2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: This empirical research brief presents a subset of findings from a study conducted at a Brazilian federal university [1]. It focuses on instructors’ ongoing self-formation practices, examining how outstanding mathematics instructors frame their practices and themselves when teaching undergraduate engineering students. When Pepin, Biehler & Gueudet looked at the state-of-the-art crossing mathematics and engineering education, they noted that “current practices of instructors have not yet been comprehensively investigated” [2, p. 182], a step toward innovation in the field. In this study, we identify teaching practices related to self-formation based on instructors’ self-perceptions, that is, what these professors intentionally do to become better teachers.
Methods: Data were collected in stages. First, a survey with undergraduate engineering students plus an interview with the dean helped identify three outstanding professors from the department of mathematics in a Brazilian federal university. Being outstanding here means that, among the 40 professors affiliated instructors of the department, they are the ones engineering students seek out and recommend to their peers. Interview transcripts were analyzed via qualitative descriptive coding methods, and results were validated through member checking.
Results: This study highlights ongoing self-formation practices emerging from participants’ self-perceptions. The practices include: (i) dialogue: they are all concerned in having an environment where students feel safe to ask questions, their main resource to achieve this is their constant invitation to dialogue; (ii) reflection after each class considering how to improve future ones; (iii) writing and continuously refining lesson plans and lecture notes; (iv) modeling their own practices after teachers they had admired as students; (v) conveying strong command of the content.
Final Considerations: This paper presents only a subset of the practices identified in the interviews, focusing specifically on ongoing self-formation practices. The findings point to pedagogical approaches that are barely investigated in the intersection of mathematics and undergraduate engineering education. Dialogue, for example, is a foundation of Freire’s pedagogy [3] and has been widely studied in the context of adult education. Here, however, we provide evidence of its relevance in large engineering classes. Sharing these ongoing self-formation practices helps illuminate current teaching realities and supports immediate improvements. Future research could examine how instructors’ self-perceptions relate to students’ learning experiences.