Kreativa pedagogiska verktyg i ingenjörsutbildningen: incitament och utmaningar
There is great potential for engineering education to benefit from creative pedagogical tools to support students in identifying solutions and asking new questions that are crucial to meeting complex and interdisciplinary societal challenges. However, there are also challenges for teachers to implement new ways of teaching that challenge existing models.
The project aims to shed light on benefits, incentives and challenges of creative teaching in engineering education through combined research approaches with surveys, workshop and interviews. The first phase of the project is a pilot case study with focus on teachers and managers of education at the KTH-ABE school.
This project seeks to examine how educators conceptualize and categorize creative teaching tools, map their application within the institution's educational portfolio and assess the extent to which paradigm-disrupting pedagogical methodologies can facilitate the development of innovative and interdisciplinary learning processes in engineering education. Experiences from exchanges between courses and course modules that have applied creative pedagogical methods shows that this can create synergies, method development and tools to identify solutions for important societal challenges.
The project is part of the Future Education initiative at KTH and is managed by project leaders (Co-PI): Katarina Larsen (Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment) and Luigia Brandimarte (Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, SEED). Project period: 2025-2026.
The project leaders have published pedagogical studies based on ongoing and previous work with course development that discuss the importance of critical reflection, pedagogy that promotes students' deep learning.
These studies discuss experiences from pedagogical methods that can create skills in engineers to understand adjacent knowledge areas and disciplines (Brandimarte, Funk and Richter, 2024) and place-based learning in urban city environments, together with critical reflection and creative methods, can create new conditions for engineering education to meet future societal challenges (Larsen and Gärdebo 2017; Nyka, Azadgar, Larsen et al. 2024, Larsen et al. 2020).
The project will draw on experiences from KTH and reach out to teachers and education managers to learn from their experiences of creative teaching and tools in engineering education.
References
Larsen & Gärdebo (2017) Retooling engineering for social justice: the use of explicit models for analytical thinking, critical reflection, and peer-review in Swedish engineering education Int J of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace.
Larsen et al. (2020) Organisational identities, boundaries, and change processes of technical universities. In book: Technical universities – past present and future (Springer).
Nyka, Azadgar, Larsen, K. et al. (2024) From creative writing, virtual environments to nature-based solutions: Global J. of Engineering Education.
Brandimarte, Funk & Richter (2024) Mixing fluid mechanics with circus: how the performing arts can enhance learning in an undergraduate engineering course. European J. of Engineering Education.
More information on Future Education at KTH and links:
Future Education at KTH is a change programme with a framework that will help us to be proactive and structure our development work of KTH's education based on a long-term holistic perspective. The framework consists of 13 principles clustered in 5 areas. See more information about Future Education at KTH, at website:
intra.kth.se/en/utbildning/framtidens-utbildning
Call for new project ideas in KTH Future Education
KTH Fikasnack Podcast with Luigia Brandimarte on how to take learning out of the classroom
play.kth.se/media/t/0_npbmyhyq
Creative writing workshop addressing climate adaptation; creative writing co-hosted by EHL and Students for Sustainability