When discussing innovation and creativity, I found myself torn between the two. I agree with the notion of teaching students to be adaptable and able to shift their knowledge from the discipline they are familiar with to something they aren’t accustomed to, but I don’t understand why everything has to consider innovation. From what I’ve seen and experienced, innovation is a word to describe white people’s expansion of the resources they use up, they people they take advantage of, and the money that often times corporations or the people “innovating” tend to hoard. If you ask someone in a lower socioeconomic background what innovation is, do you think they’d come up with the same answer as someone working for a Fortune 500 company?
Engineering design is an important manifestation of the skills one should learn during their education. Design education isn’t consistently present in engineering classrooms. My experience of design in undergrad was impactful enough in a negative way that I decided to go to grad school instead of pursuing a job in industry. To only have one instance of interaction in a design setting didn’t set me up for success. I don’t think that engineering design education will ever be of service to students first, if it continues to exist in a vacuum where all topics are arranged and separated into neat little boxes.
The concept of novice to expert trajectory, which I think is another disheartening way to look at education, causes me frustration due to the linearity of the process. Does this way of studying expertise allow people to recognize the stages and the messiness of growth in a field? The different realms of expertise, especially as it connects to published research reminds me of the Ivory Tower of academia. How accessible is research to folks who fall "short" of the expert label? Especially when it comes to readers who may identify with the senior undergrads caught somewhere between novice and expert? To me, there is no way to properly gauge who/what an expert is due to the infinite possibilities of how one could possibly use their knowledge and skills.