Outreach Update
Traveling Man
Through his innovative teaching workshops, Richard Felder is improving engineering education around the world.
Dr. Richard Felder and his wife, Dr. Rebecca Brent, have given professional-development workshops to engineering and science faculty all over the world. The locations are plotted on this map.
Dr. Richard Felder didn’t look tired. But he should have.
He was back in his Centennial Campus office a day after completing a 28-hour journey that hop-scotched from Bangkok to Tokyo to New York to Raleigh. Felder and his wife, Dr. Rebecca Brent, had been leading one of their engineering education sessions in Thailand, part of an international “workshopping” schedule that keeps them on the road about 85 days per year.
“It leaves us a little bit of time to come back and do our laundry between trips,” he said with a grin.
Felder, a venerable figure in chemical engineering who co-authored one of the field’s seminal textbooks, has spent more than two decades improving the way colleges and universities teach engineering and science. His efforts to encourage professors to understand different learning styles and engage students in class — a teaching model called “active learning” — have influenced thousands of instructors around the world.
“College teaching is the only skilled profession that no one trains you for,” said Felder, the Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at NC State. “You’re not given five seconds on how do you do this before they throw you in front of the students in the class.”
Felder and Brent’s whirlwind workshop schedule has taken them to six continents and all but a handful of U.S. states. Participants everywhere tend to rate them highly — 80 percent give the sessions a rating of “Excellent” — and no matter where the workshops are held, the instructors find the same enthusiasm and curiosity from groups of very different people.
“There are cultural differences, sure, but in general it’s the same stuff everywhere,” Felder said. “We’re getting the same questions, the same interest, the same problems that they’re raising.”
Felder didn’t set out to be a pioneer in engineering education. When he began teaching at NC State in 1969, he was teaching the same way he was taught, and the same way his peers were teaching their students. He filled his classes with long, detailed lectures that provided plenty of fodder for good note-takers. He received high marks from students and won a teaching award his first year.
His success extended to the publishing world with the release of “Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes,” a chemical engineering textbook he co-wrote with fellow professor Ronald Rousseau. The book was a hit with chemical engineering faculty, he said, and it has since been translated into several different languages and been used as the introductory chemical engineering text by roughly 90 percent of American universities. (The book was named to the list of “Groundbreaking Chemical Engineering Books” by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2008.)
But even with all that success, Felder had a nagging feeling that he was letting his students down in class. He was solving the problems his students should have been solving, so the students weren’t really learning. He turned to the education literature for answers.
“We actually know a whole lot about learning and what makes it happen,” he said. “And it wasn’t what I was doing and it wasn’t what my colleagues were doing.”