Behind the Scenes: Course Syllabi explained

In this Full Research Paper, as part of a larger research project that sought to understand the experiences of assistant engineering professors at non-R1 institutions, I examined the teaching conceptions and methods that were described in participants’ course syllabi. The actual course syllabi documents were examined, and additionally, I examined the way the participants themselves described their course syllabi using an interviewing technique called document elicitation. In this paper, I present the findings for two participants who both taught a course on “Dynamic Systems and Controls.” This paper presents an exploratory content analysis of a course syllabus and the accompanying interviews about the course syllabus for two participants. I found that the instructors included a limited amount of information about their teaching conceptions and methods in their actual course syllabi documents. However, I found that the technique of document elicitation about course syllabi was extremely successful in getting a thick description about a participant’s teaching conceptions and methods. These findings point to the beneficial use of teaching syllabi in interviews and conversations about teaching as describing the backstory and decisions behind a course syllabus reveal much about instructors’ teaching conceptions and methods.