Engineering faculty have advanced experiences with engineering that non-engineers do not have, but what Nature of Engineering (NOE) concepts do engineering researchers hold? For K-12 engineering education, having an informed NOE understanding is an essential part of engineering literacy. Yet for the higher education engineering community, NOE is hardly ever discussed. Understanding engineering faculties’ NOE views can be a valuable contribution to current NOE research. Our project is part of a collaboration between a southwestern US higher education institute and a Vietnamese University. The cohort of Vietnamese engineering faculty is participating in training for research in environmental engineering for three months in the US. Vietnamese faculty is expected to improve their research skills at the end of the comprehensive professional development under the training of US environmental engineering researchers. Over the three months, Vietnamese faculty will search literature, learn lab skills and conduct a self-driven, lab-based research project in an environmental engineering lab. The purpose of our research is two-fold: Firstly, we will investigate what Vietnamese environmental engineering faculty say in response to the NOE instrument; secondly, the purpose of our study is to explicate the impact of a collaboration between a US university and a Vietnamese university. More specifically, our research study will identify NOE views of Vietnamese engineering faculty prior to and after training. While Nature of Engineering (NOE) views are increasingly growing stateside, it is equally important to look at the views of NOE globally. Following the Vietnamese faculty research experience with hands-on laboratory projects under US engineering research mentors, we will examine how Vietnamese engineers’ NOE views have changed through interviews and open-ended written assessments. Although there are some attempts in assessing teachers’ and students’ NOE views, according to the authors’ knowledge, there is no prior research which assessed NOE views of international engineering faculty in a higher education setting. In this work-in-progress research, we report the framework and anticipated outcomes of a pilot study on NOE understanding of Vietnamese faculty.
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