"A Long Way Coming"--Understanding Engineering Educators' Transformations to Student-Centered Teaching

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Over the past decades, the engineering education community, with significant support from the National Science Foundation, has produced a large body of knowledge around engineering teaching and learning. While evidence-based educational innovations were targeted at increasing the number of STEM graduates prepared to meet society's grand challenges, the widespread impact of this body of work on teaching practice remains limited. This engineering education research study seeks to empirically generate a fundamental understanding of individual teaching transitions, and to actively disseminate the findings with the aim of fostering individual and institutional change. More specifically, the research team will conduct a qualitative research study with a view to understanding the process by which engineering faculty successfully transition from a traditional teacher-centered approach to a more active learning, student-centered approach. The research team will elicit personal narratives of exemplar engineering educators at various stages of their academic career and from diverse US institutions whom have transitioned to more student-centered teaching approaches.The broader significance and importance of this study will be to significantly advance the theoretical understanding of educational change by providing the novel perspective of individual transformations as the missing piece in the widespread adoption of student-centered pedagogies. With the aim of generating a fundamental understanding of faculty change, the research team explicitly designed this study to afford both researchers and participants in this study with opportunities to improve their own educational practice through the inherently reflective interview process. In addition to traditional modes of dissemination, such as journal articles, the research team will disseminate the research outcomes in the form of constructed narratives that represent fundamental patterns across the data to be used to foster similar transitions for a broader group of engineering educators. In combination, these efforts will provide a step towards instituting widespread change and realizing the promise that prior educational research holds for future generations of engineering students.