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.
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.
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.)
Ultimately, 21 educators travelled to Riga from Cluj, Sophia, Lazio, Darmstadt, Troyes, Cartagena, Dublin, and 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.
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+). That’s the French way of saying he’s our organization’s president/rector/director).
It’s 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. Timothèe wrote the original proposal to the European Union, and the EU agreed to fund his vision. Now, hundreds of people working on our nine member campuses contribute to the efforts and activities of this EUt+ alliance.
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 Dr. Karine Lan in Troyes and her colleagues Dr. Santiago Perez, Ms. Eleanor Asprey, and Dr. Emilija Sarma. (Karine 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:
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.
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, and Karine, for working so hard to include use and showcase what SEFI engagement can give the EUt+ community!
Thus, one of my top accomplishments of this conference was connecting my colleagues from the CDC and ASEE. Soon Stephanie and Chris will be working together. They will connect engineering educators and students with the CDC’s new initiatives to increase physical activity across the US population and to improve public transportation, particularly with regard to accessibility. Stephanie will be able to tap into Chris’s experience and policy research and Chris will access Stephanie’s national contacts to help achieve CDC goals.
I’ve just attended the world’s friendliest conference, the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). I’ve never felt more welcome and invigorated by the exchange of ideas at a conference. This was my third SEFI, and while I’ve always felt incredibly welcome here, I now know people from all corners of the world by first name and they greet me likewise.
Tuesday started bright and early with a keynote speech–delivered by Dr. Stephanie Farrell who was a Fulbright Fellow to Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) while I was a Marie Curie Fellow there. Although each morning started with a keynote lecture, for me, Stephanie’s was the most insightful of all. Attendees asked dozens of questions at the end, with another dozen people standing in line to ask questions afterward.
Following the Thursday morning keynotes, we enjoyed a fun new poster-presentation format. Poster authors got 30 seconds each to pitch their topic to the entire delegation, and then we went to visit their posters. This format raised the profile of posters as well as attendees’ interest in discussing them.
After lunch, I attended a session on “Increasing the Impact of your Journal Publications” conducted by editors of the Journal for Engineering Education, Dr. Lisa Benson and Dr. Cindy Finelli. For dinner, the EER Working Group Board met in town.
After lunch, I presented as part of the session “Reviewers! Reviewers! Reviewers!” In this session, editors of four journals explained what they are aiming to publish and how to write good reviews. I was representing IEEE Transactions on Education, the journal for which I am Associate Editor. We broke into small groups to identify characteristics of a good peer review and this was followed by a very insightful whole-group discussion.
Late in the afternoon, everyone at the conference boarded buses for Copenhagen’s Experimentarium, a really fun science-learning center. I played with the educational exhibits alongside Stephanie’s family and other colleagues from DIT, UCL, and Fulbright. There was an awards ceremony, where our UCL colleague, Dr. Eva Soerensson was honored, and I thoroughly enjoyed the conference “gala” dinner. I sat with Belgian, Dutch, and British colleagues at dinner. We got a bit rowdy and ended up building towers from paper cups and discussing the feature of ubiquitous household appliances.
The final day of the conference had many individual poster and paper presentations, including a discussion session/presentation I delivered on patterns I’ve found among doctoral dissertations that have used phenomenology to study aspects of engineering education.
I enjoyed dinner with close friends after the conference attendees dispersed. I got to explore Copenhagen a little on Saturday morning before flying off to a new conference in Greece.
Ireland by Chance 