organizers of the conferences were Dr/Prof Vijayalakshmi M. (left) and Dr Preethi Baligar (right).

REEN was held in Honolulu (2007), Davos (2008), Queensland Australia (2009), Madria (2011), Kuala Lumpur (2013), Dublin (2015), Bogotá (2017), Cape Town (2019), Perth (2021), and now Hubli, India (January 4-6, 2024).

The REEN.co website explains that “provides a forum to share, discuss, disseminate, and propagate high-quality research and best practices through the Global Engineering Education Research community.”

Networking with the lovely and energetic Dipanwita Chakravarty (KLE Architecture) while touring the engineering research building at KLE Tech.

REES 2024 was hosted by KLE Technological University (KLE Tech) in collaboration with the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE). We met on KLE Tech’s B. V. Bhoomaraddi Campus in Vidyanagar, Hubballi, Karnataka, India.

We typically team up with the local national organization for engineering practitioners and/or engineering educators. KLE Tech staff are leaders of IUCEE and are leading the way in EER, research-based teaching, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

IUCEE is doing great things in India! It’s vision is “is to improve the quality and global relevance of engineering education in India” and to do this it seeks “to build an ecosystem for transforming engineering education in India with the assistance of engineering education experts and industry from around the world” (https://iucee.org/). The organization’s website is chock full of information with a vast number of events and activities featured every week on its homepage. Wow!

When I was on the REES selection committee, three scholars from India who are active in IUCEE applied to host a Symposium. That excellent proposal came from Krishna Vedula, Gopal Joshi, and Sohum Sohoni who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years since we made that selection in 2018.

IUCEE was launched in 2007 and today the organization has members from all over India, as well as from the Indian diaspora (all those brave folks who left India to work, study and live elsewhere in the world), like Sohum, who teaches engineering in the USA. I don’t know how many members IUCEE has, but LinkedIn shows 847 followers. Ooops! Add one more! I’m following now, and so can you: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indo-universal-collaboration-for-engineering-education/?originalSubdomain=in

REES workshop activities — see my colleagues Dr Ed Berger and Dr Mikita Hari there in the center, engrossed in converesation.

REEN also has a LinkedIn group you can join (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8537067/), and you can also subscribe to get email updates from REEN (https://reen.co/subscribe/). My fabulous former boss currently runs the REEN website — shout out to John Mitchell at UCL, a truly great person to work with and for!

So, REEN selected India as a host and asked the applicants to send a member to our REEN team to help us all prepare for REES 2024. We scheduled the event for January when IUCEE’s annual conference falls.

Getting to Hubballi, Karnataka, India for the first time was no small feat, with complicated visa and flight arrangements. Thanks very much to Dr. Nithya Venkatesan, Assistant Director of International Relations at VIT Chennai for helping me arrange flights and some accommodations for my stay. Her help made my trip possible as I was truly overwhelmed.

The lovely KLE Tech auditorium building.

But it was all worth the effort. It was so inspiring to meet the very energetic members of IUCEE, as REES overlapped their conference by one day. May IUCEE members stayed on for the REE Symposium and contributed to it in insightful ways.

I’ll tell you more about the happenings of REES 2024 in an upcoming blog. Thanks for reading along today to learn how I was inspired to travel to India for my first time.

Meals under the marquee with delicious food plus great ambiance.

Featured by shannonchance

Sandra Cruz’s doctoral milestone

I have an exceptional PhD supervisee at TU Dublin, Sandra I. Cruz Moreno. She is an internally motivated, self-driven learner who needs little to no prompting from me. Supervising her for the past two years has been pure joy.

I am extremely pleased to report that Sandra achieved a major milestone yesterday because she very successfully “defended her Ph.D. proposal” (the term we use in the USA). Here, it’s called a confirmation examination to confirm that a student is on track and suitable to continue onward.

Sandra needed to submit an extensive report. The report is a bit more elaborate than a proposal back home, as it must include the work plan in addition to the first three chapters of the dissertation. She also included preliminary analyses of existing interview data.

TU Dublin is funding Sandra’s PhD so that she can analyze extensive interview data I collected from women studying engineering over the years since 2015. It’s such an enormous amount of data that I’ve never been able to wrap my arms around it fully. Sandra, a sociologist who has worked as a research consultant on rural development for the United Nations and similar organizations, is well-prepared to handle this large dataset. She has embraced the challenge and has made great strides forward.

