Faculty Rewards and Curriculum Reform (and Vice-Versa) (original) (raw)
This case study examined the effects of the BUILD Coalition program which provided incentives to faculty who developed innovative approaches to engineering education. The program was one of eight Engineering Education Coalitions sponsored by the National Science Foundation to seek ways to gain greater legitimacy for teaching within the faculty reward system. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 55 faculty at four large research-intensive universities in the Coalition. It was found that while some faculty and administrators appreciated the program's additional funding and visibility for undergraduate education, most described engineering faculty as indifferent to these incentives, with teaching still seen as irrelevant compared to the faculty's perceived core responsibilities of research and graduate education. Most interviewees rejected the proposition that the incentives were a meaningful force for change in faculty reward systems. Two themes emerged from the interviews: the first was that the program's weakness was attributed not so much to its focus on undergraduate education but to its marginality as a change agent; the other was the belief that while instructional reform per se was unlikely to alter the faculty reward system, reforming practices that promoted student learning might influence the allocation of faculty rewards in ways that could further strengthen undergraduate teaching. (Contains 18 references.) (CH)
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