Work in Progress: What Makes “Good’ Engineering Pedagogy? Preliminary Results from a Qualitative Study of Engineering Faculty

Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley; Todd Fernandez; Sara Schley

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: Faculty Development Division Technical Session 3
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41383
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41383
Download Count: 398

Paper Authors

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Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley Georgia Institute of Technology

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Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research uses qualitative methods to understand cultures of higher education, including curricular change in engineering.

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Todd Fernandez Georgia Institute of Technology

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Todd is a lecturer in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are engineering students beliefs about knowledge and education and how those beliefs interact with the engineering education experience.

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Sara Schley

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Sara Schley is the Director of Learning Sciences at GA Tech in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. She has an Ed.D. in Human Development/Language Acquisition, an MS in Experimental Psychology, and a BA in Psychology. Her research focuses on working closely with faculty interested in identifying, designing, and implementing inclusive pedagogy strategies, and on interactive classroom practices that increase students' engagement, interaction, collaboration, and inclusion.

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Abstract

This work-in-progress paper reports the results of a study focused on faculty pedagogy and the role of organizational and institutional culture [1] in improving engineering education. Improving engineering education includes careful attention to not only changing what is taught and how it is taught, but the beliefs of faculty teaching them. Our paper adds to the faculty development literature by interviewing faculty on their opinions and beliefs about good teaching [2]. This differs from prior literature because it does not engage with what faculty do and do not know [3,4], but instead interrogates the underlying structures onto which they map knowledge about teaching and learning. We build on prior suggestions that faculty members’ beliefs about knowledge and about teaching and learning may be heavily linked to the difficulties in improving engineering education [5].

We interviewed 21 engineering faculty at a large research-intensive institution in the American Southeast about their teaching philosophy, their perceptions and beliefs about teaching, and their teaching practices. We used a combination of inductive and deductive coding procedures to discover themes in the research.

Preliminary results indicate that faculty believe good teaching can take many forms. Some viewed their roles as content transfer, saying that good teachers are those who have "effectively...imparted the learning objectives on the students," in the words of one participant. Others believed that good teaching was about supporting the students and making them feel safe. One participant said a good teacher makes students feel: “if you do have tough material, you're not just the scary monster, but someone who's on their side…to conquer the material and to support them through that." Still others reported that being a good engineering educator “inspired curiosity,” helping students develop into self-motivated, self-directed independent learners. On the whole, however, faculty consistently center the role of information transmission in their teaching practice. This paper analyzes faculty's perceptions of their role in education and develops a model of those perceptions.

The findings would be useful for faculty developers undertaking curricular change efforts to accurately identify how faculty fit into our model of teaching self-perceptions. This knowledge is essential in creating and tailoring curricular change efforts that will last

Citation
Format

McKinnon-Crowley, S., & Fernandez, T., & Schley, S. (2022, August), Work in Progress: What Makes “Good’ Engineering Pedagogy? Preliminary Results from a Qualitative Study of Engineering Faculty Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41383

TY - CPAPER
AB - This work-in-progress paper reports the results of a study focused on faculty pedagogy and the role of organizational and institutional culture [1] in improving engineering education. Improving engineering education includes careful attention to not only changing what is taught and how it is taught, but the beliefs of faculty teaching them. Our paper adds to the faculty development literature by interviewing faculty on their opinions and beliefs about good teaching [2]. This differs from prior literature because it does not engage with what faculty do and do not know [3,4], but instead interrogates the underlying structures onto which they map knowledge about teaching and learning. We build on prior suggestions that faculty members’ beliefs about knowledge and about teaching and learning may be heavily linked to the difficulties in improving engineering education [5].

We interviewed 21 engineering faculty at a large research-intensive institution in the American Southeast about their teaching philosophy, their perceptions and beliefs about teaching, and their teaching practices. We used a combination of inductive and deductive coding procedures to discover themes in the research.

Preliminary results indicate that faculty believe good teaching can take many forms. Some viewed their roles as content transfer, saying that good teachers are those who have "effectively...imparted the learning objectives on the students," in the words of one participant. Others believed that good teaching was about supporting the students and making them feel safe. One participant said a good teacher makes students feel: “if you do have tough material, you're not just the scary monster, but someone who's on their side…to conquer the material and to support them through that." Still others reported that being a good engineering educator “inspired curiosity,” helping students develop into self-motivated, self-directed independent learners. On the whole, however, faculty consistently center the role of information transmission in their teaching practice. This paper analyzes faculty's perceptions of their role in education and develops a model of those perceptions.

The findings would be useful for faculty developers undertaking curricular change efforts to accurately identify how faculty fit into our model of teaching self-perceptions. This knowledge is essential in creating and tailoring curricular change efforts that will last
AU - Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley
AU - Todd Fernandez
AU - Sara Schley
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Work in Progress: What Makes “Good’ Engineering Pedagogy? Preliminary Results from a Qualitative Study of Engineering Faculty
UR - https://peer.asee.org/41383
DO - 10.18260/1-2--41383
ER -