Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
First-Year Programs Division (FYP) - Technical Session 6: Mentors & Teams
First-Year Programs Division (FYP)
Diversity
16
10.18260/1-2--43452
https://peer.asee.org/43452
161
Matthew James is an Associate Professor of Practice in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, and is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Virginia. He holds bachelors and masters degrees from Virginia Tech in Civil Engineering.
Tahsin Chowdhury is an Engineering Education Doctoral candidate who focuses on engineering in the 21st century. He is passionate about enhancing professional competencies for engineering workforce development in academia and beyond. He is trained in Industrial and Systems Engineering and has a combined 6 years experience spanning both academia as well as lean manufacturing at Fortune 500 companies. Tahsin’s long term goal is to bridge the engineering competency gap between industry demand and academic fulfillment. A global engineer and researcher, Tahsin is an advocate and ally for better inclusion in STEM and beyond.
Juan David Ortega Alvarez is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Engineering Education Deaprtment at Virginia Tech and a Visiting Professor of Process Engineering at Universidad EAFIT (Medellin, Colombia). Juan holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University and an M.S. in Process Engineering and Energy Technology from Hochschule Bremerhaven. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses for more than 10 years, Juan has over 6 years of experience as a practicing engineer, working mostly on the design and improvement of chemical processing plants.
Dr. Jennifer Benning is an Instructor in the Engineering Education Department at Virginia Tech.
Natalie Van Tyne is an Associate Professor of Practice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where she teaches first year engineering design as a foundation courses for Virginia Tech's undergraduate engineering degree programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education, along with masters degrees in chemical and environmental engineering, and in business administration, as well as bachelors degrees in chemical engineering and Russian language.
Jenny Lo is a Senior Instructor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. She has been the co-coordinator of a first-semester introductory engineering course and has taught multiple first-year engineering courses.
This complete evidence-based practice paper will describe the lessons learned through implementation of equitable teaming materials in a first-year general engineering program at a large mid-Atlantic land grant university. In this program, students are expected to develop professional teamwork skills in an engineering setting by working on projects with a semester-long team. The importance of a sense of belonging for first-year students has also been shown to be a factor in retention and success in an engineering program, which can be influenced by experiences in team projects. Many instructors have observed that incoming first-year students often struggle with teamwork, and several instructors from the program attended a workshop in Summer 2022 led by another institution with lengthy experience leading project-based learning first-year engineering courses. In this program, the program leaders facilitated workshops for participants which included providing course activities to help foster equitable teaming practices in a project based learning setting. These tools had previously been implemented in a program at a smaller institution; this paper explores the challenges and successes of integrating them at a larger scale. Instructors who participated in the summer program have a degree of autonomy in how they approach teamwork in their courses, and implemented equitable teaming tools to various degrees in their classes in Fall 2022 semester. The teaming tools included pre-readings related to the importance of diversity on teams, individual asset maps encouraging students to explore how their own backgrounds could be applied in the course, team asset maps designed to facilitate a breakdown of work for team assignments in a way that drew on the diverse backgrounds of team members, and team processing documents guiding students through reflective questions on their team’s strengths and areas to grow. This paper is based on data collected from student reflections and assignments during the semester related to their views of teamwork and the importance of diversity on engineering teams, as well as the experiences of the instructors for the classes where the team projects took place. The students’ perceptions of teamwork were analyzed from the perspective of their sense of psychological safety in their teams. Psychological safety has been shown to be an important indicator of the effectiveness of teams in engineering and other disciplines (Cole et al, 2022) (Edmonson, 1999). We anticipate the results of this study to show that integrating the equitable teaming practices into the semester project helped facilitate meaningful teamwork conversations related to equity that may not have been present using more traditional methods previously used in the course. Using all of the tools can occupy a significant amount of class time throughout the semester, but it is anticipated that the results of the study will show that they helped students recognize the value of equitable teamwork and creating a psychologically safe space as part of a successful engineering project.
James, M. B., & Chowdhury, T. M., & Ortega-Alvarez, J. D., & Benning, J. L., & Van Tyne, N. C., & Lo, J. L. (2023, June), Lessons Learned: Implementing Equitable Teaming Practices in First-year GE Courses Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43452
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015