Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The engineering profession has been keen to develop engineering activities in schools. Both the ASEE and FIE annual conferences hold several sessions each year devoted to K-12 education in which there are exchanges about what has been done and what might be done. Occasionally it is pointed out that engineering education can learn to its advantage about teaching methods in schools especially in primary (elementary) schools [1, 2]. There are no detailed analyses of engineering educators at work of the kind carried out among school teachers by Lortie [3] and more or less replicated twenty years later by Cohn and Kottkamp in the United States [4].

      My experience of teacher education leads me to believe that beginning engineering educators have much to learn from beginning teachers. Therefore, many examples in this text are taken from reports of what happened to beginning teachers and their students while researching their own instruction.

      There seems to be general agreement that there is a need for induction to teaching that goes beyond telling beginning teachers where their classroom, rest rooms, and staff rooms are before they begin their teacher training. However, by all accounts engineering education is still at this primitive stage. It is not unreasonable to suppose that key questions on a beginning engineering educators mind relate to accountability: “to whom, and for whom am I responsible?”

1.2 ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Accountability is important because it is the devil that is driving the mechanisms that control the work of teaching, as for example, the ABET criteria. In the UK, higher education institutions are now being judged for their teaching quality as well as their research [5]. That is, in addition to the quality assurance procedures already in place.

To begin at the beginning, Sockett wrote in 1980 that: “Central to the debate on accountability are the twin ideas of responsibility and answerability for actions undertaken by one party on behalf of another” [6]. My version of the development of accountability in the education system in England is that it began with the student revolt of 1969. Parliamentarians found that although the student unions in the universities received funding from student fees they were not required to account for how it was spent, and this frustrated those parliamentarians. They also came to believe that the measures in place for checking on the usage of funds by the universities were not adequate. In consequence, and it took a long time, the funding and accountability mechanisms were changed in the latter half of the nineteen-eighties. By far the most important control mechanism became the regular review of research, that is, the rating of departments against the number of publications produced, their quality as measured by peer review and the medium in which they were presented (e.g., conference, journal). Publications also became important in the United States for academics seeking tenure or promotion to associate and full professorship. Research became more important than teaching in many institutions, and the term research university coined.

Many beginning engineering educators are brought up in this system without any break in industry, and understand they have to publish or perish. The key qualification for progress into engineering education is the Ph.D., not paradoxically a Ph.D. and a qualification to teach. Some beginners may have had the experience of being a teaching assistant but few will have had any training for teaching, although training courses are available in some countries and compulsory in others [7]. A beginning teacher coming from industry will be in this situation but will have experienced the discipline of working in industry, and some of them find the organization and attitudes of engineering educators surprising. In either case both types are suddenly faced with role conflict between the relative efforts they should put into teaching on the one hand, and on the other hand, research. They come to a crossroads one of which points to research, and the other in the opposite direction toward teaching. As things stand unless teaching is formally appraised they are more likely take the research option.

Demands for improvement in teaching may increase the tension between research and teaching [8], and if undertaken within existing procedures for quality assessment create tensions between traditional teaching and innovative teaching as Pears has demonstrated for engineering in Sweden [9]. A few of the graduate student teachers whose exemplars are given in these chapters found the tasks I asked them to do brought them into conflict with their Master teachers.

1.3 ACCOUNTABILITY AND EVALUATION IN SCHOOLS

In parallel with these developments schools were also subject to similar pressures. However, in the UK, university education departments and colleges of education ensured that there was a substantial debate about accountability which extended to teacher education courses. Sometimes, as in my case, it was linked to problems associated with evaluation, since evaluation is a form of accountability [10]. I focused on the relationship between accountability and professionalism and argued, following Elliott, that the first point in the chain of accountability was the teacher.

Elliot wrote in 1976 that, “If teacher education is to prepare students or experienced teachers for accountability then it must be concerned with developing their ability to reflect on classroom situations. By ‘practical reflections’ I mean reflection with a view to action. This involves identifying and diagnosing those practical problems which exist for the teacher in his situation and deciding on strategies for resolving them. The view of accountability which I have outlined, with its emphasis on the right of the teacher to evaluate his own moral agency, assumes that teachers are capable of identifying and diagnosing their practical problems with some degree of objectivity. It implies that the teacher is able to identify a discrepancy between what he in fact brings about in the classroom and his responsibilities to foster and prevent certain consequences. If he cannot do this he is unable to assess whether or not he is obliged to. I believe that being plunged into a context where outsiders evaluated their moral agency without this kind of developmental preparation would be self-defeating since the anxiety generated would render the achievement of an objective attitude at any of these levels extremely difficult” [11].

      Successful accountability is more likely to be achieved when teachers take responsibility for their daily actions at what might be deemed to be the first level of accountability. The second level, which cannot be avoided, relates that accountability to the outside world through appraisal, that is, of objectives agreed between the teacher and the authorities (principals, parents, colleagues) to whom he is accountable. Thus, if teachers wished to consider themselves to be professionals then, in the first instance, they had to be self-accountable for the achievement of agreed goals. They had to be able to self-evaluate or as we would say today, self-assess.

1.4 ACCOUNTABILITY AND PROFESSIONALISM

In the traditional concept of a profession the professional person is self-employed. As such they are necessarily self-accountable for their work, and this impacts, or should impact, on the service they provide their clients. But this idea was challenged in the nineteenth century and persons who were employed came to be regarded as professionals. In the 19th Century the creation and development of the engineering institutions, the Institution of Civil Engineers in the UK in particular, led to the view that engineering was a profession. In the 20th Century, particularly in the latter half, many other groups sought recognition as a profession from society. Teachers belonged to this group, and they became recognized as such,