Future engineering faculty: How do they think about teaching?

Although many preparing future faculty programs exist, engineering graduate students interested in the professorate often have few opportunities to approach their teaching as a scholarly activity. While much research on educators' conceptions of teaching in higher education exist, little of this research has focused on the conceptions of engineering educators and even less on the conceptions of engineering graduate students. In the Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program, graduate students in engineering who are interested in faculty careers discuss and reflect about their teaching within the context of creating individual teaching portfolios that can be used for faculty job searches. Using a qualitative research design, these engineering graduate students were observed during the peer-led, peer-facilitated program sessions, and were later interviewed about how their experiences in the teaching portfolio program influenced their teaching. In this paper, lessons from a pilot offering of ETPP about fifteen graduate students' conceptions of teaching were focused upon