When graduate students in engineering think about careers in teaching, they often have only fuzzy notions about the realities of just what a faculty position involves. As part of their mission to improve engineering education, the Center for Advancement in Engineering Education (CAEE) has developed a program that prepares students for the world of teaching.
The program is called the Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) and helps engineering graduate students better prepare for the responsibilities of a faculty career by providing a framework and materials to help them in developing a teaching portfolio. Teaching portfolios have been used in a variety of disciplines, but the ETPP is unique because it targets engineering graduate students and postdoctoral associates and is designed to be peer-led.
Not only does the ETPP help students build a teaching portfolio they can use when looking for a teaching position, but it also raises their awareness of teaching and diversity issues in engineering education. Many graduate students considering teaching careers are unaware of all the responsibilities of being a faculty member. They have little experience with things like how to look for and get funding, how to run a meeting or how to manage their students.
CAEE researchers at the University of Washington, led by Jennifer Turns and Angela Linse, started developing the program in January 2003. The team had plans to make it available to other institutions a few years later, but the timing for taking the ETPP live got put on the fast track when Raluca Rosca, a postdoctoral researcher in Aerospace Engineering at University of Florida (UF), started using it despite its formative stage.
Rosca learned about the program through a paper delivered by the ETPP research team that reported on a pilot program at the 2004 ASEE Conference. She was immediately intrigued and met with Jessica Yellin of the ETPP team (and a Mechanical Engineering PhD) to discuss using the ETPP. As Yellin polished the program, Rosca began a recruiting effort that garnered an initial group of 35 interested students.
Although some issues had been discovered during the pilot, Rosca’s use of the ETPP gave Turns, Yellin and the rest of the team valuable feedback that is being used to improve the program even more. From deciding when to start a session to the amount of information to the benefit of having a guide for facilitators, the UF offering uncovered several critical areas that are being improved by the team.
Because of Rosca’s willingness to implement a program that was essentially still a work in progress, the ETPP team was able to fine-tune the program more rapidly and it will be available to other institutions ahead of schedule. Once it is ready, graduate students at other institutions will be able to simply download the materials and start their own program. And there have been several added bonuses. First, the University of Florida chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), together with the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in the College of Engineering, agreed to sponsor ETPP activity on the Florida campus in the future. And second, Rosca and Diane Hickey of SWE presented a paper on the UF ETPP activity at the 2005 ASEE Conference (available via proceedings search).