The (Un)Emotional Engineer: Emotional Positioning and Scaffolding in Teaching and Learning about Wicked Sustainability Problems

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Engineers play a crucial role in solving complex sustainability problems such as climate change and resource
scarcity (here called “wicked problems”), but most contemporary engineering education does not adequately
prepare students for this task. There is strong evidence that emotions are important in engineering education,
but research about how teachers can work with emotions to improve student learning is scarce. To fill this gap,
the project employs an innovative combination of discourse analytic tools from positioning theorywith the concept
of scaffoldingfrom Vygotskian theories of learning. The project runs over four years and comprises three studies
that aim to explore students’ and teachers’ emotional positioning, as well as possible shifts in students’
positioning that may occur in and through emotional scaffolding. This will be done by analyzing video-data from
students’ small-group discussions about wicked problems and focus group meetings with teachers. The project
will develop important knowledge about how emotional scaffolding can be used to improve teaching and learning
about wicked problems, and thus to better prepare future engineers for solving urgent sustainability challenges.
The project will also contribute to empirically uncovering theoretical (in)compatibility between positioning theory
and scaffolding and may thus open up new areas of educational research with a clear focus on rendering
educational research more useful for practice.