Becoming Teachers: Early Career Engineering Faculty

Concerns about the quality of postsecondary engineering education have long been a feature of the higher education discourse. The socialization process for engineering faculty and STEM faculty, in general, has been deemed to hinder faculty uptake of progressive teaching practices in the form of research-based, student-centered pedagogies. In this regard, some researchers have argued that to understand the uptake of these practices, studies must examine if and how teacher identities motivate faculty to invest in their teaching. Thus, it is of critical importance that scholars study the teacher identity construction processes that early career engineering and other STEM faculty experience as they navigate academic contexts. The present study employed the communities of practice identity framework to explore how early career engineering faculty in a research extensive institution constructed a teacher professional identity. This conceptualization views identities as multiple and as negotiated through engagement in practice within and across communities of practice that have meaning for faculty’s conceptualization and enactment of teaching and other professional roles. This inquiry employed a narrative approach to data collection and data analysis. Ten participants who were in their first tenure-track faculty positions, and within three years of hiring, were interviewed three times during the academic year. The inquiry focused on faculty’s interactions both as learners and teachers before they became faculty and those in which they engaged during their first years on the tenure track. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and data were coded, yielding categories and themes that were further refined through a process of analytic memoing. The codes were read across participants but also in the context of participants’ narratives to illuminate participants’ individual identity journeys. The analysis revealed that while the participants were students, they critically observed teaching and learning interactions that formed the foundations for engaging with and making meaning of their work as graduate teaching assistants. With these experiences, faculty entered their new tenure-track positions during which they engaged with a loosely configured community of practice around teaching in their departments. While they also engaged the practice landscape within and outside of the university, participants’ interactions with students emerged as those that most informed how they shaped their teaching selves. These observations led to five propositions to guide future research. This study also documents the emergence of two identity trajectory sub-types, falling under an overall trajectory reflecting a learning and developmental orientation to teaching. Together these findings challenge the deficit narrative that frames engineering faculty (and STEM faculty more generally), and particularly those in research-intensive universities, as uninterested in teaching and unwilling to invest time in teaching-related activities. Finally, this study offers recommendations for future research and faculty development practice that takes a strengths-based approach to teacher development among early career engineering faculty.PhDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171423/1/jrpollar_1.pd