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Disciplinary Literacy broadly defined involves students reading, speaking, and writing using habits of thinking that are practiced within a core discipline, and differs from content literacy in significant ways.1-3 Disciplinary literacy is critical to education of engineers, owing to habits of thinking, and ways of communicating that uniquely comprise engineering practices. While there are many research based publications K12 on how disciplinary literacy enhances student learning outcomes, there is little research at the post-secondary level, and none to date related to engineering education. This preliminary study looks at (i) how disciplinary literacy practices can be used as tools to support core content ideas in engineering, build engineering habits of thinking, and effective communication and (ii) how students build towards effective disciplinary literacy practices when embedded in a collaborative class setting. A preliminary study was conducted within three undergraduate materials science courses in order to test these models; to investigate if embedded disciplinary literacy activities were successful in building effective student communication practices and content knowledge. A classroom conversation tool was employed4, as well as student formative and summative assessments to judge student growth in disciplinary literacy, and content objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report focusing on Faculty Learning Communities, a group of educators who engage on active learning toward professional development as teachers, promote deep learning and faculty cohesion. Topics discussed include group problem solving, student-centered learning and engineering teachers.

The article offers information related to framing routines which are a widely used literacy strategy to support students in the organization of topics, main ideas and details of information. It is noted that it can be used to support teachers in the design of engineering curriculum into the K12 classroom by using content from Common Core, and Next Generation Science Standards to design an engineering activity.

This paper describes a model for a virtual community of practice (VCP) to support faculty efforts to adopt research-based instructional strategies in Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering courses. The VCP was built on published recommendations for successful faculty development programs. The VCP program began with a 10 week virtual training period for five pairs of VCP leaders, during which they acquired the skills and knowledge needed to lead the faculty VCP. The faculty VCPs focused on one of five technical disciplines and were led by a pair of leaders having expertise in a specific technical focus area as well as in engineering pedagogy. Workshops were held using Internet conferencing software: the first 8 weekly workshops provided training in research-based pedagogy, and the second 8 biweekly workshops supported faculty efforts to implement chosen strategies in their courses. The participants were full-time faculty members with a range of teaching experience and pedagogical expertise, ranging from novice to expert. Improvement was measured via pre/post survey in the areas of familiarity and use of research-based pedagogy, as well as in perceived student motivation. The second part of the paper focuses on the translation of faculty participant experiences from the VCP into the classroom as they implemented a variety of instructional methods in their courses. We describe their approaches and preliminary results using different instructional methods such as flipping the classroom, using game-based pedagogy, promoting positive interdependence in cooperative-learning teams, peer instruction, small group discussion, Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), and using Bloom's Taxonomy to structure a course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]