Perceptions of Engineering Faculty on Educational Innovation at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Abstract

As the educator of nearly one-third of all Latinx engineering graduates in the United States, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are at the forefront of innovating engineering curriculum for Latinx students. In many cases, the driving force behind these innovations in engineering is the faculty. This study aims to identify the assets and challenges that engineering faculty at HSIs perceive impact their ability to engage in educational innovation and, ultimately, create inclusive and learnercentered educational experiences. Specifically, the thematic analysis of workshop artifacts enabled the researchers to examine the perspectives of 24 engineering educators from two-and four-year colleges across the Southwestern and Southeastern United States who attended one of two National Science Foundation-sponsored workshops. The artifact analysis illustrates how engineering educators at HSIs recognized particular assets to leverage when innovating within their courses and departments, both from within and outside of their institutions. At the same time, these educators also acknowledged barriers to innovation from various sources, including personal, interpersonal, and administrative. Recognizing that faculty experiences can vary based on their position's responsibilities, this study also begins to explore the differences in perception of educational innovation across instructional and tenure-line faculty. These differences across faculty types suggest an opportunity to bring different perspectives and skillsets to educational innovation collaborations that include faculty from diverse backgrounds and roles. Overall, this study provides a foundation for future research on factors impacting faculty engagement with inclusive and learner-centered pedagogy at institutions seeking to serve Latinx and other racially and ethnically diverse students.

The AMPLIFY Project: Experiences of Engineering Instructional Faculty at HSIs

“…Understanding the perspectives instructors adopt is vital for designing faculty development opportunities at HSIs. These results complement existing literature on asset-and deficit-based framings, particularly related to understanding the structures that instructors at HSIs adopt within their classrooms [6], [7], [23]. Additionally, these findings further current work by providing a novel expansion of the binary framing of perspectives as either asset-or deficit-based by shifting to a continuum, acknowledging the awareness and supportive-based framings that instructors can hold of their students' backgrounds.…”

Nuestro Impacto: An Insider Look into the Connections between Our Past Experiences and Current Teaching and Mentoring Practices

“…Faculty professional development research that includes engineering faculty is scant (Coso Strong, Kendall, & Henderson, 2023;Villanueva Alarcón & Muñoz, 2023). Furthermore, at institutions of higher education where Latiné/x faculty are the minority, research impacting their access and application of FDPs in the classroom is also rare (Kendall et al, 2021;Nuñez et al, 2015). The work presented in this paper is novel in that it centered the voices and experiences from five Latiné/x engineering faculty and through their stories, who knowingly identified areas that could merit further consideration for future FDPs.…”

Faculty Perceptions Of, and Approaches Towards, Engineering Student Motivation at Hispanic-serving Institutions

“…Thirty-six engineering educators from 13 two-and four-year HSIs participated in one of two workshops in the spring of 2018 [25]- [27]. During these workshops, participants were introduced to curriculum design through various lenses, such as design thinking, students as empowered agents, and intrinsic motivation.…”

“…Using the Design Thinking framework of inspiration, ideation, and implementation [28], [29], [30], participants were asked to engage in a student-centered design process to explore and prototype approaches that could be used to address their students' motivational needs and thereby enhance their intrinsic motivation [31]. Participants worked on worksheets individually and in small groups.…”