Faculty Apprentice as a Mentorship Model for Engineering Graduate Students interested in Teaching

This paper presents a new model of mentoring engineering graduate students called faculty apprenticeship, which is aimed at helping prepare graduate students to become effective teachers. Engineering education scholars have pointed out that graduate school usually falls short in preparing engineering graduate students for a career as faculty. Moreover, graduate students lack deliberate opportunities to practice and gain genuine teaching experience. Students who are appointed as teaching assistants (TAs) do not always get opportunities to teach and are mostly restricted to supporting the instructor as necessary. With an increasing focus on developing strategies to better prepare graduate students for their teaching role in academia, we address this challenge through the model of faculty apprenticeship. The faculty apprentice approach was implemented in the school of engineering education at a large Midwestern university. In this paper, we present the rationale of the faculty apprentice approach, which is located within the conceptual frameworks of the mentoring and apprenticeship models. We look at the experiences of two professors and two graduate students who served as instructors and faculty apprentices respectively throughout several semesters. The data is collected in the form of reflections and is examined through a qualitative constructivist lens to inform engineering educators on the mutual benefits of this approach. The results that emerged from the combined experiences of faculty and students provide a reasonable argument on how the faculty apprentice approach benefits both faculty and students. The results also present the process involved in successfully running the model. We believe the faculty apprentice approach is compatible and complementary with current efforts being taken by engineering colleges towards professional development of graduate students. The intention of this paper is to spark interest among instructors and provide information to transfer this approach from engineering education to other engineering disciplines.