Reflection re-engineered

Don’t ask students to reflect.

Create the conditions for Reflection to emerge

There might have been a time where engineering problems were viewed as solvable problems by just applying the laws of physics. This no longer the case. As our society, our planet, and engineering are inextricably intertwined, engineering problems cannot be addressed by maths and physics alone. In all the wicked problems that engineers work on (e.g. energy transition, affordable health care, climate collapse etc.), engineers can only provide part of the solution. Engineers need to work in concordance with many different fields, both academic and non-academic. Engineers need more than just technical knowledge and skills, they need to be adaptable, responsible, resilient, humble, aware of the impact their work has on society and the planet. If the role of engineering is changing in our society, engineering education should also change.

At the same time this is an overwhelming task: there are so many skills engineers should have; not every engineer in training needs the same skills nor has the same abilities. And let’s be real: disciplinary knowledge remains as relevant as before and there is a limited amount of time that students have in their education. We also know that changing education is a hard and slow process.

In Delft University of Technology, we face this problem as well. On the one hand we want to educate socially responsible engineers and at the same time we need to educate our students efficiently. There is a reluctance to “give away” study credits from disciplinary education to personal development and transferable skills acquisition.

Since 2022 we have been working in the Reflective Engineer Program for a way around this inherent tension. In this practice-oriented program we have focused on Reflection as the foundational skill, one that is essential in educating socially responsible engineers. Because without reflection, how do you know the limitations of your work, the unintended impact your work has? How would you know what to develop in yourself? Understand others who are unlike you? Know when to persevere or take a step back, etc.?

In the Reflective Engineer Program that I initiated; we focus on reflection as a multipurpose tool that we embed within our disciplinary education. In this program we develop many reflective interventions across the university. The reflective interventions address issues that teachers already face, such as problems around (peer)feedback, collaboration, research projects, and low passing rate. Next to that the interventions are an aid in addressing topics that are challenging to grasp, such as the limitations of your work, ethical issues and unintended effects. By focussing on existing issues, we feed two birds with one seed: we use reflection as a constructive tool to address relevant problems and enable students to practice their reflection skills.

But reflection in education is easier said than done. Educators take reflection for granted: we know that it is relevant but assume that merely asking students to reflect will actually make them reflect. Unfortunately, responses to reflective assignments frequently stay superficial, evasive, inauthentic, or worse, outsourced to Ai such as ChatGPT. From our work in the Reflective Engineer Program, we understand that just asking is just not good enough.

Through our Program we have gained insights into creating reflective practices that work effectively across diverse educational contexts in a meaningful and insightful way. We distilled these insights into a practice-based framework that help engineering educators to design the conditions where reflection can emerge. In this keynote I will share and illustrate our framework so educators, researchers and others can use it to design, adapt and/or improve the reflective activities for their students, their colleagues and themselves.