Stories of Change: Faculty in Reflective Dialogues

Over a two year period, a group of faculty from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), met monthly to explore the role of reflection in transforming engineering education. This dialog group at Cal Poly was part of a larger Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) coordinated by the University of Washington. During the first year of the project the group at Cal Poly included faculty from the College of Engineering, but during the second year the group expanded to include faculty from other colleges (Liberal Arts, Business, and Science and Math) and students. The group consisted of 40 individuals with consistently 25 at each dialog meeting. We grappled with questions mostly philosophical in nature: What is reflection? Aren’t we reflecting all the time? Does reflection lead to transformation? What is the difference between transformation and change? How can we ask our students to reflect if we don’t have a reflective practice? As we concluded the two-year experiment in Spring of 2016, some faculty who participated in the dialogs reported changing both personally and professionally. In order to document and understand the nature of the changes we embarked on this research project. We interviewed 10 faculty from Engineering and Liberal Arts. The interviews were coded and analyzed through inductive narrative techniques. The results point to some profound themes. Most striking is that the practice of reflecting together on our own teaching led to more in-class active learning and an enhanced learning environment. This in turn led to faculty reporting deeper learning for students. Some faculty also reported changes in their own personal realm that resulted in a sense of greater well-being. Examples of these changes are included in this paper.