Supporting Engineering Graduate Students in Professional Identity Cultivation through Disciplinary Stewardship

Megan Frary; Donna Llewellyn; Paul Simmonds; Julianne Wenner

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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: NSF Grantees Poster Session
Page Count: 9
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41899
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41899
Download Count: 243

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Paper Authors

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Megan Frary Boise State University

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Megan Frary is an Associate Professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSMSE). She also serves as the Associate Director for Undergraduate Programs in the MSMSE. Since 2013, Dr. Frary has also been the Coordinator for Graduate TA Support in the Center for Teaching and Learning; in this role, she works with graduate students to better prepare them for their current and future teaching work. Dr. Frary has been recognized for her teaching work with both the 2008 Bradley Staughton Award from ASM International and the 2016 ASEE Pacific Northwest Section Outstanding Teaching Award. Her current research is related to (1) how teaching experiences help graduate students develop their professional identities and (2) how to evaluate teaching effectiveness.

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Abstract

Historically, the goal of graduate education has been to prepare future academics, and it has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that many engineering graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from engineering graduate education.

Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate engineering education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, engineering GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs) who are enrolled in an Elementary Science Methods course. The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students with input and feedback from the GSs. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. To support the work that the GS do and account for the time they spend on the project, they also enroll in a 1-credit graduate course about teaching and learning which is open to graduate students from all disciplines.

We will present results from five semesters of GIFT showing that project participation (1) promotes the development of GS professional identity, (2) reduces impostor feelings, (3) leads to changes in attitudes about K–12 educators, and (4) improves GSs’ skills in communicating with a variety of audiences. In the future, these results can be extrapolated to support engineering GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers.

Citation
Format

Frary, M., & Llewellyn, D., & Simmonds, P., & Wenner, J. (2022, August), Supporting Engineering Graduate Students in Professional Identity Cultivation through Disciplinary Stewardship Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41899

TY - CPAPER
AB - Historically, the goal of graduate education has been to prepare future academics, and it has thus focused on the creation and conservation of disciplinary knowledge. However, today’s reality is that many engineering graduate students (GSs) go on to non-academic careers. As educators, it should be our aim to equip GSs for success, regardless of career aspirations. It is therefore essential that we shift our focus towards preparing a new type of scholar – one with a strong professional identity – rather than preparing a person for a specific type of career. We argue that helping students cultivate a professional identity has been largely missing from engineering graduate education.

Connecting ideas across disciplines and applying abstract knowledge to real problems—as one does when teaching—is a necessity for the development of a strong professional identity. It is hence the integration of knowledge transformation (teaching) into graduate engineering education that led us to create the Graduate Identity Formation through Teaching (GIFT) project. In GIFT, engineering GSs are supported to construct adult-level, inquiry-based, 30-minute lessons based on specific K–6 Next Generation Science Standards. The GSs serve as disciplinary experts by teaching their lesson to elementary teacher candidates (TCs) who are enrolled in an Elementary Science Methods course. The TCs then turn this knowledge into 15-minute mini-lessons for elementary students with input and feedback from the GSs. Finally, the GSs observe the TCs teaching the lesson to K–6 students and reflect on the entire experience. To support the work that the GS do and account for the time they spend on the project, they also enroll in a 1-credit graduate course about teaching and learning which is open to graduate students from all disciplines.

We will present results from five semesters of GIFT showing that project participation (1) promotes the development of GS professional identity, (2) reduces impostor feelings, (3) leads to changes in attitudes about K–12 educators, and (4) improves GSs’ skills in communicating with a variety of audiences. In the future, these results can be extrapolated to support engineering GSs in terms of their current educational activities and their future careers.
AU - Megan Frary
AU - Donna Llewellyn
AU - Paul Simmonds
AU - Julianne Wenner
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Supporting Engineering Graduate Students in Professional Identity Cultivation through Disciplinary Stewardship
UR - https://peer.asee.org/41899
DO - 10.18260/1-2--41899
ER -