2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Our evidence-based practice paper will present a Big Development Initiative (BDI, blinded for review) implemented at a large, multi-campus, North-Eastern US, R1 institution. BDI was funded by a 5-year NSF IUSE grant (institutional and community transformation track) that was part of a multidisciplinary collaboration of science and engineering faculty and Learning Centers staff. We discuss our practices, the reasons behind them, and impacts on participating faculty, emphasizing building connections between the institution’s offices, departments, and schools.

BDI addressed perceptions of fragmentated and siloed faculty development initiatives at our institution. Faculty development efforts are distributed across departments, including an office for teaching with technology, one for assessment and evaluation, two school-based offices, a center for faculty research excellence, and an office for DEIB efforts. While each contributes significantly to faculty development, the siloes and disconnected communication channels lead to a perception of scarcity when it comes to support around teaching. In addition, most units focus on specific areas of development and not the kind of holistic teaching support we implemented. Recently, engineering departments have hired full-time teaching-focused faculty to improve teaching practice and education quality. While some science and math departments have many teaching-focused faculty, our engineering departments often have only a few faculty in these positions. We designed our BDI to bring siloed faculty together and create easier access to the many and varied programs across campus.

BDI, and our study, are grounded in questions about how institutional structures impact faculty agency and motivation. Our work is guided by Structuration Theory, Agency, and Expectancy-Value Theory. These theories conceptualize human motivation as being connected to instructors’ expectations of success in an endeavour (e.g., transforming aspects of their course) and the perceived value of that endeavour, while allowing us to examine the interdependence of human decision-making and institutional structures.

We planned BDI around maximizing value for faculty, while generating structures which supported faculty becoming involved in our programs and focusing efforts on teaching development. BDI has two major components: summer institutes are focused on pedagogical content delivery, and the production of usable materials and course design plans; semester support groups focus on the production or implementation of specific smaller projects, or the in-depth discussion of particular research-based ideas to provide faculty continuing support and a sense of connectedness with peers.

Our analysis will start from a thematic analysis of interviews with faculty, in the style of Braun and Clark to develop a sense of our data and the impacts that this program has had on participants. We will be using our theoretical lens to look for themes around how the structures of BDI has impacted faculty. Through the iterative process of thematic analysis, other themes may also emerge for investigation, which will enrich our understanding of participants’ experiences. Presentation of these themes, alongside illustrative cases of STEM faculty, will demonstrate the impacts of BDI on participants, provide context for engaging roundtable discussions of what participants are taking away from the programs, and present implications for faculty development initiatives.