From Complaining to the Associate Dean to Leading Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Engineering Classroom

In this paper I provide a personal narrative,early exploration of, and directions for work being carriedout to reframe and more deeply understand the learningtaking place in my engineering entrepreneurshipclassroom. The first contribution is a new pedagogical lensbeing used to frame the learning students need to doexplicitly in terms of the key competencies, barrierconcepts, and learning thresholds my students need tomaster (as opposed to the time-based tables of content andsyllabi we normally use). The second contribution is adescription of the game-like dynamics that have resultedfrom this competency-threshold lens, and which seem tohave, in turn, encouraged a switch in focus from ‘gettinggrades’ to ‘leveling up’ by mastering the competenciesbetween and at each barrier or threshold. I also describehow this new lens seems to have focused me and mystudents more on their personal processes of buildingknowledge than just the products of the learning normallyassessed. The third contribution is a proposed researchmethodology and novel approach to data collection thattogether promise to provide a rich narrative andsignificantly deeper understanding of my students’learning experiences. I share insights gained to date on thisresearch journey, along with steps for further research.