In higher education, we don’t just want students to learn things, we also want them to be able to use the things they learn after they leave higher education. And, since we know students have not finished learning on the day they graduate, we also want them to be able to continue to improve thereafter.

Recent research into the development of expertise can shed a light on both these goals of higher education. Expertise involves, not only knowledge and ways of thinking, but also emotions and social experiences. This in turn has particular implications for how we think about learning and teaching relationships in experiential learning.

Roland Tormey is a Sociologist and Learning Scientist. He is a Senior Scientist at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he also heads the Teaching Support Centre.

Having worked in teacher education for fifteen years, much of his recent research is focused on engineering education, specifically on the development of ethical competence, on diversity, and on metacognition. He also works on the emotional experience of engineering education. https://actu.epfl.ch/news/research-and-practice-are-intricately-intertwined/