2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a research paper presenting our work with faculty-to-be. Engineering faculty are often not trained pedagogically prior to their entry to the professoriate. Given their rigorous preparation through apprenticeship-model programs for research skill development, these faculty-to-be are well prepared for research. However, there is not a similar degree of preparation for their pedagogical skills. Given the wide array of difficult skills involved with adult education, this is cause for concern.
We interviewed several PreService (PSF) faculty, which is a term we coined to describe (engineering) graduate students intent on pursuing a faculty position after acquiring their degree. We asked them about their views on teaching, how that would be facilitated, and how that interacted with their own learning. As such, this study seeks to understand how PSF consider “effectively teaching engineering” to occur.
Afterwards, we performed a descriptive phenomenological analysis upon the interview corpus. We sought to understand how this population understands the phenomenon of “effectively teaching engineering” and how that phenomenon can show us portions of their epistemological beliefs. Our research questions for this work are:
What do PSF consider to be “effectively teaching engineering?”
How does this structure and elements reveal portions of their epistemological beliefs?
We followed the analytic process laid out by STEM scholars, adapting the works of Husserlian tradition into this context. Further, we leveraged the lead author’s position as an insider to the population to develop unique insights.
Our analysis revealed PSF had unexpected perceptions about the role of the instructor. Most of our participants noted the powerful, yet limited, autonomy of the instructor. PSF also made an interesting distinction between the course viewpoint and the classroom viewpoint. They considered course design and curricular decisions which the instructor made with one lens, and the interactional decision-making done in the moment during the course of a class session from a different lens. Given the limited training in pedagogical development of most of our PSF, this was both surprising and heartening.
The implications of this work include ways to present the skills for being an excellent instructor to the ways PSF described teaching, presenting course design mechanisms that will align to student-centered attitudes most PSF took towards learning, and activating these views of an instructor’s autonomy to facilitate development of the key skills in pedagogical design.
We look forward to presenting our work in a Q/A session.