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The quest for the Mythical Phoenix: Attendee narratives at an engineering education faculty workshop

This work-in-progress paper utilizes a graphic narrative format to depict findings from the first year of a multi-year project on conceptual change in faculty development. Faculty development workshops are often designed to share best practices that participants can implement at their home institutions. However, the influence of these workshops on participants is rarely studied beyond the use of short exit surveys, often with highly targeted and quantitative questions that leave little room for responses on faculty experiences that may fall outside the workshop's explicit learning objectives. This paper depicts an exploratory qualitative study focused on participant experiences at a week-long faculty workshop on innovation in engineering education. We present our findings in the form of a fable/analogy. Attendees enter the workshop identifying as good teachers on a quest to find the "Mythical Phoenix," a legendary way of educating engineers with a reputation for being "new" and "innovative," even if they are not entirely clear on what that may look like. Participants enter with expectations of harnessing the "Mythical Phoenix" to take home, but must adjust their thinking when they come to see the "Mythical Phoenix" is actually an adapted collection of local practices built over time by faculty much like themselves. Alternating between the perspective of a student (in the workshop) and a teacher (at their home institution) contributes to the changes faculty articulate in their thinking throughout the workshop experience. They eventually realize their job is not to take home someone else's approach, but rather to focus on adapting general attitudes and frameworks to use in their existing home environment.