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中心，以应对国内和全球对STEM教育进行革命性改进的呼声。在过去的20年里，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。尽管许多个别教职员工采用了新的教学方法，但变化的深度或广度还不足以对整个STEM教育产生重大影响。我们需要更好地理解教员如何才能成为变革的推动者，以实现这一变革。本研究的重点是探讨早期职业工程教育教师的经验，因为他们试图影响本地和更广泛的学生的工程教育经验。工程教育学院的独特之处在于，他们接受过所需变化类型的正式培训，并经常被嵌入到学科工程部门，在那里他们可以应用自己的知识来创造变化。了解他们的经历和他们工作的学术文化将提供关于他们如何能够和不能影响其部门的教育实践的信息。这样做将加强我们培训和发展准备推动工程教育变革的教师的努力。在两个阶段的第一阶段研究中，将使用协作探究和协作人种志方法来系统地考察PI作为六名早期职业教师在不同环境中的经历：这将包括仔细审查对模棱两可的接受、对失望和挑战的反应、适应的意愿和协作能力。随后，在第二阶段，将审查另外12-15名早期职业教师的经验，以提炼和扩展第一阶段的结果，增加它们对多种环境的适用性。该项目的成果将(1)促进工程教育界对促进工程教育变革(或缺乏变革)的现有结构的了解；(2)确定作为早期职业工程教育教员进行变革的障碍和支持；以及(3)发展关于如何更好地准备和支持教员在其学术职位的头几年影响工程教育的共同建设的理解。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作用继续演变，要求改变工程教育的呼声将继续下去。通过确定影响早期职业教师采取战略和有意行动以实现影响的障碍和支持，这项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计划上的改变，使未来的教师受益。此外，这项研究得出的循证见解有可能加快新的工程教育教师的入职进程，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.