CAREER: Advancing academic cultures of well-being by understanding professional experiences of engineering faculty

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In the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all come to recognize the importance of promoting well-being in every facet of life, including and especially in higher education. We recognize that promoting well-being among faculty and students must be a central focus rather than an afterthought of professional education. Accordingly, this project will advance cultures of well-being in engineering education by understanding faculty members’ personal experiences of coping with negative emotions and failure within their professional context. Engineering faculty members are highly influential to students who seek their guidance to understand what it means to become an engineer. Faculty are best positioned to influence equitable, inclusive, and healthy cultures of engineering education when their own emotional needs are met. Therefore, this project will examine how faculty members meet their well-being needs and how they use their influence to nurture or inhibit cultures that allow for engineering students to experience well-being. This project aims to transform how faculty relationally connect with students and other faculty and staff by transforming the ways that they understand themselves. In addition to the research plan, which includes intensive interviews with engineering faculty at multiple institutions, this project will also provide direct training to faculty on coping with failures and preserving a positive professional identity. In line with the PI’s career mission, this project will develop and define a scholarship of care within engineering education research that influences national and local policies of well-being through research-informed insights.Specifically, this project will address two significant gaps in extant literature: 1) the role of failure and negative emotions in facilitating or mitigating cultural patterns of well-being; 2) the complex, dynamic nature of the lived emotional experiences of engineering faculty. This project is organized around the following objectives:Objective 1: Examine social and individual experiences of failure and negative emotions in engineering faculty. Objective 2: Characterize the link between faculty’s emotional experience and their surrounding cultures of well-being. Objective 3: Establish a framework to provide training for engineering programs to establish cultures that support healthy strategies for coping with professional failure. This project will use a qualitative mixed-methods approach that embeds an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study that examines the lived experiences of professional failure and negative emotions in engineering faculty (Objective 1) within a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) analysis that generates a theoretical model of the relationships between faculty emotional regulation and cultures of well-being (Objective 2). The education plan to develop faculty training on regulating emotions related to professional failure (Objective 3) will be interwoven with the research focus to change cultures of well-being (Objective 2). This study will occur at three purposefully selected institutions and involve 10-12 faculty participants for the IPA study, 18-22 participants that are interviewed twice for the CGT study (36-44 total interviews), and a three-module training series to be delivered at four institutions.This project is jointly funded by Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) in the Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) Division of Engineering (ENG), and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.