2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Divergent Paths to Teaching Innovation: Studying How Three Engineering Professors Engaged with Communities of Practice to Teaching Innovation

This research paper explores how three senior tenured engineering professors took varied paths to teaching innovation as they engage with teaching-focused communities of practice. Most research-intensive university of the United States often prioritize research over teaching. Existing literature reports that strong emphasis on research hinders tenure-track engineering faculty from focusing on teaching innovation. In this paper, the study reports three different paths engineering professors took to teaching innovation within a system that prioritizes research over teaching. We use a qualitative case study approach, drawing on in-depth interviews, survey data, and document analysis to explore their diverse paths to teaching innovation. Data were collected from three senior tenured professors at a large research-intensive U.S. university. In particular, we analyzed interviews from a large study examining how communities of practice influenced changes in teaching conceptions and faculty engagement. Our findings showed that three tenured engineering professors took distinct paths to teaching innovation: (1) A ‘Resilient Innovator’ who developed an online course system with multimedia resources and online assessment, navigating the tenure system’s emphasis on research over teaching, (2) A ‘Writing Integration Champion’ who collaborated with interdisciplinary faculty and integrated writing pedagogy into engineering classrooms, (3) A ‘Balanced Strategist’ who invested personal time in improving teaching as well as doing research, and later joined the communities of practice to better teach a highly challenging course. Their diverse paths provide a deeper understanding of how different choices individual faculty members made influenced their engagement with teaching innovation and career paths in a research-intensive university. This paper raises questions for engineering educators and administrators about how faculty members’ paths and participation in communities of practice influenced by personal, departmental, and institutional factors research-intensive universities. It also offers questions to research-intensive universities whose goals are to build and sustain the culture of excellent teaching and teaching innovation in engineering classrooms through communities of practice.