Sandra Cruz at SEFI 2023, where she presented her research (left) and engaged thoroughly in events like the pre-conference Doctoral Symposium (center and right).

Sandra’s study is titled “Exploring Women’s Experiences on Collaborative Learning in Engineering Education: A Phenomenological Analysis.” She submitted written reports of the coursework she has done to date, as well as a five-chapter document presenting her research. Both of Sandra’s supervisors, as well as our college’s head of research and the external examiner from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), all read and critically analyzed Sandra’s submission.

The result of this review and of yesterday’s two-hour oral examination concluded that her “Proposed research and progress [are] suitable for [Sandra] to remain on the higher register” and proceed into the final stage of her doctoral research. That’s fancy talk for “It’s a go!” and “Full speed ahead!”

Sandra Cruz with her external examiner, Dr Roland Tormey and lead supervisor, Prof/Dr Shannon Chance, on the day of examination.

Regarding the research Sandra has produced to date, the external examiner’s evaluation states:

The report is very well structured and extremely well written. It demonstrates a high degree of scholarship in dealing with quite a few challenging concepts while, at the same time, managing to make them accessible. There is a very good balance between methodology and methods in chapter three in particular.

The data available is suitable for completing of the PhD and the initial analysis carried out shows quite a lot of promise.
-External Examiner Roland Tormey, PhD

Our advisory supervisor, Prof/Dr Brian Bowe, couldn’t attend the examination (he’s the university registrar, after all, and the end of Semester 1 is an extremely busy time of year). Nevertheless, his guidance to Sandra and me has been essential throughout the process. The advice he provides is targeted and highly applicable. Sandra and I have benefited from having him on the team.

I was delighted, but not at all surprised, to hear about the successful outcome. Congratulations, the result reflects your hard work and dedication.
–Prof/Dr Brian Bowe, Head of Academic Affairs at TU Dublin

I have included the cover and table of contents of Sandra’s report so you can see the level of detail required. The report is 96 pages long. While Sandra was rehearsing for the examination, I was off in India delivering a paper she authored on policy to address gender gaps in engineering — policy at the European and Irish levels. The policy paper generated great interest and will form part of the PhD study, although it wasn’t a major component of the confirmation report. In fact, there were a number of topics she researched that didn’t need to be explained in detail at this point, such as critical feminism, which will inform her work going forward.

Working with and learning with and from Sandra is an honor and a privilege. I am grateful to TU Dublin for providing the grant to fund Sandra’s research activity. I am grateful to Brian, Roland, and Marek for the support they have lent Sandra and me. And most of all, I am grateful to Sandra for her diligence, perseverance, openness, and sincerity. I have learned so much from her and from working with her!

Featured by shannonchance

Empowering technology teachers via the Government of India’s Ministry of Education

The National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTR) in Chennai, India has been working to enhance the delivery of technical education in India for 60 years. NITTTR is hosting a year’s worth of “Diamond Jubilee” events, and I was the opening keynote speaker for the Jubilee!

I had the pleasure of meeting NITTTR staff in Blacksburg, Virginia (USA) last summer at the ethics symposium coordinated by Virginia Tech professors Diana Bairaktarova and Tom Staley. In Blacksburg, Renukadevi (Renuka) Selvara and Janardhanan (Jay) Gangathulasi invited me over to Chennai when they heard I planned to attend the 2024 Research in Engineering Education Symposium (REES 2024) in Hubballi, Karnataka, India in January 2024.

Renuka is a Professor of (Engineering) Education and the Head of NITTR’s Centre for Academic Studies and Research. Jay is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is also a leader of the Centre.

Kicking off NITTTR’s Diamond Jubilee. Pictured left to right: Janardhanan Gangathulasi, Shannon Chance, Renukadevi Selvara, and Prof. Dr. Usha Naesan, Director of NITTR.

I was truly honored to be invited as the keynote for the launch (on January 8, 2024) of the year-long Jubilee celebration to speak about the work I’m doing with engineering ethics education. The audience comprised future teachers of technical subjects (NITTR students) and their teachers (NITTR staff).

Here’s the lovely poster NITTTR produced to announce this International Seminar.

