The Learning Environment And Faculty Development

Since 1995 ECSEL an NSF sponsored coalition of schools (Howard University, MIT, Penn State, Morgan State, CCNY, University of Washington and the University of Maryland) has broaden its vision to include issues of student and faculty development, as well as, diversity. This coalition has produced a number of "best practices" and lessons learned from its major themes of Engineering Design, Student and Faculty Development and Diversity, Linkage to K-14, and Assessment/Evaluation. One such product produced by ECSEL is "In Their Own Words" (ITOW) a video and accompanying workshop (developed at Penn State) that addresses the "student experience" in the classroom and how to enhance the student learning environment. The video/workshop is aimed at a faculty audience with the aim to engender discussion about how students experience the learning environment and to raise faculty awareness of obstacles and universal student issues. Originally the video/workshop was design for Penn State, a large, predominately white institution. Recently, a second version of the video has been developed for export to campuses with a more diverse student population. Using the promotion of the ITOW workshop as a model we will examine what one can do when trying to introduce a new idea (i.e. workshop, program, etc.) to an academic body such as an engineering faculty. In this paper we describe the process of implementation of ITOW by facilitators on three different college campuses, the impact on those campuses, and document implementation problems and solutions. Two of the campuses are majority institutions and the third is a minority institution. We will compare the experiences of each of the facilitators and discuss the problems each campus faced in running a workshop of this nature and how these issues were resolved. The initial response to a workshop of this nature, in some cases, can be unfavorable. The experience at the three institutions indicates that constant communication among the facilitators, faculty members, chairs and deans is a key to acceptance of a challenging workshop.