2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper describes a study to examine faculty participation in communities of practice for teaching innovation at a large midwestern research intensive university. This study is making progress from collecting data from a faculty survey to interviews and focus group for the practitioners from all engineering majors. Extensive research reported a variety of barriers and motivators for individual engineering faculty’s adoption of instructional change. However, there is little research focused on engineering faculty participation in communities of practice for instructional change, particularly teaching innovation. This study has two objectives: (1) to better understand how engineering faculty members perceive their participate in communities of practice for teaching innovation supported by an annual funding program and (2) to make the program better to enhance the communities of practice. In this study, our participants included faculty from various engineering departments with various backgrounds, interests, and teaching experience. Using a community of practice as a theoretical framework, we conduct a qualitative case study, collecting data from multiple sources, such as an online survey, individual interviews, focus group, and a mini case study, to ensure the validity of our study. The survey results show that 92% of the faculty members are highly engaged in the faculty communities of practice and 76% of them answer this funding program helps their teaching practices be more innovative. However, only 45% of the respondents say that faculty members interact with each other within engineering departments. The survey results may not show individual engineering faculty members’ various lived experience in the communities of practice but need to explore their lived experience through other data, such as interviews and focus groups. The survey results enable the funding program conveners to recognize engineering faculty’s experiences to interdisciplinary interactions with diverse faculty for teaching innovation. In late Fall 2023, we will interview engineering faculty members who participated and are currently participating in the funded communities of practice. Conducting individual interviews, we will analyze the respondents’ answers to open-ended survey questions about their experiences and perceptions related to the communities of practice and the teaching innovation funding program based on thematic analysis. From individual interviews, we anticipate some unexpected or hidden findings based on individual participants’ diverse backgrounds, motivations, and their experiences on the faculty communities of practice for teaching innovation in the specific institutional contexts. This work-in-progress paper will discuss the details about the survey questions and the responses, and the findings of open-ended responses. We hope it will be able to contribute to reducing existing barriers and expanding motivators from engineering faculty members to consider their participation in the communities of practice as a means to advance teaching innovation.