Co-designed research agenda to foster educational innovation efforts within undergraduate engineering at HSIS
Conference
Henderson, G, Kendall, MR, Basalo, I et al. (2019). Co-designed research agenda to foster educational innovation efforts within undergraduate engineering at HSIS
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Henderson, G, Kendall, MR, Basalo, I et al. (2019). Co-designed research agenda to foster educational innovation efforts within undergraduate engineering at HSIS
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The responsibility to educate and empower underrepresented groups in undergraduate education often relies on the commitment of educators and the curricula they design. Without financial or institutional support, there are limited opportunities for educators from different Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to engage in conversations about their curricula developments and share their vision for the future of engineering education. This multi-institutional research project adopted a participatory research design to recognize the existing efforts of educators and foster their curricula and scholarship ideas. A series of three workshops were conducted in 2018 by visiting educators engaged in engineering education at both two and four-year HSIs. Before, during, and after the workshop series, attendees were asked to reflect on three guiding educational philosophies: intrinsic motivation, students as empowered agents, and design thinking. Thirty-six engineering educators from thirteen HSIs from across the Southern United States participated in one of two, two-day workshops where attendees prototyped examples of how they would implement these philosophies at their home institution. Using these prototypes, participants identified the assets they already had and resources they would still need to obtain. Following a thematic analysis of these prototypes from the initial workshops, five themes were identified and prepared for dissemination at the third workshop. Ten participants from the initial workshops attended the final workshop conducted at the 2018 ASEE Annual Conference, and an additional five participants joined as general ASEE Annual Conference attendees. In the final workshop, participants engaged with the preliminary results, further reflected on their progress since the first workshop, and brainstormed research questions they believed the engineering education research community would benefit from answering. The results of this research paper are based on the perspectives of forty-one engineering educators, with a focus on qualitative analysis of questions proposed from fifteen participants at the final workshop. Five research areas emerged: Engineering curricula enhancement, Understanding our students, Faculty development relevant to HSIs, Perceptions of instructional faculty, Long-term impactful approaches. This paper therefore aims to support broader engagement in research and collaboration with and within HSIs, with a goal of increasing the representation of Latinx students in engineering. The results have the potential to target and foster further collaborative scholarly research between educators and promote their curricular efforts in undergraduate engineering education at HSIs.
