Teaching Engineering

Hi there! My name is Arun Pennathur and I am an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). I and my colleague Prof. Louis Everett in Mechanical Engineering wrestle daily with problems in teaching engineering at UTEP. Our struggles are related to what we do (or don’t do, or should do) in the classroom and beyond, student learning and reaching students, our own growth as engineering faculty trying to be good teachers (we know we work hard at it), and our belief in UTEP being a go to campus for engineering and our struggle to define our roles in all this. This blog is our attempt to share some of the struggles and successes we have daily in teaching engineering. Although our initial thinking is that we will keep this blog to our experiences in teaching engineering to our students, we have a feeling this blog will evolve into a much deeper look at our beliefs and philosophies, and the values we bring to our work.Indeed we have already seen some of this evolution happen in the almost daily discussions we have about teaching engineering (the Latte helps). But for now, we will begin with our struggles and successes. Our hope in sharing our struggles and successes is that we will reveal our efforts in thinking about what we do, to our students and faculty colleagues. Our hope is that if our students understand our thinking and planning, they will help us do better by commenting on what we do. Our faculty colleagues can perhaps identify with the problems we have and will join us in discussing strategies to overcome any struggles. In those rare instances where we have tried something and we have succeeded to some degree, we will share our successes so our colleagues can benefit from trying our solutions and see if it works for them.

Our efforts in engineering education and a majority of our new ideas and thoughts are sponsored by National Science Foundation (Award #0618861). All ideas expressed in the blog are our own and do not in any way represent the official position of NSF.