2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 225: Building a Culture of “Engineering with Engineers”

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

The Mechanical Engineering Department at a private, mid-sized university was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant in July 2017. The grant supports the development of a program that fosters students’ engineering identities through a culture of doing engineering with engineers. The department is cultivating this culture of “engineering with engineers” with a strong connection to industry and through changes in the four essential areas of a shared department vision, reflective faculty, relevant curriculum, and supportive policies.

● Shared department vision: The department revised its mission statement, creating a shared vision among faculty and staff. This shared vision guided the department's decisions in building a culture that promotes inclusive, professional, and experiential practices. Building a shared vision was the most important action to take.
● Reflective faculty: Reflective faculty consider how their actions in and out of the classroom affect students and each other. A caring, student-centered mindset prompts faculty to innovate their teaching to enhance students’ learning and pushes faculty to continue to learn and improve their own skills. Working on issues together fosters a collaborative spirit.
● Relevant curriculum: Our new curriculum emphasizes hands-on, doing engineering and experiential learning. The curriculum helped build a strong community through shared learning experiences in classes, such as the vertically integrated design projects sequence and the integrated data acquisition and electrical engineering sequence. The COVID pandemic impacted course delivery but what was learned through remote teaching improved our in-person classes.
● Supportive policies: Supportive policies are crucial to sustaining change. Recently, the university approved new university tenure and promotion guidelines that broaden the scope of what it means to be a professor. The university also updated their strategic directions to provide more focus on inclusive excellence. The department’s effort to build an inclusive culture is aligned with and supported by the updated university policies.

As we conclude this project, we are completing an audit to review our work in the four areas above. We are considering strategies we used, processes we developed, instruments we devised and deployed, data we gathered, and curricular interventions we explored. For each of these items, we are assessing what was particularly impactful for us, the relative levels of ease and difficulty as seen in retrospect, how educative each endeavor was, and the potential for others to make use of not only what we developed, but also the assessment activity itself.

In this paper, we will summarize the results of this audit and explain how the audit has helped to prioritize our dissemination efforts. We believe that both the product of this approach, and the approach itself, will be useful for others in the engineering education community.

This project was funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) IUSE/PFE: RED grant through NSF.

Authors

Prof. Yen-Lin Han http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2027-803X Seattle University [biography]

Yen-Lin Han is an Associate Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Seattle University. Dr. Han received her BS degree in Material Science and Engineering from National Tsing-Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, her MS degree in Electrical Engineering and her PhD degree in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California. Her research interests include micro-scale molecular gas dynamics, micro fluidics, and heat transfer applications in Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) and medical devices as well as autonomous vehicles and robotics. She also holds the patent for the continuous trace gas separator and several pending patents in autonomous vehicles and robotic testing apparatus. Additionally, she has a couple of provisional patents including a dynamic tumor ablation probe and an innovated design to replace the gladhand connector in semi-trucks. She is passionate about Engineering Education and experienced in developing inverted classroom lectures and facilitating students’ learning through authentic engineering problems. She is currently the Co- PI for the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments grant awarded to the Mechanical Engineering department at Seattle University to study how the department culture changes can foster students' engineering identity with the long-term goal of increasing the representation of women and minority in the field of engineering.
Dr. Jennifer A Turns University of Washington [biography]

Dr. Jennifer Turns is a full professor in the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. Engineering education is her primary area of scholarship, and has been throughout her career. In her work, she currently focuses on the role of reflection in engineering student learning and the relationship of research and practice in engineering education. In recent years, she has been the co-director of the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE, funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust), a member of the governing board for the International Research in Engineering Education Network, and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Engineering Education. Dr. Turns has published over 175 journal and conference papers on topics related to engineering education.
Dr. Kathleen E. Cook http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3990-2880 Seattle University [biography]

Kathleen Cook, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Psychology Department at Seattle University. Dr. Cook received her doctorate in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington, with a minor in quantitative methods and emphases in cognitive
Dr. Gregory Mason P.E. zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Gregory S. Mason received the B.S.M.E. degree from Gonzaga University in 1983, the M.S.M.E. degree in manufacturing automation from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering, specializing in multi-rate digital
Dr. Teodora Rutar Shuman http://orcid.org/https:// 0000-0001-8640-1224 Seattle University [biography]

Professor Teodora Rutar Shuman is the Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Seattle University. She is the PI on an NSF-RED grant. Her research also includes electro-mechanical systems for the sustainable processing of microalgae. Her work is published in venues including the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Education, International Journal of Engineering Education, Transactions of ASME, Chemical Engineering Journal, Bioresource Technology, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, and Combustion and Flame. She is a member of the ASEE, ASME, and the Algae Biomass Organization. Dr. Shuman served as Chair for the ASEE Energy Conversion and Conservation Division.

She received a Dipl. Ing. degree in mechanical engineering from Belgrade University, and an M.S.M.E. and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She has held the title of Paccar Professor and is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington.

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