Morelock, J. R., & Sochacka, N. W., & Walther, J. (2020, June), Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute  Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34237

\bibitem{asee_peer_34237}
  Morelock, J. R., \& Sochacka, N. W., \& Walther, J. (2020, June), \emph{Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute}
  Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line .
  10.18260/1-2--34237

John Ray Morelock, Nicola W. Sochacka, and Joachim Walther.  "Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute".  2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line , 2020, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2020.  https://peer.asee.org/34237 Internet.  11 Jul, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_34237}
  John Ray Morelock, Nicola W. Sochacka, and Joachim Walther.
  "Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute".
  \emph{2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line , 2020, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2020.
  https://peer.asee.org/34237 Internet.  11 Jul, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_34237
author = "John Ray Morelock, Nicola W. Sochacka, and Joachim Walther"
title = "Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute"
booktitle = "2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access"
year = "2020"
month = "June"
address = "Virtual On line "
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/34237}
number = {10.18260/1-2--34237}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - This evidence-based practice paper responds to a growing interest in engineering education to engage research and instructional faculty in educational research, stemming from the introduction of educational research funding opportunities oriented toward technical STEM faculty such as PFE: RIEF and ECR: BCSER.  In this paper, we summarize the work and results of the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI)—a recently founded faculty development center at University of Georgia grounded in a complex systems theory of institutional change—in cultivating a growing community of technical engineering faculty, staff, and graduate students engaged in educational research.  EETI’s support for educational research includes a financial component (in the form of research initiation grants) and a community-building component (in the form of a weekly gathering of interested faculty, staff, and graduate students to develop research ideas and methodologies). This paper focuses on the latter.

In designing its community-building component, EETI leadership drew upon Donella Meadows’ 14 principles for engineering change from within a system (Meadows, 2008) and industry-vetted practices for establishing collective intelligence in teams (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010) to create four key conditions that have led to successful, enduring, and diverse communities of engineering faculty who generate educational research ideas and projects.  These four conditions are (1) careful use of language to communicate the value of engineering education research and our excitement to work with the community; (2) Relationship-building that actively includes faculty of all roles in addition to staff and students, and extra accommodations to include new participants; (3) development of collective intelligence through conversational turn-taking and modeling of socially sensitive responses; and (4) establishment of process-oriented expectations that prioritize the development of ideas and projects rather than the creation of products and publications.  In doing so, we have created communities of educational researchers where participants from a variety of academic levels (students; staff; pre-tenure, tenured, instructional, and professional-track faculty) develop ideas and projects together in a collaborative process.

In this paper, we discuss in greater detail the theoretical and conceptual foundations that informed our four key conditions, and elaborate on the nature and benefits of the communities we have cultivated, particularly benefits related to engagement of tenured faculty members and retention of instructional and professional-track faculty.  EETI leadership believes EETI’s model of community-building is transferable to other engineering institutions, and we discuss the implications of EETI’s approach and results for other engineering faculty development units.

Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer (D. Wright Ed.). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688. doi:10.1126/science.119314t
AU  - John Ray Morelock
AU  - Nicola W. Sochacka
AU  - Joachim Walther
CY  - Virtual On line 
DA  - 2020/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Building Communities of Engineering Faculty, Staff, and Students Engaged in Educational Research: The approach of UGA’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/34237
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--34237
ER  -