This day-long Jubilee-opening event started with short introductions by Renuka, Jay, Ursa the Director, and me. Then, right before my talk, Dr. K. N. Shoba delivered an exceptionally nice introduction about me — she studied my curriculum vita in great depth and showed she understood it extremely well. I felt so honored by her effort.

My keynote presentation integrated some active learning techniques (evidently new to the NITTR audience) to explore “Ethics Teaching in Higher Education.”

After discussing the definition of ethics and showing slides about how I have taught ethics (including environmental and social aspects) to students of architecture, engineering, and education, the audience and I did some group activities.

Participants discussed what do ethics in engineering look like to them, and how they define ethics.

Next, I introduced the topic of education research and identified specific resources for educators who want to teach students about ethics. I briefly described my own shift into engineering ethics education research. For instance, I showed them the special focus issues of journals that I have spearheaded related to ethics, and then summarized findings of my study on Ethics & Responsibility in Civil Engineering, published in AJEE.

Then I showed slides to illustrate how I am integrating ethics into the Architectural Engineering curriculum I’ve been designing for NewGiza University (NGU) in Egypt. I described curricular innovations (e.g., challenges and scenarios) that we’re drawing from University College London’s Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP) into the design of the NGU course.

The entire audience after the keynote — what a great group of participants!

Lastly, the audience and I delved into the forthcoming “International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education” that I am editing alongside Tom Børsen (Aalborg University), Diana Martin (UCL), Roland Tormey (EPFL), Thomas Lennerfors (Uppsala University) and Gunter Bombaerts (TU Eindhoven).

I distributed guides to the various Teaching Methods that will be covered in our handbook. There are individual chapters to help teachers who want to use these methods:

Chapter 19) Literature review of teaching methods

Chapter 20) Case studies and dilemmas

Chapter 21) Project-Based Learning (PBL)

Chapter 22) Value Sensitive Design (VSD) & Design-Based Learning (DBL)

Chapter 23) Service-learning & humanitarian

Chapter 24) Arts-based methods

Chapter 25) Reflective & dialogue-centered approaches

Chapter 26) Moral development via Challenge-Based Learning (CBL)

The audience, particularly the students, were enthusiastic and seemed genuinely interested in learning more about these teaching methods.

The forthcoming International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education is slated for release by Routledge publishing house in late 2024. It will be available free of charge in digital format and for purchase in print versions. The handbook is geared toward teachers, researchers, and educational managers — and I hope you’ll read it as well!

A few of the participants and organizers after the keynote.

I thoroughly enjoyed my day at NITTTR, including the conversation over lunch with Renuka and Jay. I was honored to meet Prof. Dr. Ursa and the students and teachers of NITTTR. I thank them all for their delightful hospitality and also thank Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) and Dr. Nithya Venkatesan and Dr. Shanmuga Sundaram for helping make this visit to NITTTR possible. VIT funded many of the costs of my travel, provided me meals, accommodation, transportation, warm collegiality, and logistical support to help make my visit to both NITTTR and VIT possible.

I enjoyed connecting with NITTTR staff and students and I look forward to future opportunities to learn together!

Featured by shannonchance

Learning civil engineering in India

India is now the most populated country in the world. There’s a pressing need for more and better-educated civil engineers there. A civil engineer working in India today can expect to work 9 AM to 9 PM six days per week and 9 AM to 2 PM on Sundays (according to Dr. Balasubramaniam, Managing Director of Hitech Concrete Solutions Ltd) because their skills are in such high demand.

However, this current weekend is a holiday, so I hope most of them are taking some time off!

Based on my two-week glimpse into life in India, I believe Indian people work extremely hard. Most people working in businesses or projects at the national and international levels work in English. Higher education in India is also in English because India has around 100 languages.

Civil engineers’ work is incredibly important! In a developing nation, the infrastructure and buildings overseen by civil engineers (and architects!) shelter and support a growing population of people – a population working hard to live ethically and build a brighter future.

Building under construction on VIT campus

In the first couple weeks of January 2024, I got an inside perspective by attending events and touring workshops and laboratories at the Chennai branch campus of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT).

VIT’s Dr. Nithya Venkatesan, Assistant Director of International Relations, and Associate Professor Dr. Shanmuga Sundaram (who goes by Shanmugham) served as my primary hosts. They helped coordinate my entire two-week trip, and without them I never would have managed to make my first venture into this fascinating land.

