Learning to Learn: The Co-Evolution of an Institution and its Students

In this study, we report on the student experience at Olin College, a small undergraduate university in the United States with an explicit mission to transform engineering education. We employ a highly narrative approach to situate students' individual experiences within their larger learning trajectories and use them as a lens through which we view the accounts of their time at college. We highlight a series of themes: from often successful, but traditional high school experiences to an academic dislocation in the first year in college that reinforces fundamentally different values of what it means to be an engineer. The resulting dissonance (and inherent wrestling) students experience as they adjust into an environment that values interdisciplinary activities and student autonomy emerged as a central theme of this study. We connect these themes to shifts in motivation and accountable disciplinary knowledge to reveal what it means for college students to 'learn beyond success'.