A cumulative learning approach to developing scholarship of teaching and learning in an engineering community of practice

The pressure on engineering educators to prepare adequately equipped graduates, who are capable of tackling complex global challenges, has increased significantly in the face of increasing student numbers and resource constraints. Concern about attrition, retention and throughput has seen significant development of student-focused academic support strategies over the past three decades. More recently, however, the focus has shifted to supporting engineering educators by introducing a more holistic Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) approach to their pedagogical practices. This paper reports on a research-intensive institution in an emerging economy, where an engineering faculty, as it engages in a range of programme renewal projects, has adopted a community-of-practice approach. An overarching theoretical approach to supporting student learning frames the faculty initiatives. Three support domains are considered important: cognitive, affective and systemic (CAS), which align to the ‘knowledge, values and skills’ elements of the International Engineering Alliance graduate competency profiles. Drawing on the Legitimation Code Theory dimension of Semantics, the paper illustrates the manner in which a number of cognitive-support initiatives, across engineering fields and at different stages of the programme, enable the principle of cumulative learning: the ability to ‘connect the dots’ between theory and practice. These cumulative learning initiatives demonstrate the synergistic relationship between cognitive, affective and systemic learning support approaches. The sharing of these initiatives, using a community-of-practice approach to SOTL development in the faculty, can also be mapped as a cumulative semantic wave, in which higher-order principles of learning are practically applied, interrogated and shared across different contexts.