2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 117: WIP: Exploring the Teaching Journey of Early-career Engineering Faculty

Presented at Faculty Development Division (FDD) Poster Session

This work-in-progress paper explores the teaching experiences of early-career faculty in their initial semesters. One of the challenges of transitioning into the first faculty position is the newness of classroom teaching, which is a core component of the profession. We investigate the teaching experiences of early-career engineering faculty (tenure-track and non-tenure-track) at a southwest R1 university. This research study addresses the following question: What challenges and support structures do early-career engineering faculty experience in their transition into the classroom?
We performed one-on-one, 60-minute semi-structured interviews with faculty members who have less than two years of total teaching experience as an instructor. The first stages of Campbell’s Hero Journey were used to facilitate the dialog and provide a narrative structure to the interview, which offers a broad-reaching archetype of narratives. The participants were asked questions related to three aspects of their teaching story: (1) call to adventure, (2) challenge in the road, and (3) finding a helper. An inductive and deductive approach was used to design a codebook that described the themes emerging from the interviews.
Preliminary findings indicate that early-career engineering faculty who participated in the study experienced challenges related to planning and operationalizing their lessons (e.g., knowing how to select content for their lessons), using the learning management system, and using online classroom environments. The support structure used to cope with the challenges was informal mentorship, i.e., participants sought support from senior peers who had taught the same classes they were teaching and built their material from existing resources. These findings have the potential to enhance new faculty’s well-being and student learning experience by providing institutions with the groundwork to create specific professional development activities for new faculty to improve their transitional experience into teaching, to be discussed more fully in the paper. This paper would be preferred presented as a poster.

Authors

Mr. Marcus Vinicius Melo de Lyra http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4309-6826 Arizona State University [biography]

Marcus is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Engineering Education Department (EED) at The Ohio State University. His research interests include teaching faculty development and early-career faculty experiences. Before joining the EED program, Marcus studied two years in the Engineering Education Systems and Design program at Arizona State University, he also earned his BS in Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte and his MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Federal University of Campina Grande in Brazil.
Dr. Adam R. Carberry http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0041-7060 Arizona State University [biography]

Dr. Adam Carberry is an associate professor at Arizona State University in the Fulton Schools of Engineering, The Polytechnic School. He earned a B.S. in Materials Science Engineering from Alfred University, and received his M.S. and Ph.D., both from Tufts University, in Chemistry and Engineering Education respectively. His research investigates the development of new classroom innovations, assessment techniques, and identifying new ways to empirically understand how engineering students and educators learn. He currently serves as the Graduate Program Chair for the Engineering Education Systems and Design Ph.D. program. He is also the immediate past chair of the Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN) and a deputy editor for the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). Prior to joining ASU he was a graduate research assistant at the Tufts’ Center for Engineering Education and Outreach.
Dr. Samantha Ruth Brunhaver http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8607-5959 Arizona State University [biography]

Samantha Brunhaver, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor within The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Her primary areas of research include engineering career pathways and decision-making, undergraduate student persistence, professional engineering practice, and faculty mentorship. Brunhaver graduated with her B.S. in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
Dr. Jennifer M. Bekki Arizona State University [biography]

Jennifer M. Bekki is an Associate Professor in The Polytechnic School within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research aims to understand and address systemic inequities within STEM graduate education.

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