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Integrating Teacher Empathy into the Engineering Classroom one Educator at a Time: An Action Research Study

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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 1

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--40527

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/40527

Download Count

515

Paper Authors

biography

Bala Vignesh Sundaram Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus

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With two years of Industrial experience and three years of teaching experience as Assistant Professor, Bala Vignesh is pursuing PhD in EESD program in Arizona State University to understand and improve the concept of teacher empathy within the field of engineering education.

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biography

Nadia Kellam Arizona State University

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Dr. Nadia Kellam (she/they) is Associate Professor of Engineering within The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). She is a faculty in the Engineering Education Systems and Design (EESD) PhD program and currently advises three doctoral students. Dr. Kellam is an engineering education researcher and a mechanical engineer. She is also deputy editor of the Journal of Engineering Education and co-chair of the newly formed American Society of Engineering Education’s Committee on Scholarly Publications. In her research she is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of marginalized undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators. She is a qualitative researcher who uses narrative research methods and positioning theory to understand undergraduate student and faculty member’s experiences in engineering education.

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Abstract

Abstract: In this research paper, we explore the journey of one engineering faculty while integrating best practices from research on teacher empathy in their classroom. Teacher empathy is a term used in multiple fields of study, including higher education, nursing, and medicine, to refer to the empathetic skills of teachers. This body of research generally shows that better teacher empathy helps in improving students’ learning experience, satisfaction, and overall performance. The purpose of this study is to explore the story of how one engineering faculty member integrates teacher empathy into their course, including motivations, barriers, difficulties faced, and benefits to becoming more empathetic in the classroom. The model of empathy framework developed by Walther and colleagues was used to frame our study on teacher empathy [1]. We used Action Research (AR) methodology for this study as AR allows the researcher to work with the participant instead of on the participant. In this study, we were part of a teaching team for an Engineering Mechanics class. In two pre-study interviews, we discussed the meaning of teacher empathy and the participant decided on specific empathetic actions to implement in their course. We collected after-class audio reflective journaling and three 1-hour interviews (spread evenly across the semester) as the data. We used a qualitative data analysis approach, primarily utilizing inductive coding and thematic coding to arrive at our findings. Over the course of the semester, the faculty’s use of empathy in the classroom increased. Positive feedback from the students during class and in regular student evaluations of the class encouraged the faculty to continue to explicitly adopt empathetic actions in this class. Our findings indicate that there are benefits of teacher empathy within engineering education. The immediate positive benefit for the faculty is an increase in work satisfaction and reduction in burn-out. In future work, we will expand the number of participants to better understand the broader benefits among diverse engineering faculty members.

Sundaram, B. V., & Kellam, N. (2022, August), Integrating Teacher Empathy into the Engineering Classroom one Educator at a Time: An Action Research Study Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40527

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