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Board 100: Work in Progress: Developing a Body of Knowledge to Illustrate Advanced Manufacturing Competency and Identity
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Mardis, Marcia A. |
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | In this theory-driven work in progress, we: 1) provide the history and justification for a Body of Knowledge (BOK) in the context of technician education and professionalization; 2) detail our method for creating an advanced manufacturing (AM) BOK; and 3) share subsequent steps to vet and validate the AM BOK with the AM community. We conclude with an examination of a BOK’s potential impacts on and contributions to AM’s dynamic evolution and maturation as a technical field. The imperative for this paper is that technical fields like engineering and information technology have developed BOKs to guide their practitioners, employers, educators, and researchers to a common set of material understandings. These understandings establish social norms and cultural expectations for a professional field. AM also encompasses specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions, yet currently has no prevailing BOK. As one of the fastest growing technical fields, AM education and professional identity construction requires an articulation of what it means to practice AM and how AM practitioners enact the field’s competencies. Because BOKs are also valuable to guide curriculum, employer expectations, and professional advancement, we explored ways to create an AM BOK and assembled an initial BOK that we are currently testing through research and community engagement. Motivation and Background Advanced manufacturing (AM) is a fast growing, dynamic, and economically instrumental industry sector. In response, many community colleges and undergraduate-serving institutions have established technician education programs to prepare future workers to support AM vitality and innovation. However, in the rush to couple market and training demands, stakeholders have not agreed upon a definition of the field. Without a central notion of AM, core competencies and professional identities of AM workers are likewise unclear [1]. As AM stakeholders and participants work toward a unified understanding of the field, a Body of Knowledge (BOK) is be an important step in defining the profession and its necessary competencies [2]. A BOK is a collection of essential concepts, terms and activities within a profession or subject area; it contains structured knowledge that is used by members of a discipline to guide their practice or work [3, 4]. BOKs proscribe the knowledge in a particular area that an individual is expected to have mastered to be considered or certified as a practitioner [5]. Though BOKs are grounded in the breadth of a profession’s norms and practices, they also reflect the current state of the profession’s identity. BOKs are dynamic, and must be systematically distilled and monitored as collection of activities and outcomes representing a profession’s most current values, constructs, models, principles and instantiations. This monitoring entails continuous discovery and validation work by members of the profession with a goal of self-reflection and reproduction of the profession [6]. BOKs, then, are competency taxonomies that are specific but inclusive; updated and refined, i.e., “curated,” as profession changes; and guide, but not dictate, professional education, professional learning, and assessment. Professionals are not meant to master the breadth of the competencies in a BOK, but focus on the depth of content that allows |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/140/papers/25132/download |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
