Abstract:

Being a faculty member generally starts after completing a doctoral degree and requires the individuals to teach and research. Doctoral education focuses on the quality of the research while teaching especially undergraduate courses is not the issue. However, young faculty members who have been involved only in research during their doctoral studies are expected to teach once they start working as faculty members. They are reported to have concerns for gaining the respect of the students, not try new instructional approaches for not being criticized, prepare more than they teach, generally teach factual knowledge, and do not focus on their research until they establish an effective teaching style (Boice, 1991).

This study investigates the teaching conceptions of young engineering faculty members. Specifically, the influence of the nature of the knowledge they teach, the institutional contexts, previous experiences and the other responsibilities they have for their jobs on their teaching conceptions will be explored.

Six young engineering faculty members (three female and three male) from four engineering departments at a technical university have participated in the study. The participants were interviewed about their views regarding teaching in their area, departments’ trends about teaching, and university context in general. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The interview data was analyzed through inductive coding strategies (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

The initial findings have revealed that young engineering faculty members have already established conceptions about an effective instructor in their respective areas as reported earlier (Kember & Kwan, 2000). The participants seem to have a teaching approach through their existing conceptions and their trial-and-error experiences. While making students understand the material appears as their strong side, not knowing exactly how to handle the assessment is a weak side. They have certain preferences in teaching in their respective areas which confirms the influence of the context on the teaching (Quinlan, 2002). Teaching alone or with a team seems to influence the teaching decisions participants made during the semester or in a single course hour. It might be speculated that since teaching with a team or alone have an impact on faculty members’ conceptions of teaching at a university (Kember & Kwan, 2000), young faculty members may develop different conceptions of teaching once they have opportunity to teach either with a team or alone. The findings of the study are expected to contribute to the development and improvement of faculty support programs.

References:

Boice, R. (1991). New faculty as teachers. Journal of Higher Education, 62, 150 – 173.
Kember, D. & Kwan, K. (2000). Lecturers’ approaches to teaching and their relationship to conceptions of good teaching, Instructional Science, 28, 469-490.
Miles, M.B. & Huberman, A.M.(1994). Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (2nd ed.).Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Quinlan, K.M. (2002). Scholarly dimensions of academics’ beliefs about engineering education. Teachers and Teaching: theory into practice, 8, 41-64.

Keywords:

Young faculty members, conceptions.