ENGINEERING EDUCATION SCHOLARS PROGRAM

The Science and Engineering Education Scholars Program (SEESP) is a one-week summer workshop for graduate engineering students who wish to become tenure-track faculty as well as new engineering faculty. Held for the first time July 16-21, 1996, the program has funding for three years from the National Science Foundation. Twenty-eight graduate students from twenty-four institutions, three new faculty, forty UW faculty, and ten consultants participated. July 7-12, 1997 is the next program.

Given the need for curricular and pedagogical reform in engineering and given the high attrition rates of students in engineering, EESP focuses national on engineering graduate students and new faculty, especially women and minorities, interested in pursuing an academic career, Teams of local, on-campus and outside experts were responsible for

program content that integrates research and teaching,
program evaluation and assessment to insure the highest possible program quality, and
program transition from a dependency on outside experts to a reliance on local experts.
The innovative, three-year program will evolve into a UW-Madison sponsored program in collaboration with engineering education coalition schools. Our program has these major components:

workshops for content knowledge about teaching and learning plus hands-on application and a reflective approach,
collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams of participants as well as local and outside experts,
networking strategies to build collaborative faculty teams at home institutions,
a transition plan to move from outside experts to local expect teams, and
evaluation, adaptation, and dissemination.
NSF funding is $300,000 over three years.