Enhancing Engineering Education Research Capacity Through Building A Community Of Practice

This paper focuses on the NSF-funded Rigorous Research in Engineering Education (RREE) workshops and how the Community of Practice (CoP) model of Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder was used to create a partnership that produced the RREE workshops. Specifically, the paper will discuss how organizational partnerships were formed, how the RREE workshops were structured to promote a CoP among workshop participants, and implications of this work for others who would like to use the CoP model to expand their own communities. Introduction Calls for embracing more rigorous research in engineering education are emerging with increasing frequency. For example, the Journal of Engineering Education is repositioning itself as an archival journal for scholarly research in engineering education [1]. The journal now provides a forum for reporting on research that meets criteria such as those set forth by Diamond and Adam [2] and updated by Diamond [3]: 1. Requires a high level of discipline-related expertise 2. Is conducted in a scholarly manner with clear goals, adequate preparation, and appropriate methodology 3. Is appropriately and effectively documented and includes a reflective critique that addresses the significance of the work, the process used, and what was learned 4. Has significance beyond the individual context 5. Breaks new ground or is innovative 6. Can be replicated or elaborated upon 7. Is judged to be meritorious and significant by a rigorous peer review process. In response to calls such as this and the urgent need for rigorous engineering education research conducted by engineering faculty knowledgeable about the state-of-the-art in education research methods, the National Science Foundation has funded “Rigorous Research in Engineering Education: Creating a Community of Practice” (DUE-0341127). The goals of this project are to: • Create and present workshops for engineering faculty on conducting rigorous research in engineering education. Five-day workshops are held in Golden, Colorado each summer from 2004 through 2006 to train faculty participants. For more details see the project website [4]. • Sustain the development of this project through establishing a community of practice. The foundation for this aspect of the project is the work of Wenger and his colleagues. [5, 6] Furthermore, we aim to collaborate with projects and initiatives that have similar goals, such as: o Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) Scholarship on Engineering Education Institutes Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 10568.1 o Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CASEE) Annals of Research on Engineering Education (AREE) o Departments of Engineering Education Purdue – Department of Engineering Education Virginia Polytechnic University – Department of Engineering Education Utah State University – Department of Engineering and Technology Education The RREE workshops are positioned to assist in building engineering education research capacity in the engineering faculty community. More rigorous engineering education research is being called for by many national reports and commissions, including the National Research Council (NRC) reports “How People Learn” [7] and “Scientific Research in Education” [8]. A unique aspect of the Rigorous Research in Engineering Education (RREE) workshops is that they establish a structure and mechanism for training faculty to conduct rigorous engineering education research through a collaboration of engineering educators, learning scientists, and faculty developers (those who assist faculty enhance their teaching). The collaboration is a result of partnerships between three groups who could be considered, in Wenger’s words, to be “intellectual neighbors”: • Engineering educators (the American Society for Engineering Education [9] – the lead on this project), • Learning scientists (specifically the Education in the Professions Division of the American Educational Research Association [10]), and • Faculty developers in higher education (the Professional and Organizational (POD) Network in Higher Education.[11]) During the RREE workshop, participants work on a research question and research plan. The deliverable of the workshop is a draft of a small-scale research plan. This plan is to be refined and carried out (with the help of a research mentor) during the following academic year. For more detailed information about the content of the workshop please see the project webpage [4]. This project is aimed at strengthening the base on the cyclic model of the relationship between knowledge production and improvement of practice in STEM education (See “Mathematical Proficiency for All Students” [12]). That is, it is focused on helping faculty conduct research on student learning and teaching practices, which we expect will lead to new educational materials and teaching strategies. The paper uses Wenger, McDermott and Snyder’s model of a community of practice (CoP) [5] to describe (1) how this collaboration arose, (2) how the RREE workshops were structured to create a community of practice, and (3) implications of this work for others who might want to build other communities of practice. The CoP approach is being embraced by many organizations, including for example, the American Association of Higher Education, and is receiving increased web support [13]. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 10568.2 The Community of Practice Model Wenger et al. define a Community of Practice (CoP) as a unique combination of three fundamental elements: a domain of knowledge which is defined by a set of issues; a community of people who care about this domain; and the shared practice that they are developing to be effective in their domain [6, p. 27]. We propose that the engineering education research community is a community that is still forming. Clearly, there is a growing group of people who care about engineering education research. We see the domain of knowledge in engineering education as ripe for rapid expansion. Knowledge about how people learn engineering (and about how people learn, in general) and about best practices in educational research, are areas that would benefit by more contact with educational researchers in other arenas. One of the desired outcomes of this project is the opportunity for practicing engineers to make professional connections with education researchers and with faculty development professionals. Wenger et al. also describe the structure of a CoP (See Figure 1). A core community (often with a community coordinator, who helps to keep the “plates spinning”) is composed of those who are most active in the community. Active members (who participate in a variety of activities) are also part of the community as are peripheral members (who we have called “affiliated”) who occasionally participate. There are also “outsiders” who are not yet part of the community. Our project made use of the CoP structure by (1) determining groups that might not be within the Engineering Education CoP but have much to contribute to this community, (2) contacting the core groups of these potential “partners” and finally (3) creating a new core group, containing members of the partner groups. How these connections came about will be further explained in the next two sections of this paper. Finding “partner” organizations: How these collaborations arose How does one “find” organizations that are not now linked to the CoP, but would be beneficial additions to the community? This process begins by the willingness of members of the initial CoP to be “boundary crossers” and join other organizations. In our case, all of the three authors were already members of at least one of the proposed partner organization (ASEE and AERA). And two of the authors were members of all three communities (ASEE, AERA, and POD). Once these partner communities or organizations have been identified, then discussions can begin with the respective core group(s). The core group is generally the governing body (elected officers and board members, and executive committee members.) These discussions begin very informally, and may require years to fully establish. It is useful for these discussions to be focused on the creation of a common task. In this case the discussion was centered around the joint creation of workshops on engineering education research (which eventually became the RREE workshops). Buy-in from the core groups of the partner communities is essential, and therefore the project must be viewed as benefiting not only the initial CoP, but the partner groups as well. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education P ge 10568.3 For the RREE workshops, the core groups involved were the President of ASEE and the Board of Officers of the Education and Research Methods (ERM) Division of ASEE, the Executive Committee of AERA Division I (Professions Education), and the Executive Committee and Core Committee of POD. Initial discussion of this project began with the ERM core group in 2001, and discussion with AERA and POD began in early 2002. This advance work was needed for the RREE workshops that were launched in August 2004. As one can see, advance work in this phase is lengthy due to the time between opportunities for face-to-face meetings (which usually occur at annual meetings or conferences) and the time needed for organizations to make decisions. But the time spent is well worth the effort as powerful partnerships can be created. Once the connections between organizations were made, there were also efforts to create events that would allow for f