Creating Effective Future Faculty In Engineering

This paper introduces the framework and early implementation of a new program designed to develop more effective future faculty in engineering. The core of the program is based on our efforts regarding the recently developed Minor in Engineering Studies (MES). This program teams up effective engineering faculty to train, mentor, and evaluate a select group of graduate students to teach classes in our MES program. The goal is to help the engineering graduate students (the graduate educators) become better communicator and better educators by training non-engineering students in technological literacy classes. We believe that this practice will develop and enhance the effectiveness of the graduate educators as classroom instructors and that therefore this is the way to train effective future faculty in engineering. In this paper we introduce the conceptual framework of the MES and the results of the early implementation of this study.