Outreach Update
Traveling Man
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Felder is also the co-author of “Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes,” one of chemical engineering's seminal textbooks.
What he found changed the way he taught. Instead of holding forth with long lectures, he broke his classes into short snippets in which students solved problems in groups. Some students understood the information right away. Others took a little longer, but they eventually found the answer themselves — rather than Felder finding it for them.
“You remember about 10 times more of what you say and do than what you see and hear,” he said.
Felder began sharing his methods at professional society conferences and in education journal articles and soon began to get some attention. In 1986, he held a workshop for NC State engineering faculty that incorporated what he'd learned. The workshop was so well-received that he was asked to give it again the following year. Soon, faculty at other universities began to take notice of his articles, and before long he was getting invitations to conduct workshops at campuses around the country.
A significant turning point came in 1990 when he married Brent, who had been an education professor at East Carolina University, and they started doing their workshops together. She brought to the sessions a deep knowledge of pedagogy, and he had the technical background to translate that knowledge into examples that engineers and scientists could relate to.
In 1991, Felder helped start the National Effective Teaching Institute, a three-day workshop held just prior to the annual meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education. The high-profile event has drawn nearly 1,000 participants over the years, and demand for Felder and Brent's services has grown as a result of those sessions.
The domestic interest in the workshops has stayed steady over the years, but international requests have “gone through the roof” over the last five years, Felder said. Now the couple schedule international workshops one or two years in advance.
Despite all the travel, the rewards are huge. In May 2008, for example, Felder and Brent gave a workshop for 100 engineering faculty in India. The faculty came from the second tier of Indian engineering schools, many of which struggle to put out the high-quality engineers needed to support a fast-growing country with 1.1 billion people. After Felder and Brent returned home, they started hearing from faculty members who were trying their methods with great success. Some of those faculty are passing those methods along to their peers.
“We're seeing more of a tangible effect from our India workshop than from anything else we've ever done,” he said.
Felder acknowledges that he has pursued an unconventional academic career path, and he continues to be grateful to the NC State administrators who encouraged him to take it years ago.
“Most department heads and deans would have told me to stick to my
research and forget about this education stuff,” he said. “But
people like my first department head, Jim Ferrell, and former deans Larry
Monteith and Nino Masnari encouraged and supported me. Those guys deserve
a lot of the credit for whatever Rebecca and I have contributed to improving
engineering education.” 