From Q&A to Norm & Adapt: The Roles of Peers in Changing Faculty Beliefs and Practice

Abstract

is a learning scientist and associate professor at the University of New Mexico in the Organization, Information & Learning Sciences program and in the Chemical & Biological Engineering Department. She served as Co-PI on an NSF RET Grant and a USDA NIFA grant, and is currently co-PI on three NSF-funded projects in engineering and computer science education, including a Revolutionizing Engineering Departments project. She was selected as a National Academy of Education / Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and a 2018 NSF CAREER awardee in engineering education research. Dr. Svihla studies learning in authentic, real world conditions; this includes a two-strand research program focused on (1) authentic assessment, often aided by interactive technology, and (2) design learning, in which she studies engineers designing devices, scientists designing investigations, teachers designing learning experiences and students designing to learn.

Developing a “Revolution”: Design Challenges in a Chemical Engineering Department

“…Our chemical engineering degree includes a 1-credit first-year course, four core technical courses, as well as laboratory, seminar, and concentration-specific courses, culminating in a two-semester capstone design sequence (see Figure 1). Some of the faculty were hesitant about the curricular changes (Ferris et al, 2022;Gallup et al, 2020;. We viewed this as expected, in part because we recognized that in their educations, they had not experienced such approaches.…”

“…Given that many of our first-generation and low-income students had abundant opportunities having to "make do" and "make it work, " our faculty readily agreed that these kinds of experiences were valuable. We share more detailed examples of how we collaborated with faculty elsewhere (Davis et al, 2021;Gallup et al, 2020;Kang et al, 2022;Svihla, Chi, et al, 2022).…”

Pandemic Pivots Show Sustained Faculty Change

“…Many change projects fail to bring about change [17,18]; complicating this, what counts as evidence of sustained successful change is poorly defined. However, our prior work also suggested that by supporting faculty to implement sociotechnical design challenges in core classes, faculty became more aware of student potential, because such teaching brought them into closer proximity with students and such experiences brought out students' passion [19]. We argue that the 2020 pandemic, which brought about an abrupt shift to teaching online, provided a fair test of faculty beliefs and revealed a great deal about their values related to student learning.…”

The Educative Design Problem Framework: Relevance, Sociotechnical Complexity, Accessibility, and Nondeterministic High Ceilings

“…Some of the design challenges were co-designed with graduate students who worked in industry, vetted by the department's industry advisory board, or developed with significant input from industry sponsors. Along with shifting to design-focused courses, the faculty collaborated with a learning scientist and attended workshops to develop learner-centered teaching strategies, results of which are reported elsewhere [26][27][28][29][30][31]. Over this timespan, several faculty discarded prior challenges or significantly revised their design challenges, before being pleased with the student outcomes.…”