Engineering students are increasingly expected to work towards solving ‘wicked’ problems. Tacking such complexity can invoke a range of emotions and educators are increasingly required to support students in situations when they are confronted with uncertainty and value conflicts.
In this episode we speak to Johanna Lönngren, Associate Professor in Science and Engineering Education at Umeå University. Johanna is part of the Umeå Science Education Research (UmSER) group and focuses on the role of emotions in education for sustainable development, exploring how engineering students talk about, and collaboratively deal with, emotions when they work with complex sustainability problems.
Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn more about the emotions that engineers experience when tacking complex and wicked problems
Timestamps
0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode
0.17 Podcast Intro
0.42 Experiences with student emotion from Natalie and Neil
3.45 Introduction to Johanna
8.23 University of Umeå
10.28 Wicked problems in engineering
15.08 Brining wicked problems into engineering education
19.15 Emotions in education
25.19 Emotion as social; implications for methodology
29.18 Emotions associated with wicked problems
32.18 Positioning theory
34.55 Emotional scaffolding
40.52 Studying and evaluating the use of emotional scaffolding
47.37 Techniques to help students deal with emotions associated with wicked problems
54.11 Supporting engineering educators in providing emotional scaffolding
56.54 Future work
1:00:40 Takeaways from Johanna
1:02: 18 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil
Resources
https://wickedproblemsteaching.wordpress.com/.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2025.2474046?scroll=top&needAccess=true#d1e164
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