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Reflection is often cited as a critical component of effective teaching, but the term itself and its related practices often remain ambiguous. Reflecting on one's teaching is an important exercise to better understand the approaches to and success towards creating inclusive classrooms. Therefore, engineering educators must become aware of reflective practices to be able to employ them in their work. We explored essential elements of highly effective reflection practices for equity-minded educators in a workshop where faculty participants learned about three reflective practices: (i) personal reflection, (ii) reflective engagement with colleagues, and (iii) reflection with students. Through collaboration with others, attendees evaluated various reflection techniques, discussed case studies, and considered supports and barriers to how purposeful reflection can support equity-minded engineering practitioners. From this workshop, a Community of Practice of faculty was formed to analyze individual reflective practices, identify practices applicable to their classrooms, and work together to employ reflection in seven classrooms across our college. In this practice paper, we evaluate each of the above reflective practices and their utility in contextualizing more equitable curricula in a variety of course types. Additionally, we provide an engineering education framework for using reflection to understand the classroom environment educators create and its impact on equitable student learning. This practice paper presents reflections from the workshop and outcomes from the Community of Practice activities to inform equity-minded reflective instruction in engineering.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Y(Our) story: A collaborative autoethnographic reflection of a faculty community of practice to promote equity-oriented engineering education
This research paper presents an autoethnographic study of a faculty-led community of practice assembled to promote reflection as a process to improve equity in engineering courses. The faculty participants (authors) committed to enact a variety of practices in self-reflection, reflection with colleagues, and reflection with students during one semester to build more equitable teaching and learning opportunities in their courses. This commitment came after participation in a series of DEI faculty development workshops in the previous semester and exploration of reflection practices during the formation of the community of practice. The theoretical framework central to this work is Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice that emphasizes members’ coming together around a common interest to share experiences, to collaboratively improve their work, and to solve shared problems. Communities of practice are increasingly common as vehicles for faculty development, especially to promote high-quality, equitable instruction (Borboa-Peterson, Ozaki, & Kelsch, 2021; Hoyt, et al., 2020). As such, this paper examines the impact of a community of practice on reflective teaching to advance the authors’ interest in expanding equity-oriented classroom teaching and learning opportunities for all faculty and students. Rooted in autoethnographic methodology (Belbase, Luitel, & Taylor, 2008), the study explores individual narratives and their intersections with the stories of other community members to better understand the experiences of engineering faculty who use purposeful reflection to promote educational equity. The authors construct a shared narrative that grew from the interactions with fellow community of practice members and explore the culture of engineering education at their institution and the opportunities and challenges of advancing more equitable teaching and learning. Findings include prevalent themes of successes and limitations to supporting equitable classrooms, the impact of a reflection-driven community of practice on individual teaching performances, and the strengths and challenges of enacted reflection techniques for engineering educators.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2308531
- PAR ID:
- 10630677
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- faculty development communities of practice equity-oriented engineering education autoethnographic reflection
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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