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

在新冠肺炎的大流行中，我们都逐渐认识到在生活的方方面面增进福祉的重要性，包括尤其是在高等教育中。我们认识到，促进教职员工和学生的福祉必须是职业教育的核心重点，而不是事后才想到的。因此，这个项目将通过了解教员在他们的专业背景下处理负面情绪和失败的个人经历，促进工程教育中的幸福文化。工程教员对寻求指导以理解成为工程师意味着什么的学生具有很大的影响力。当教师自己的情感需求得到满足时，他们最有能力影响公平、包容和健康的工程教育文化。因此，这个项目将考察教职员工如何满足他们的幸福感需求，以及他们如何利用他们的影响力来培育或抑制允许工科学生体验幸福感的文化。这个项目旨在通过改变教职员工理解自己的方式来改变他们与学生和其他教职员工的关系。除了研究计划，其中包括对多个机构的工程学教师进行密集采访，该项目还将为教师提供如何应对失败和保持积极的职业认同的直接培训。这个项目将根据PI的职业使命，在工程教育研究中开发和定义一个关怀学术，通过研究知情的见解来影响国家和地方的福祉政策。具体地说，这个项目将解决现有文献中的两个重大空白：1)失败和负面情绪在促进或缓解幸福文化模式中的作用；2)工程学教师生活情感体验的复杂、动态的性质。本项目围绕以下目标进行组织：目标1：研究工程学教师失败和消极情绪的社会和个人经历。目标2：描述教师的情感体验与他们周围的幸福文化之间的联系。目标3：建立一个框架，为工程项目提供培训，以建立支持健康策略的文化，以应对职业失败。本项目将使用定性的混合方法，将解释性现象学分析(IPA)研究嵌入建构主义扎根理论(CGT)分析中，该研究考察工程学教师的职业失败和负面情绪的生活经历(目标1)，该分析产生教师情绪调节与幸福文化之间关系的理论模型(目标2)。发展与职业失败相关的情绪调节的教师培训的教育计划(目标3)将与改变幸福文化的研究重点(目标2)交织在一起。这项研究将在三所有目的地选择的机构进行，涉及IPA研究的10-12名教职员工，18-22名参加CGT研究的两次访谈(36-44次访谈)的参与者，以及将在四个机构提供的三个模块的培训系列。该项目由工程教育和中心(EEC)工程部(ENG)的扩大工程参与(BPE)和已建立的刺激竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)共同资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.