(69d) Using the Renaissance Foundry Model for First-Year Student Engagement through High Impact Practices (HIPs)

The purpose of this contribution is to provide the strategies for integrating High Impact Practices (HIPs), with the Renaissance Foundry Model (herein, the Foundry) – an innovation-driven pedagogical platform (Arce et al., 2015) – as implemented in a freshman-level ethics course in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tennessee Technological University (TN Tech). Specifically, the student creation of e-Portfolios (an HIP) was leveraged in a manner that encouraged students to assess engineering designs through various lenses (e.g., global, economic, societal, environmental and cultural) through an iterative process linked to the Foundry. The Foundry, which provided the platform for which students engaged in the e-Portfolio throughout the semester, is an iterative pedagogical learning platform which comprises two major learning paradigms: knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer (Arce et al., 2015). Towards the creation of a prototype of innovative technology, students must engage in the six elements of the Foundry while iteratively progressing through both the knowledge acquisition paradigm and the knowledge transfer paradigm. In utilizing the Foundry towards the development of an e-Portfolio, student teams focused on an engineering design while leveraging various lenses for analysis that was guided by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework that includes four major criteria: interpretive flexibility, wider context, relevant social groups, and closure and stabilization (Pinch & Bjiker, 1984). In the implementation of this course redesign, there were three major takeaways in terms of implementing an HIP in this context, specifically as it concerns the e-Portfolio project. For the purpose of this contribution, these three takeaways include: how team dynamics influenced engagement, technological implications in pedagogy, reflections on the learning curve. Key observations from these items included the need for contracts, negotiations, and conflict mitigation in addressing elements of team dynamics, the necessity of pedagogical support during the creation of the e-Portfolios for students to gain initial training in using the Google Sites platform for their assignments, and finally leveraging the iterative nature of the Foundry implementation as related to these assignments for web design allowed students and instructors to navigate the learning curve associated with the integration of new technology. The three takeaways presented herein have provided opportunity for reflection and guidance for future iterations of this course.