Faculty Development Model for Mentoring Interdisciplinary Engineering Projects

Abstract

The Work-in-progress paper discusses the faculty development model. The workplace problems for engineers in the 21st century demands interdisciplinary skills. To cater to the need, the educators need to make interventions for inculcating interdisciplinary skills among students. The challenge is that very limited focus is on preparing the faculty towards building interdisciplinary knowledge, skills and mentoring capabilities. The authors through this paper share an experience of deploying a faculty training model used for training the faculty towards mentoring interdisciplinary projects. The presented faculty development model is a result of the heuristic experience of four iterations and is organically evolved. The model was implemented in the context of a first-year engineering course titled Engineering Exploration. The course uses PBL pedagogy and every faculty, mentors a set of students to complete an interdisciplinary project. The nature of the projects in the course demands knowledge and skills from different domains to be applied at the mentioned stages. To mentor such interdisciplinary projects, faculty needs to be formally trained. However, in the literature authors found very limited architecture in the direction of standard frameworks and models that can be used to train the faculty towards interdisciplinary thinking and mentoring. The paper describes the evolved faculty training model consisting of four following phases where initial phases are focused on improving the technical skills among faculty members while the latter phase is focused on improving the mentoring skills.