Collaborative Research: Supporting Agency Among Early Career Engineering Education Faculty in Diverse Institutional Contexts

教师是许多潜在解决方案的核心，以应对国家和全球对STEM教育的变革性改进的呼吁。在过去的20年里，我们在理解如何为STEM教育创造有效的学习环境方面取得了重大进展。虽然许多个别教师采用了新的教学方法，但这种变化还不够深刻或广泛，不足以对整个STEM教育产生重大影响。我们需要更好地理解教师如何成为变革的推动者，以实现这一变革。本研究的重点是探索早期职业工程教育教师的经验，因为他们试图影响当地和更广泛的学生的工程教育经验。工程教育教师的独特之处在于，他们接受过所期望的变革类型的正式培训，并且经常被嵌入到学科工程部门，在那里他们可以应用他们的知识来创造变革。了解他们的经历和他们工作的学术文化将提供他们如何影响和不能影响其部门教育实践的信息。这样做将加强我们的努力，培养和发展教师准备推动工程教育的变化。在两阶段研究的第一阶段，合作探究和合作自我民族志方法将用于系统地检查pi作为六名早期职业教师在不同环境中的经历：这将包括仔细检查对模糊性的接受程度，对失望和挑战的反应，适应的意愿和合作的能力。随后，在第二阶段，将对另外12-15名早期职业教师的经验进行审查，以完善和扩展第一阶段的结果，提高其对多种环境的适用性。该项目的结果将(1)促进工程教育界对促进工程教育变革（或缺乏变革）的现有结构的理解(2)确定作为早期职业工程教育教师进行变革的障碍和支持；(3)形成一种共同构建的理解，即如何更好地准备和支持教师在担任学术职位的头几年影响工程教育时行使代理。这些进步是至关重要的，因为随着技术的进步和工程师在社会中的角色的不断演变，对工程教育变革的呼吁将继续下去。通过识别影响早期职业教师采取战略和有意行动以实现影响的能力的障碍和支持，本研究的结果将使工程教育研究生课程和国家工程教育组织能够做出程序性的改变，以造福未来的教师。此外，本研究得出的基于证据的见解有可能加快新工程教育教师的入职过程，促进教师在其职业生涯的各个阶段在全国范围内改善STEM教育，并支持工程教育研究领域的发展。

Faculty are at the center of many potential solutions to national and global calls for transformative improvements in STEM education. The last 20 years have seen significant advancement in understanding of how to create effective learning environments for STEM education. While many individual faculty have adopted new approaches to teaching, change has not been deep or widespread enough to make a major impact across all of STEM education. Better understanding is needed of how faculty can become change agents in order to effect this change. This study focuses on exploring the experiences of early career engineering education faculty as they attempt to impact the engineering education experiences of students locally and more broadly. Engineering education faculty are unique in that they have formal training in the types of change desired, and are often embedded in disciplinary engineering departments where they can apply their knowledge to create change. Understanding their experiences and the academic cultures in which they are working will provide information on how they can and cannot influence education practices in their departments. Doing so will enhance our efforts to train and develop faculty prepared to drive change in engineering education.In the first phase of a two-phase study, collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography methods will be used to systematically examine the PIs' own experiences as six early career faculty members in diverse settings: this will include scrutinizing acceptance of ambiguity, responses to disappointments and challenges, willingness to adapt, and ability to collaborate. Subsequently, in the second phase, the experiences of 12-15 additional early career faculty members will be examined to refine and expand on the phase one results, increasing their applicability to multiple settings. The results of this project will (1) advance the engineering education community's understanding of existing structures for facilitating change (or the lack thereof) in engineering education (2) identify barriers and supports for making change as early career engineering education faculty; and (3) develop a co-constructed understanding of how to better prepare and support faculty to exercise agency as it relates to impacting engineering education during their first few years in academic positions. These advancements are critical because the calls for change in engineering education will continue as technological advances are made and the role of engineers in society continues to evolve. By identifying the barriers and supports that affect early career faculty's abilities to take strategic and intentional actions towards achieving impact, the results of this study will enable engineering education graduate programs and national engineering education organizations to make programmatic changes to benefit future faculty. In addition, the evidence-based insights resulting from this study have the potential to expedite the on-boarding process of new engineering education faculty, promote improvements in STEM education nationally by faculty at all stages of their careers, and support the development of the field of engineering education research.