Pre-Service Faculty Learning Processes and Teaching Approaches

This is a full paper examining Pre-Service Faculty (PSF) conceptions of learning and the influences of those upon their enacted or theorized teaching practices. PSF are our analogy to pre-service teachers, and denotes people on a pathway towards a faculty position, who have not yet landed their first faculty job. Specifically, we study engineering graduate students in this project. We thematically analyzed ten interviews with PSF at a large R1 US institution. We developed an analytical framework to describe the relationships between PSFs’ learning processes and teaching approaches. This framework is composed of four elements: PSFs’ personal learning processes, embraced teaching actions, rejected teaching actions, and the learning processes that the PSF considers viable. PSFs’ conceptions of effective engineering teaching can be deduced from this framework. This framework is in agreement with the literature on teaching processes of engineering faculty, who describe several of the same influences. We also found that these PSF describe more constructivist pedagogy than anticipated, especially considering that the majority of the PSF had minimal formal pedagogical training. We conclude that this inclination to implement constructivist pedagogies represents a productive beginning, that these PSF have considered what it means to effectively teach, and consequently represent a promising population for structured interventions to train them in educational theory, methods of enacting active learning, or these constructivist pedagogical methods which they describe thereby empowering them to introduce these methods within their future classrooms.