Board 117: WIP: Exploring the Teaching Journey of Early-career Engineering Faculty

This work-in-progress paper explores the teaching experiences of early-career engineering faculty in their initial semesters of a faculty position. The challenges of starting a new faculty position make it one of the most critical moments in a faculty's career. Each individual will encounter specific challenges based on their held identities and institutional culture, but teaching is often a shared obstacle among them. One-on-one, 60-minute semi-structured interviews were conducted with engineering faculty members who have less than two years of total teaching experience as an instructor. The first stages of Campbell's Hero's Journey were used to facilitate the dialog and provide a narrative structure to the interview. The participants were asked questions related to three aspects of their teaching story: (1) the call to adventure, (2) challenges on the road, and (3) finding help. Preliminary findings indicate that early-career engineering faculty who participated in the study experienced challenges related to planning and operationalizing their lessons (e.g., knowing how to select content for their lessons), using the learning management system, and navigating online classroom environments. Further, analyzing the data through the lens of Schlossberg's Transition Theory helped identify that the support structure used to cope with challenges was informal mentorship, i.e., participants sought support from senior peers who had taught the same classes they were teaching and built their material from existing resources. These findings provide a first step in creating specific professional development activities for both new engineering faculty and new faculty generally to improve their experience in teaching.