Embodied Self-Regulation as the Foundation for Self-Directed Learning in Engineering Education
Project introduction and background information
Just like other areas of academic education, engineering education is undergoing rapid transformation. For example, WUR’s Vision for Education and the 4TU.CEE’s strategic plans, state that students are expected to take ownership of learning, navigate uncertainty, and act as responsible change agents. In response, curricula increasingly adopt self-directed, experiential, and challenge-based learning designs, e.g. by focusing on ownership for personal development, learning and self-directedness. Yet there is a growing misalignment between educational ambition and human capacity. While curricula promote autonomy and responsibility, educators are rarely supported in developing the embodied, regulatory, and relational capacities required to enact such environments in practice. Self-directed learning is often framed as a cognitive or motivational skill, overlooking the fact that agency collapses under dysregulation, overload, or relational unsafety. A development simultaneously present in our achievement-driven, individualistic society, as signalled in the RVS report on a surging hyper-nervous society experiencing declining mental health.
This project starts from a different premise: Self-directedness is not merely a learning strategy; it is an embodied regulatory capacity that develops in relational, sensory, and emotionally safe learning environments.
Engineering educators are central to creating these conditions. Their capacity to regulate attention, sense internal and external stimuli, remain present under pressure, and act with authenticity directly shapes students’ ability to engage as partners in learning. This proposal therefore addresses a critical but underexplored layer of educational innovation: the sensory and self-regulatory foundations of teaching excellence.
Objective and expected outcomes
WHAT – Educational and Professional Impact: Partners in Learning
Advancing personal, professional, and identity development: The project supports educators in developing an integrated teaching identity. An identity that aligns values, bodily awareness, attention, and pedagogical action. Rather than performing predefined roles, educators are invited to reflect on who they are in the learning space and how this shapes interaction, decision-making, and trust. This focus on authenticity and appropriate vulnerability strengthens teaching excellence by fostering coherence between personal and professional selves.
Developing life-long and life-wide learning competencies: Sensory intelligence and self-regulation are transferable capacities that extend beyond teaching. Educators learn to: (i) notice and respond to sensory and emotional signals; (ii) regulate attention and energy across contexts, and (iii) reflect in action and adapt responsively. These competencies support life-long and life-wide learning across teaching, research, supervision, and leadership. Such somatic and embodied competencies are increasingly relevant for educational institutes coming to terms with an increased visibility and prevalence of neurodivergent brains and mental health and wellbeing issues (just as in many other systems, and society as a whole).
Stimulating personal leadership, responsibility, empowerment, and reflexivity: Leadership is approached as embodied responsibility: the capacity to remain present, make ethical choices, and act with courage in complex situations. Educators cultivate reflexivity not only through reflection on practice, but through awareness within practice. Thus, recognising how their presence and regulation influence others.
Enhancing lecturer-student relationships, sense of connection and trust: Lastly, the underlying assumption is that, in an indirect way, students will also benefit from this project. WUR students consulted via an ACT project in 2526P1 expressed a wish for a (stronger) sense of relationship, connection and trust with their teachers. To interact with each other in a reciprocal manner. Yet, those students also indicate they need their lecturers to model and invite such behaviour. If educators gain insight, practice and experience with on how to connect with themselves they might also be able, through that connection with self, to (better) connect on a personal and professional level with their students.
HOW – Educational Design and Innovation Approach
Designing for conditions, not just curricula: Rather than redesigning entire programmes, this pilot focuses on micro-level educational conditions within existing engineering courses. Educators learn to align: (i) time (pace, rhythm, transitions); (ii) space (movement, sensory load, relational positioning), and (iii) tools (physical, physiological, and reflective practices) with the purpose of learning activities. This alignment supports personalised engagement and student ownership without large-scale curriculum reform.
Flexible learning formats: The professional development intervention consists of one workshop, trained on two or three occasions (and preferably different locations). We aim for 8 – 12 participants per workshop and warmly welcome all 4TU.CEE professionals (part of the three ACF tracks: lecturers, researchers, professors) curious about the added value of including self-regulation as part of their engineering education: no experience needed but curiosity required in e.g. embodiment, neurodivergence and whole-person-approaches. We aim to experiment, co-create and finetune possible, required and desired application of (i) time, (ii) space and (iii) tools during this workshop. The format itself models presence, regulation, and flexibility, mirroring the learning environments educators aim to create.
Curriculum agility through self-regulation: Curriculum agility is understood as the capacity to sense and respond without losing coherence. By strengthening self-regulation, educators become more able to adapt in real time to student needs, group dynamics, and emerging learning opportunities. This is an essential capability in experiential engineering education.
Professional identity and moral compass: Educators engage in structured reflection on their values, responsibilities, and ethical positioning. This supports the development of a moral compass aligned with Responsible Engineering and reinforces teaching as a relational and ethical practice.