INVESTIGATING FACULTY LEARNING THROUGH A SITUATED LEARNING FRAMEWORK

The NAGT Workshop for Early Career (EC) Geoscience Faculty: Teaching, Research, and Managing One’s Career has been offered annually since 1999, involving more than 1200 geoscience faculty. Since its inception the workshop design maximizes social interactions as a means of modeling effective practices and facilitating participants’ learning. The workshop addresses the “whole faculty”, whereby participants bring their background and experience and, in turn, gain knowledge, practice, and confidence in balancing teaching, research, service, and life (Beane et al., 2022). The design principles of the workshop align with situated learning theory. This theory provides a framework for conducting a retrospective study on the lasting impact of the EC workshop and investigating the current workshop’s success at infusing new practices as part of participants’ learning.

Unlike an experimental design that controls for context, situated learning theory posits that the social context and what participants bring to the learning experience matters. Learning is conceptualized as social in nature and discourse is vital to knowledge transfer (Lave, 1988; Hajian, 2019). Through the EC workshop, faculty benefit as active participants and gain through shared learning of practices, developing a network of support, and getting feedback on teaching and research plans. Moreover, the “whole faculty” workshop approach serves to strengthen collective learning through both diverse and shared experiences (Webster-Wright, 2009).

The enduring value of the EC workshop model as a socially situated and “whole faculty” experience is corroborated in recent surveys together with 27 alumni interviews and a retrospective survey involving 365 past participants. Alumni interviews report on lasting changes in teaching, a sense of belonging derived from the collegial connections, and scholarly guidance that helped them realize the “unwritten curriculum” for succeeding. Survey respondents attribute workshop connections in providing them a broader range of resources and the tools for building new and lasting networks. Recent EC survey responses underscore the importance of collective learning where participants report gaining new strategies for supporting equity and inclusion through other participants’ diverse experiences.