Teaching with unfamiliar pedagogy for engineering design instructors

Abstract

In recent years, increasing amount of attention has been paid to the teaching of engineering design. This increase stems from response to calls for reform in the way engineering graduates are trained and many engineering programs reacted by adding more practical courses such as engineering design to their curriculum. Unlike traditional engineering courses, teaching engineering design requires adopting a type of pedagogy that many engineering educators are not familiar with and are often resistant to implement. Thus, it is the need to understand resistance that makes the study of concerns that faculty members may have implementing active teaching strategies relevant. Teachers' concerns have been examined extensively at K-12 level, but few studies have examined the same issue in undergraduate engineering education. The purpose of this study is to investigate the concerns of faculty members teaching a freshman engineering design course using an unfamiliar pedagogy, and map these concerns to a model developed for understanding concerns related to adoption of innovation. Themes that do not map unto this model would be deemed specific to the teaching engineering design.