Bridging Geotechnical Engineering Education and Research on Education

Marina Pantazidou¹

¹ National Technical University of Athens

Resumo

This paper is about the use of tools and results from research on education in geotechnical engineering education. The incentive for doing this is to go past the level of individual faculty each improving their own courses to producing educational gains as a community. The literature of discipline-based education research (DBER) provides guidance and examples of how other disciplines, mainly from the sciences, have started this kind of work. Pedagogical content knowledge is a concept also from the education literature that reminds us that as teachers we need to consider content from a combined teaching and learning point of view, which can serve as a useful framework for the collective undertaking to enrich geotechnical engineering education. An important component of pedagogical content knowledge is how students perceive key topics and can be obtained by asking them suitable probing questions. Such knowledge of geotechnical engineering can be articulated, recorded and shared. The paper considers three geotechnical engineering topics, soil classification, shear strength and bearing capacity, from the teaching and learning points of view. Through examples, proposals are sketched for systematic study of student perceptions and the development of targeted educational material. Among the three topics discussed, shear strength emerges as a priority focus.

Palavras-chave: Geotechnical Engineering Teaching and Learning; Discipline-based Education Research; Pedagogical Content Knowledge