Visiting the VIT Chennai Internationalization Office and meeting Dr. Nithya Venkatesan.

Dr. Renukadevi Selvaraj, Professor and Head of the Dept. of Education at the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training Institute (NITTTR), run by the Ministry of Education for the Government of India, connected me with VIT after I met her in Blacksburg, Virginia (my hometown) at an ethics symposium last summer.

At VIT, I attended a two-day conclave on civil engineering organized by Shanmugham that included presentations by academic and industry partners. Shanmugham’s areas of specialization include sustainable building materials, special concrete, alternative binding processes.

I delivered the opening keynote address for the conclave. Most of the audience of around 45 participants were civil and structural engineering students, but their teachers, some PhD researchers, and some industry partners also attended.

Other presenters at the conclave talked about structural failures within existing buildings (causes, effects, and ways of avoiding or addressing defects), earthquake resistance and previous structural failures in India due to earthquake activity, and the importance of being part of professional organizations (such as the UK-based Institution of Civil Engineers, ICE). India does not yet have a licensure program for professional/licensed/chartered engineers of the type you see in the US, UK and Ireland, but Professor Johnson Alengaram from the University of Malaya encouraged the audience to join ICE and maintain their learning and their credentials with care.

Shanmugham noted that he’s in the second generation of civil engineers the people of his father’s age with a first generation of civil engineering professional in the country. The students he is educating now, he sees as the third generation of civil engineering in India.

Arvindh Raj Rajendran, who earned a Master of Structural Technology degree, delivered the conclave’s final talk with an extremely well-articulated presentation about an apartment complex that his family’s company, Hitech Civil Engineering Services, Ltd., has worked to diagnosed and remediated. The original construction, by a different company, had severe deficits that had made national news in India. Hitech has made interventions to keep the structure inhabitable and conducted detailed analyses to help the government and the courts decide if the building can be salvaged or must be replaced. He explained the analysis and rectification process in detail. Arvindh showed other faulty structures that Hitect has been able to salvage, as well as the equipment they use (all pictured below).

A slide from Arvindh Raj’s Hitech presentation.

Before the conclave started, I had the distinct honor of visiting four of the engineering laboratories on the VIT Chennai campus, being shown around by Shanmugham. We visited the soil testing lab where he and his colleague, Associate Professor Dr. Karthiyaini train PhD students and conduct research.

We visited Shanmugham’s materials testing laboratory. He has just gained national certification to test materials (such as concrete samples from active construction sites). He can test the performance of all kinds of concrete steel and concrete-related products. He is also researching possibilities for creating concrete mixed with less embodied carbon than today’s standard material.

He’s working towards a net-zero-type concrete method using byproducts of other industries in India — because concrete is a central construction material in the country. China and India are using a huge portion of the entire amount of concrete fabricated each year currently worldwide.

Dr. Shanmungham’s colleague added Tom and Jerry to my visit to the Shanmugham’s concrete testing lab!

I also visited a water quality research lab and met the academic leader and her PhD students. They are working on a wide array of topics, including addressing toxic landfill effluents that leak into the soil, reviving microplastics from water, desalination process, and ocean clean-up techniques. I learned so much and wish I’d taken notes!

The geology lab was equally interesting as the students were taking samples from a soil boring to study contaminants. They introduced me to each doctoral research project, and I asked loads of questions, which, again, unfortunately, my brain failed to file into long-term memory. It does this filing in the night while I sleep and in the day when I retell what I’ve learned. But I learned so very much in that single day of touring that my brain couldn’t hold it all.

One thing I will never forget is how many talented women are studying engineering at VIT. To my delight, the research labs are gender balanced.

On the day of the tours, I also met VIT’s vice president for academics, Dr. Sekar Viswanathan. He holds this role on all four VIT campuses. I was very impressed with how attentively he communicated with Dr. Johnson, another international guest speaking at the conclave, and me.

VIT is a private institution that provides itself in excellence and holds academic world rankings. The Chennai campus is currently educating about 10,000 engineering students and is expanding its facilities to double its enrollment. This is very important in a country where many hundred thousand engineers graduate from higher education institutions each year but are not well-prepared for industry. Receiving an education at a highly-ranked institution like this helps ensure the graduate will be ready to perform well in the industry. The country desperately needs more civil engineers who can do this. Hopefully, one day, India’s civil engineers won’t need to work seven days a week!

