The PEER Collaborative: Supporting Engineering Education Research Faculty with Near-peer Mentoring Unconference Workshops

The PEER Collaborative National Network is a national peer mentoring network for early career tenure-track or mid-career tenured faculty who conduct and are primarily evaluated based on their research related to engineering education. This paper discusses the development, logistics, and outcomes of two PEER workshops built around a community of practice framework. Data from internal and external evaluations are presented to provide insights into aspects that worked well and aspects that need further development. Additionally, by reflecting on the workshops, participants crafted vignettes describing the impact the PEER workshops had on their personal and professional lives. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future of PEER (and potential spin-off groups from the PEER cohorts), and the changes that will be made in future workshops. Recommendations are provided for other organizers interested in developing successful “near peer” groups to address specific community needs. Introduction In March 2009, a small group of colleagues across the engineering education research community came together as a peer mentoring community. A shared focus was on being evaluated for tenure based primarily on their engineering education research performance. The group of 12 developed and held a self-organized and self-funded retreat at Pine Mountain Resort State Park in Kentucky. For two full days, they talked in pairs and small groups about "thorny problems" they were wrestling with in their work. They reviewed each others' papers and grant proposals, problem-solved around issues working with difficult graduate students and developing complicated IRB applications, and discussed strategies for making interdisciplinary connections. These conversations, interspersed with recreational activities, built trust between the participants, which formed the foundation for peer-mentoring relationships. These relationships have not only continued but have grown deeper and expanded to include more people, including a few recently-tenured faculty now contemplating the new target of promotion to full professor. Naming themselves the PEER (Pine mountain Engineering Education Research) Collaborative, this group has continued to meet regularly at our major disciplinary conferences, and has strengthened relationships through online interactions via email, Skype, and a private Facebook group. The group decided to expand the PEER Collaborative structure because of its perceived effectiveness and utility to the original group. Two national workshops, developed using the theoretical framework of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Kimble & Hildreth, 2008), have been held to evaluate whether this peer-mentoring structure may be useful to other early or mid-career faculty who are isolated (geographically or functionally) at their institutions from more senior faculty who are experienced in engineering education research. These P ge 24237.3 workshops were funded by the National Science Foundation, held in in August 2011 and June 2013, and were collaboratively designed for a broader group of tenure-track and recently tenured engineering education faculty members. This paper discusses the development, logistics, and outcomes of these workshops built around the community of practice framework. We present data from internal and external evaluations to provide insights into what worked and what needs further development. We include vignettes from participants reflecting on the PEER workshops and the effects the PEER events had on their personal and professional lives. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future of PEER and its relationship with other developing groups (including GEECS for graduate students and the EER Leaders for mid-career scholars groups), a discussion of the changes that will be made in future workshops, and recommendations for other organizers about developing successful “near peer” groups to address specific community needs. The need for peer mentoring in EER Over the last decade, there has been a change in the landscape of engineering education research. This change can be seen through a number of significant events in the engineering education community, including the reinvigoration of the Journal of Engineering Education's publication mission, ASEE’s Year of Dialogue, the articulation of a set of research areas to structure future engineering education research agendas, and a plethora of editorials calling for the birth of a new discipline or the value of different forms of engineering education research. These events laid the intellectual groundwork for the growth of a new formal discipline of engineering education. Their momentum increased the hiring of engineering education faculty where tenure is granted based primarily on research performance. These positions emerged in a variety of different departments including engineering, education, and even newly established engineering education departments. Furthermore, new funding programs focused on engineering education research at the National Science Foundation have given faculty a vehicle for performing such work. Overall, the engineering education research community over the last decade has mobilized financial and human resources to generate an exciting, diverse, and, in many respects, new research discipline. The growth in numbers of tenure-track faculty members who are evaluated primarily on their research performance in engineering education along traditional metrics of funding, publications, and graduate students graduated has been particularly exciting over the last eight years. However, most faculty have been hired into assistant professor positions, generating an imbalance in the blend of faculty ranks normally present in academic departments -indeed, by virtue of their “start-up” situation, engineering education departments have been structured where assistant professors constitute the plurality (if not the majority) of members, followed by the number of associate professors, and then finally by full professors. This is the reverse of what is common in established academic departments. P ge 24237.4 The imbalance of assistant to full professors engaged in engineering education research projects and programs places particular strain on assistant professors. Most are faced with working on their teaching and research with insufficient guidance and mentoring, while adapting to a new work environment. Faculty who are either in imbalanced departments or who exist in isolation at their institutions often find themselves both with leadership and service responsibilities considered unusual in established programs (e.g., chairing the graduate admission and curriculum committee, developing departmental policies and bylaws, running major research centers, and serving on strategic planning committees). The few senior faculty with expertise in engineering education tend to either be too sought after nationwide or are otherwise engaged to be able to spend much time with junior faculty. The imbalance makes it difficult to receive professional mentoring from established leaders. In addition to this imbalance, there have been few faculty members nationwide who have gained tenure based on their engineering education research (although this number has dramatically increased in the last 2-3 years). More common is to find tenured faculty members who have transitioned into engineering education research after receiving tenure for their technical research. Furthermore, few institutions have any tenure guidelines or best practices for junior faculty engaged primarily in engineering education research. Tenure packages submitted in more traditional Colleges of Engineering must educate the college and department-level promotion and tenure committees about how to assess the value and quality of educational research as well as calibrate their expectation of funding sources and success. Often this burden falls on the tenure candidates themselves. These challenges are urgent to address, as junior faculty are just starting to attempt tenure and promotion and the critical mass of assistant professors are soon to begin submitting tenure and promotion materials. Junior faculty at these institutions were hired for their promise and potential in a field beginning to establish itself using the same markers as conventional disciplines. We need to have a mechanism to pool knowledge between junior faculty across distributed locations and between isolated faculty members. We also need to build capacity among early and middle-career faculty in order to build critical mass around this new intellectual community of engineering education faculty members. Developing new mentoring frameworks and practices is an important way to link current junior faculty with successfully tenured faculty. Literature Background For this project we have adopted Lave and Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) model as the theoretical framework for the design of the workshop. Communities of practice are groups of people who share a common concern, common practice, or a passion for something they do. These communities learn and produce solutions together as the community members interact with each other. There are three primary components that each CoP must entail: P ge 24237.5 ● The domain: A CoP has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. In other words a CoP is not just a group of friends or a club of people. In the context of our workshop, the domain is engineering education research. ● The community: In varying degrees of participation, community members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information in their domain. The community we have built is composed of junior, pre-tenure, and recently tenured scholars. The next generations of engineering education researchers are included and mentored as part of the community. ● The practice: Members of a community are practition