SEFI@work | Emotional scaffolding for dealing with epistemic emotions in engineering education

From the (un)certainty (dis)comfort series from the SEFI ethics SIG

20 May 2025, 15:30-16:30 Brussels time

For many engineering students, dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity involves epistemic challenges (i.e., challenges related to the nature of knowledge or learning processes) that can trigger epistemic emotions, such as frustration over the lack of perfect solutions or curiosity about what one might find in exploring complex systems. Based on an in-depth analysis of video-recorded group work (Holmén & Lönngren, 2025), we discuss (1) how engineering students express emotions when they collaboratively grapple with epistemic challenges, and (2) how diverse aspects of students’ learning environments can function as emotional scaffolding to facilitate students’ engagement with epistemic challenges. We also propose a classification of emotional scaffolding at different levels of leverage, ranging from shallow adjustments to learning environments to deeper transformations of the emotional logic underpinning teaching and learning.

Ref: Holmén, J., & Lönngren, J. (2025). Expanding sustainability learning in engineering education through emotional scaffolding. European Journal of Engineering Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2025.2474046

This workshop is for you if:

• You are interested in the intersection of uncertainty and emotions 
• You want to support students to engage constructively with sustainability
• You want to connect with other researchers and teachers interested in supporting engineering students to constructively engage with uncertainty.

Speakers: 

• Johanna Lönngren, Umeå University

• Johan Holmén, Chalmers University of Technology

Target Audience: Educators, Education PhD Students, Early-career researchers, senior administrators.

The (un)certainty (dis)comfort workshop series is a SEFI SIG Ethics project organised by Siara Isaac (EPFL).