Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, as did many other groups [12].

Lest it be thought that this argument only applied to the UK, it should be noted that in the U.S. in 1970, Owens argued that since the teachers are professionals they should be responsible for what goes on in the classroom. The teacher is no different to the medical practitioner in this respect [13]. But those who teach in higher education do not regard teaching as a professional activity. In engineering their allegiance is to the engineering profession, and their research is associated with that allegiance. This is one of the, if not the major reason why faculty do not have much interest in aligning their teaching and assessment to the knowledge base of techniques that is available to them. It is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to reform or change the practices of engineering education.

The best that can be said of the majority of engineering educators is that they are “restricted” professionals to use a term coined by Eric Hoyle. He made a distinction between “restricted” and “extended” professionalism. He argued that at that time teachers looked for a restricted notion of professionalism which is “a high level of classroom competence teaching skill and good relationships with pupils” [14]. And this is what the public would expect. In Ireland, Henry Collins (sometime President of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland) examined Hoyle’s model of restricted professionalism, and concluded that achieving the competence that the public expects of teachers would necessarily extend their professionalism [15].

      “Extended professionalism” wrote Hoyle “embraces restricted professionalism, but additionally embraces other attitudes of the teacher. These include seeing his/her work in the wider context of community and society, ensuring that his/her work is informed by theory, research, and current exemplars of good practice; being willing to collaborate with other teachers in teaching, curriculum development and the formation of school policy, and having a commitment to keep himself/herself professionally informed.”

      Hoyle’s model of restricted and extended professionalism is easily adapted for higher education as Exhibit 1.1 shows.

      Engineering Educators who attend the annual ASEE and FIE conferences are more likely to be, or have a tendency toward extended professionalism, and to take the issue of accountability seriously.

An important step that would enable engineering educators to become a professional has been taken by the American Society for Engineering СКАЧАТЬ