'Really Talking' to Gaza: From Active to Transformative Learning in Distributed Environments and Under Highly Pressured Conditions

This chapter outlines the original 2015 pilot EAST Project, focussing on the active learning precepts that underlie its pedagogy. Using the post-course student-survey, it looks specifically at students’ progress made in terms of communication, team-working and problem-solving, skills representative of the 3D Global Engineering Competencies proposed by Patil and Codner (2007). It then moves on to examine in detail two case-studies (one each from Gaza and Glasgow), providing exemplars of potentially transformative outcomes which emerged from the active learning precepts of the course. The data is analysed in close relation to multiple contextual challenges which the participants had to tackle on a regular basis.