2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education, particularly chemical engineering education, has done significant work in developing better ways for teaching undergraduate students. With the rise of engineering educational departments and programs over the past decades, there has been an increasing focus cross-disciplinarily on the similarities of educating engineers. Unfortunately, graduate students, particularly engineering graduate students, are under-studied within literature. Graduate school is a time of significant personal development, growth, and apprenticeship into the research world. As such, this presents an excellent opportunity to facilitate pedagogical development. However, there is little scholarship around the pedagogical knowledge or current skills of future engineering faculty. To address this, we performed an exploratory descriptive phenomenological study. The goal of this study was to determine what PreService Faculty (PSF) believe it means to learn and teach engineering. PSF are a term we use to refer to engineering graduate students who are intent on pursuing a faculty role post-graduation.

A descriptive phenomenological analysis was performed on interview data collected with PSF on their views of learning and teaching. This work focuses on PSF who were in Chemical or Biomedical Engineering PhD programs. The four interviews from this study were collected from a larger corpus across multiple disciplines.

Our research questions for this project are:
What does it mean to “learn engineering?”
What does it mean to "effectively teach engineering?”
How, if at all, are these two phenomena connected?

PSF considered learning engineering to involve several key unexpected elements, such as: a necessity for resources to facilitate one’s own learning, a clear physical connection between the topic being learned and the phenomena being described, whether learning was a social or personal exercise, and “learning to get ‘un-stuck’” when faced with challenges.

PSF considered teaching engineering to involve a difference between why an element is being taught, whether that was for conceptual or content coverage, or instead focused upon student learning. Further, their pedagogical decisions were focused upon student learning, while their content coverage descriptions were focused upon the teacher facilitation of the course.

These two phenomena were connected for these participants specifically through their (hypothesized) teaching methods; PSF often would draw upon their own learning experiences to consider how to facilitate similar experiences with other students.

The findings from this disciplinary subset are echoed within the larger dataset, indicating a minimal difference in the views toward learning or teaching engineering cross-disciplines. These findings indicate that disciplinary nuances are often minimal by the time graduate school occurs. While the concepts of a discipline are extremely important, the more integral elements of learning or teaching engineering are not disciplinarily unique, and indeed are often shared across the disciplines. This presents unique potentials for facilitating peer-development. Chemical engineering education could provide leadership in this way, guiding their peers (or PSF as peers-to-be) in the development of their own pedagogical excellence.