2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents lessons learned from the first year of an interdisciplinary faculty development team exploring the impact of a humanistic model for faculty development through a Community of Practice. In many skilled professions, incoming faculty have hardly, if any, pedagogical preparation [1], especially on theoretical underpinnings of teaching and the science of how students learn. Paradigm shifts in engineering education have been focused on instructional behaviors, such as active learning, but have not focused on the relational or affective aspects of education. In the discipline of nursing, caring is an expected component of nursing practice. “Caring, which is when the one caring connects with and embraces the spirit of the other through authentic, full attention in the here and now, and conveys a concern for the inner life and personal meaning of another” [2], informs Human Caring Theory (Caring Science), which can help us go beyond care for patients towards cultivating a humanistic approach to educating students. This humanistic approach acknowledges the importance of the affective side of teaching and learning. Engineering, which shares many of the highly technical, decision-making aspects of nursing, could benefit from this approach.

Our team developed a Community of Practice (CoP) informed by this humanistic-educative caring framework as an agent of change among engineering faculty. During the summer of 2023, we embarked on our first iteration of our CoP and despite our best intentions and solid grounding of our team, we learned a few lessons we would like to share. We missed a critical step of really understanding ourselves and applying our framework within our team, an interdisciplinary group made up of faculty in nursing, engineering, and an instructional designer. The process of developing the CoP programming involved many collaborative meetings where we shared our ideas and insights guided by the nurse on the team who is responsible for and teaches a series of teaching courses within her college. We modeled our CoP program from her learning theory course and our collective experience participating in and facilitating other CoPs. As the first summer of programming commenced, the following was a common occurrence during CoP debriefing:

Engineer Facilitator: “Something is off”
Nursing Facilitator: “What’s off, I think everything is going fine”
Engineering Facilitator: …
Engineering Facilitator: “Something just doesn’t feel right”

The facilitation team dynamics of how we all approached this first iteration of our program remained steeped in our disciplinary backgrounds and areas of expertise, which may have caused varying perceptions of the effectiveness of education-focused programming. In retrospect, we can align the dynamics of our team with the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, specifically using the Stages of Concern and Levels of Use [3]. This lightning round presentation will share how our team dynamics would have been improved had we went through the Concerns-Based Adoption Model prior to implementing our programming to better gauge our own perceptions and what impact would look like among our participants.