Students as the Teachers: Positioning Undergraduates as Experts, Role-Models, and Guides to Create Diverse Learning Communities

We present a novel upper-division undergraduate engineering course that trains the trainers in active learning and inclusive pedagogy to “Lead by Design,” i.e., teach a First Year Design class. Peer-led learning is commonly used to supplement course instruction and, increasingly, to support university makerspace programming in building communities of learning around these spaces. This practice has been shown to establish a more accessible and empathetic learning environment that benefits both the mentors and the learners. However, its usage falls short of formally positioning students as topical experts and leaders within a university's main curricular structure. As a result, the benefits of social learning are relegated to extracurricular or peripheral activities, inhibiting many learners from belonging to an engineering learning community of mixed-year peers. In this innovative practice, we position undergraduate students as teachers of a formal course to create a more welcoming and accessible learning environment for our first-year students, one that offers a more diverse representation of what engineering looks like. This study examines the quarter-long course, Lead By Design, where undergraduate student-teams develop, practice, and prepare to teach a First Year Design course around a skill-building topic that they propose. In this way, first year content is created for students by students; learners genuinely value the topics and the enthusiasm with which these topics are offered, which have included: 3D Design & Printing, Rocketry, Cybersecurity, Circuit Design and the EDA Toolchain, and Autonomous Vehicle Control, among others. Qualitative and quantitative data, along with external observations of the two-quarter program, show that learners are more willing to participate in and direct their learning within the low-risk and approachable learning environment created by student-teachers. These courses are beginning to organically cultivate mixed-year communities of practice as students form relationships that extend beyond the boundaries of the class, with many returning to enroll in Lead By Design so they may teach their own version of a First Year Design course.