Shanmugham was an exceptional host during my trip. He and his wife (Rama, an electrical/computer engineer who runs a startup business with a colleague) and their six-year-old daughter (Shanmuga, who speaks English in addition to her mother tongue), took me shopping for Indian outfits — so I’ll fit in better on my next trip to India!

They also invited me to their home, located in a huge complex of apartments. There are 20 buildings, each about 17 stories tall. I met their neighbors, and I learned something about how they live. We got to share a bit of our own cultures with each other, which was a true highlight of my time in Chennai.

Shanmungham with Shanmunga and Rama, at their home.

At the very start of my trip, I also got the chance to visit some stone temples near Chennai. Shanmugham showed me around the massive site and, in true Indian fashion, took pictures of me at each important structure. These temples, carved from solid granite boulders protruding from the sand at this coastal location, have stood for 1300 years. The craftsmanship was superb and awe-inspiring.

The day we visited the temples (the day I landed in India, January 2) was a holiday. The site was being visited by many busloads of tourists from all over India dressed to the nines. I included pictures of one group of visitors in the gallery below.

“The Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram is a collection of 7th- and 8th-century CE religious monuments in the coastal resort town of Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, India and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, about 60 kilometres south of Chennai.”
—https://www.tamilnadutourism.tn.gov.in/

The Indian people definitely made me feel welcome and safe and thankful for this opportunity to meet and learn from them. Everywhere I went, people stopped and asked to take a picture with me. Little children looked at me in amazement. Shanmugham noted that many visitors to the temple had come from afar, from rural parts of India, and only some of the children had seen anyone like me before.

Incidentally, the food was incredible! During my two-week visit, I enjoyed the taste of every single thing I ate. At VIT, I had the privilege of residing at the international guesthouse. The drivers and guesthouse staff were absolutely incredible and made my stay a joy. At first, they offered me more Western foods, but when they saw that I enjoyed the Indian dishes more, that changed! The entire staff went the extra mile to ensure my safety and comfort.

In this post, I described just five of my days in India. I hope to post another blog this week about my experiences at REES 2024 in Hubli, India, and visiting NITTTR outside Chennai.

From ancient stone temples to teaching labs and structural failure — I got insider perspectives of civil engineering in India from the staff of VIT and I look forward to my next visit to India.

Monuments at Mahabalipuram, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Chennai, India.

Featured by shannonchance

Welcome to Ireland by Chance!

This site began as a way to share cultural experiences while I was a Fulbright Fellow in Ireland 2012-2013. I ended up falling for Ireland and I returned as a Marie Curie research fellow in 2014, and when that ended I got a full-time lecturing post at TU Dublin, although I was allowed a two-year career break to complete a second Marie Curie research fellowship, this time to University College London, in 2018 and 2019. I returned to Ireland and just recently earned Irish citizenship and an Irish passport.

Today, this website shares stories of being a “researcher on the move”, but a huge majority of visitors come to learn about the process of applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) individual fellowship. I’ve posted lots of advice. You can find out more using the following links:
• Abstract and Eval
• Excellence Section 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4
• Notes on using tables
• Impact Section 2.1, 2.2
• Implementation Section 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4
• Ethics Section
• Final Report (after I subsequently won the fellowship!)

A happy glowing Shannon in September 2022!

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025 by shannonchance

It’s BIM a great semester!

There’s no better feeling than connecting with students in a meaningful way. I’m fortunate to teach — these days, at TU Dublin. And to have students who really want to learn!

Teaching architecture students has always been my passion, as they love to learn.

Lately, I’ve been teaching Building Information Modelling to mature students, and they are also lots of fun.

Here is a photo from our most recent class meeting, during a breakout session to apply the lessons we’d covered in a lecture. They all jumped right in! (Even despite it being 4PM on a Friday!)

With the holiday coming up, a bunch of us went to a nearby restaurant, BoCo, to celebrate and socialize after class.

Here’s to life-long active learning!

And, many thanks to these energetic students and my fabulous co-teacher, Claire Simpson, for making class worthwhile and fun this semester!

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Colleagues on the Board

Motivation to Serve

Candidacy Video

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Mr. Aongus Coughlan, MCIOB

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