DEM-Changing Faculty through Learning Communities

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

The Dwight Look College of Engineering and the College of Science at Texas A&M University will conduct a demonstration project aimed at changing faculty knowledge, personal vision, commitment and interactions with students, through learning communities. The project will help faculty improve four strategic disciplines that underpin improvement of learning environments for women, underrepresented minorities and all students: 1) Development and invitation -- Faculty members examine mechanisms through which women and men develop intellectually and motivationally, and understand the role of invitation in the development process. 2) Mental models -- Faculty members understand and make explicit how they build chains of reasoning from observable data through assumptions to action. 3) Personal vision -- Faculty members improve their capacity to imagine and act in ways that maximize their individual self-fulfillment. 4) Personal commitment -- Faculty members improve their capacity to move from creating a personal vision to recognizing that they have power and responsibility to realize it. The critical element of learning environments on university campuses is the faculty; therefore, development of learner-centered educational environments rests on helping faculty develop the mental and interpersonal disciplines that provide the foundation for such environments. Changing how women are treated, how the classroom is managed, how teaching is performed, how graduate students are mentored, all depend on numerous individual faculty. However, university campuses are not analogous to neural networks that can be trained by feeding back quantitative error measurements through algorithms such as the back-propagation method. Instead, university campuses more closely resemble complex adaptive systems in which diversity, interaction and selection of numerous and complicated agents gives rise to observable, emergent properties. If the aim is to create learning environments that are both more inviting and more welcoming, it is not sufficient to bombard faculty with messages such as "Be inviting!" or "Be welcoming!". Instead, it is important to identify disciplines that should be nurtured and developed across the entire faculty with the conviction that if faculty members practice these disciplines, then they will create learning environments that are inviting and welcoming. As faculty members become more proficient in the four strategic disciplines, the project should observe changes in attitudes about learning, teaching and the role of women and minorities in SMET. The project also should observe increasing participation in the workshops and faculty learning communities sponsored by the project. Finally, the project should observe improvement in retention of women in undergraduate physical science and engineering; improvement in the enrollment in graduate study; and improvement in retention of women in graduate physical science and engineering.