The article frames the issue simply,

“What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training.  Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful…”

If students never learn the basics of practice, does graduating mean they have become lawyers? Jeffery W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, says no.

“They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.” Carr told the New York Times.

Students are suffering because they are not taught to think like lawyers, to use their skills, knowledge and culture to see the world like a lawyer. When they graduate with a diploma they know a lot of theory, but they don’t have the epistemic frame of a lawyer.

David Segal, New York Times reporter, places the blame on Universities, as law school professors are chosen for scholarly thinking rather than experience. In fact, experience may even hurt one’s prospects of becoming a professor.

“It can be fatal, because the academy wants people who are not sullied by the practice of law,” explained one lawyer turned professor.

Lack of faculty experience presents a mentoring problem. How are teachers, who have very little experience themselves, in a position to show students how to think like lawyers?

Some schools are looking to make changes. What they need is an epistemic model, to teach an epistemic frame, and turn students into lawyers.

So even if young people don’t plan on majoring only in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, it’s beneficial for them to have some understanding of the STEM world and ways of thinking. Students can complete a double major in STEM and another field, participate in STEM extra-curricular activities and competitions, or play epistemic games like Nephrotex and Land Science that simulate professional workplaces.

Rich sums it up best, “physics and poetry, anyone?”

The 2011 Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium is sponsored by the O’Donnell Foundation.

Elizabeth is moving on to a post doc position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while David will being staying on as Tech Director of our group.

Both Elizabeth and David’s dissertations will be available on this website.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Bagley-Dissertation-FINAL.pdf

This dissertation examines how one approach to environmental education, the epistemic game Urban Science, extends an environmental education framework into a virtual environment that creates opportunities for young people to develop a combination of the skills, knowledge, values, identity, and epistemology needed to be environmentally literate. The aim of this study is to determine whether having mentors communicate with players through a virtual chat program rather than face-to-face changes anything about the players’ experience. Specifically, this study examines virtual chat versus face-to-face conditions during Urban Science and asks:

1. Was the mentors’ discourse during the reflection meetings different between the two conditions?
2. Was the players’ discourse during the reflection meetings different between the two conditions?
3. Were the players’ outcomes different between the two conditions?
4. Was the players’ level of engagement different between the two conditions?

Overall, these results suggest that since using more words did not impact the quality of the players’ professional discourse during the reflection meetings, the exit interviews outcomes, the quality of their final proposals, or their level of engagement, mentoring via chat is a viable method for mentoring in the context of epistemic games. A bolder interpretation of the results suggests that since mentoring in virtual and face-to-face conditions produced similar effects on players, epistemic mentoring could be automated and still retain the quality of interactions and players’ level of engagement. If the epistemic mentoring is automated, epistemic games like Urban Science could become more widely available to young people giving them the opportunity to help the world “move beyond what we already know in order to break beyond the boundaries of now to a more beautiful fabric of the future.”

A copy of his slide presentation can be found on slideshare, and a video of the entire seminar is made available by Think Digital (David’s presentation can be found about 55 minutes in).

In addition to being a featured speaker, David was interviewed by Julien Llanas of Académie de Créteil.

But, what are the demographics of these STEM graduates? They don’t say.

Epistemic Games, on the other hand, provide a authentic view of STEM professional practices to try to increase the number of underrepresented and minority groups in science and engineering to further diversify the field.