2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite the international interest in the role of faculty communities that play on teaching innovation, there is little known about how women faculty who participate in these communities perceive their participation in faculty communities and its impact on their views of teaching. In this study, we particularly focus on women teaching faculty members’ participation in these faculty communities. In this paper, we examine how women teaching faculty view their participations in teaching-focused communities of practice and their impact on their view of teaching and instructional practices. Based on communities of practice as a theoretical framework, we used a case study, collecting quantitative and qualitative data based on a faculty survey, individual interviews, and artifacts. In particular, we chose women teaching faculty members’ interviews from a larger study because our aim was to learn from women teaching faculty’s unique experiences in the communities of practice. We used narrative methods as our main analysis approach to listen to their personal stories. Women teaching faculty members describe their journeys from initial struggles to active leadership to teaching innovation through their engagement in the communities of practice. They joined a community of practice as one of the team members and developed their roles in leading teaching innovation as a principal investigator. However, this study also identified challenges that women teaching faculty experience such as high teaching load, uneven participation, and the need for sustained support to balance their teaching and their efforts for teaching innovation. This study raises questions to help engineering communities consider how to support women teaching faculty who participate in the communities of practice for teaching innovation to be able to sustain their roles in teaching innovation despite high teaching loads in the current system of research-intensive universities. The findings suggest that unlike traditional short-term professional development, this team-based grant approach offers a supportive framework for enhancing educational innovation in research-intensive environments