Third John Burland Lecture: Changing attitudes, organization and scale in engineering education: The teacher as a go-between and TC306 as a knowledge broker

This lecture campaigns for solutions that overcome obstacles to the production of quality teaching materials for engineering education, proposes a framework for their production, and describes example applications in geotechnical engineering. The perspective of the lecture is content-based, i.e. not method-based. This perspective calls for two fundamental changes in attitude. First, shedding the assumption that geotechnical engineering instructors have more than enough suitable teaching materials to choose from. Second, adopting in education the practice of peer review, i.e. doing education as we do research. For organizing the production of teaching materials, the literature of education offers the concept of pedagogical content knowledge, which first requires acknowledgement that indeed there exists a distinct body of knowledge, part of which resides unrecorded in the minds of the teachers. Pedagogical knowledge of content focuses on how content is perceived by both instructors and students and on how to guide understanding of content towards generative perceptions and away from misinterpretations. The lecture describes small-scale teaching materials developed within this framework for the topic of soil compaction. Developing teaching materials and peer review take significant time; without the incentives of research (funding and prestige), it can be done by reducing the scale of the undertaking and of personal involvement. Some progress has already been made by TC306, the technical committee on geo-engineering education, with contributions provided by its members and obtained through reaching out. Collectively, the advocated changes transform the teacher into a go-between who bridges experience levels, connects ideas, and links education with both research and professional practice. By fostering collaboration and serving as a conduit for sharing and feedback, TC306 acts as a knowledge broker.