I Want to Try That Too! Development of a Conceptual Framework for Interventions that Encourage Pedagogical Risk-Taking Among Faculty

摘要

The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University became one of six U.S. engineering schools to receive the first National Science Foundation-funded "Revolutionizing Engineering Departments" (RED) grants in 2015. The NSF RED program calls for significant and sustainable improvement in the preparation of engineers (NSF, 2014). The RED project at ASU, entitled, "Instigating a Revolution of Additive Innovation: An Education Ecosystem of Making and Risk-Taking" (EEC-1519339), is answering this call by empowering faculty to realize a mindset of pedagogical risk-taking and additive innovation (Jordan & Lande, 2016) in their classrooms. The ASU Polytechnic School has a well-established track record of innovativeness in teaching. The National Academy of Engineering (2012) recognized its engineering program as one of 29 exemplars to address real-world, industry-focused problem solving, and the U.S. News & World Report recently named ASU (for the second time) as the most innovative university in the country (Smith-Barrow, 2016). Still, faculty have been slow to embrace risk taking in pedagogical approaches beyond the project-based engineering design spine. The project therefore focuses on propagating an entrepreneurial culture throughout the program, and particularly in our mezzanine level courses that have been traditionally taught using teacher-centered methods such as lectures.