Synthesis Lectures on Engineering: Transformative Teaching (PDF)

The journey to becoming an exemplary engineering educator is one that is rarely simple and straightforward.

Simply being exposed to active learning strategies or innovative pedagogies rarely leads to a transformation of one's own teaching. In this book, we present a collection of stories from exemplary engineering educators that are told in their own voices. These stories are shared to enable readers to immerse themselves in first-person recollections of transformation, involving engineering educators who changed their teaching strategies from the ways that they were taught as engineering undergraduate students to ways that more effectively fostered a conducive learning atmosphere for all students. It is our hope that providing stories of successful engineering educators might stimulate thoughtful and productive self-reflection on ways that we can each change our own teaching. These stories are not simple, linear stories of transformation. Instead, they highlight the complexities and nuances inherent to transforming the way that engineering faculty teach. Through our strategy of narrative storytelling, we hope to inspire future and current engineering educators to embark on their own journeys of teaching transformations. We conclude the book with some lessons that we learned during our readings of these stories, and invite readers to extract lessons of their own.