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The Process of Conceptualizing and Creating the Engineering Faculty Impact Collaborative to Support Faculty Development and Mentorship
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Huerta, Mark Vincent Aukes, Daniel M. Bekki, Jennifer M. Brunhaver, Samantha Carberry, Adam R. Holloway, Julianne L. Lichtenstein, Gary R. McKenna, Ann F. |
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | This is a work in progress paper that describes an effort to support faculty development and mentorship. The current faculty development literature indicates that faculty members who receive adequate mentoring are more productive leading to greater overall objective career success. Minimal research in engineering education has investigated the impact of faculty development and mentoring programs despite these findings. Evaluating faculty development and mentoring programs can elicit information that can help inform the development of an evidenced-based approach to designing such programs. The Engineering Faculty Impact Collaborative (EFIC) seeks to address this need by building a collaborative among institutions and faculty that will: (1) instigate broad interest in and awareness of entrepreneurial mindset (EM)-based engineering faculty mentorship and development, (2) contribute to the knowledge base around engineering faculty development or mentorship, and (3) connect engineering faculty members who wish to engage in EM-based faculty development. This paper shares the process of developing a strategic plan for EFIC and details from the resulting strategic plan that emerged. Introduction It is well known that new faculty must quickly master ‘early career survival skills’ and become productive researchers, effective teachers, and conscientious colleagues who provide meaningful service to their institution. Mastering these different responsibilities is a challenging process that can lead to considerable stress. Boice [1] found that 95% of new faculty take four to five years to become fully productive in research and effective in teaching. Untenured faculty have reported higher levels of stress during this time period for reasons including they feel like they do not have enough time, receive inadequate feedback and recognition, are given unrealistic expectations of what they can accomplish, lack an environment with collegiality, or struggle with work-life balance [2]. Tenured faculty are not immune to this process as new challenges emerge in continuing to produce impactful research and improve teaching, while also taking on more service responsibilities. Support programs and resources often provided during the pre-tenure years are typically unavailable once tenured [3]. For example, recently promoted faculty may find it challenging to change research directions in order to remain competitive with a potentially shifting funding landscape. There is broad agreement that mentorship plays an important role in supporting faculty, especially those early in their careers. Little evidence on how institutions can most effectively support mentorship to achieve the optimal level of impact on faculty productivity and success is available in the literature. There is a particular lack of empirical support for evaluating the efficacy of mentorship programs. This suggests a need for a concerted effort to investigate the effectiveness of mentorship approaches on faculty development at different stages in their careers. The Engineering Faculty Impact Collaborative (EFIC) was created to inspire a unified effort among researchers and administrators to address this need. This paper describes the formation of the EFIC led by a planning team at Arizona State University and supported by the Kern Family Foundation. The following paper provides background on faculty development and mentorship, describes the process of developing a strategic plan for EFIC, and provides examples of research studies and activities that would contribute to EFIC. Background Faculty development programs may be able to enhance faculty members’ productivity and performance in research, teaching, and service, while reducing stress. Such programs include institutional and/or departmental onboarding orientations, professional development workshops, and resources to attend external professional development opportunities. Mentorship is viewed as a key facilitator for faculty development. Mentoring in the context of faculty development has been defined as “a process where an experienced faculty member serves as a guide to an individual with lesser experience for the purposes of socializing them into disciplinary norms, fostering their acquisition of institutional and scholarly knowledge, providing professional opportunities, and person and/or professional support” [4]. Mentorship has been divided into three core areas – career development, psychosocial support, and role modeling – and can be provided through both formal and informal interactions [5, 6]. Formal mentoring programs typically involve a more experienced faculty member, the mentor, being assigned to a new faculty member, the mentee [7]. These programs require time, money, and programmatic support. Informal mentoring relationships are developed organically when two individuals are drawn together for what could be a variety of reasons. Assigned formal relationships may infringe on the autonomy of younger engineering faculty or create dissatisfaction due to regular, required meetings [4, 16]. Not offering formal mentoring opportunities may leave underrepresented minorities (URMs) and women at a disadvantage in identifying a mentor, especially within engineering. There is some evidence indicating that same gender mentoring relationships generally provide more psychosocial support than cross-race and cross-gender relationships [17]. Women currently constitute 16.9% of tenure-track faculty in colleges of engineering in the United States [18] making it difficult for them to identify a mentor similar to themselves. Women from underrepresented groups may find this an even greater challenge. Long et al. [16] found women may even need to go outside of their institution to find mentors. Regardless of whether these connections are made formally or informally, research suggests that having a network of multiple mentors, sometimes referred to as “mentoring constellations,” leads to greater objective career success [8, 9]. Studies indicate that faculty members who receive adequate mentoring become more productive scholars, more effective teachers, experience greater job satisfaction, and have more collegial relationships [1, 10, 11, 12]. Faculty who do not receive adequate mentoring are more likely to become isolated, stressed, and experience burnout that can decrease morale and increase turnover [13]. Most faculty development orientations and workshops can provide faculty with general best practices within teaching, research, work-life balance, and more. Mentorship offers the additional value of specific advice tailored to an individual’s current situation and psychosocial support. There is a clear consensus that faculty development and mentorship are important, but trends have largely not impacted faculty mentorship offerings. The majority of higher education institutions in the United States do not have formal programs [14]. In a recent exploratory qualitative study completed by Huerta, London, and McKenna [15], interviews were conducted with engineering deans across different types of institutions to investigate the state of faculty development across different colleges of engineering. It was revealed that, although mentorship is recognized as important, there was a lack of evidence on how to best structure mentoring programs. The majority of deans reported that their institutions relied on informal mentoring programs. Deans also noted that supporting recently tenured faculty was an area in which few resources and attention have been allocated. Conceptualizing EFIC The planning team for EFIC was formed with the purpose of conceptualizing an approach to enhance engineering faculty development and mentorship in a manner that supports meaningful and impactful research, teaching, service, and mentorship. Engineering faculty are the focus of this effort because they have direct and immediate influence on the next generation of students, contribute long term and lasting impact to the field of engineering, and serve as key leaders in advancing technological solutions that create value to society. The planning phase was carried out over nine months starting in April 2018. The final goal was to develop a strategic plan for EFIC to help mitigate issues with faculty development, specifically mentorship models. Entrepreneurial mindset (EM), a construct propagated by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), was integrated as a core framework for EFIC. Bekki and colleagues [19] define EM as “the set of cognitive behaviors that orient an engineer toward opportunity recognition and value creation in any context, not just that of an entrepreneurial venture.” KEEN’s framework for EM, referred to as the “3Cs”, supports developing student behavioral and mindset outcomes, including using curiosity to explore the world, and making connections between different sources and information in order to create value for others [20].This framework has resonated and been applied by a number of faculty to drive content, assessment, and pedagogical changes in their courses. This has become known as entrepreneurially-minded learning (EML) [21]. The majority of courses in which EM has been integrated focus on engineering design or project-based courses [21]. Having an EM framework aligns well with the goals of faculty development. It promotes a paradigm of having faculty leverage curiosity and connections to identify opportunities and create value [20]. The 3Cs framework also fits well with the objectives of quality mentoring relationships as curiosity is required by both the mentor and mentee to make a meaningful connection, which fosters more insightful feedback and/or even collaborations that lead to the creation of value and impact. The overarching goals for EFIC were conceptualized into three domains: 1) Instigate broad interest in and awareness of EM-based engineering faculty mentorship and development, 2) Contribute to the knowledge bas |
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| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://peer.asee.org/the-process-of-conceptualizing-and-creating-the-engineering-faculty-impact-collaborative-to-support-faculty-development-and-mentorship.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
