Talking "Faculty development" with engineering educators, then talking "engineering education" with faculty developers: A collaborative reflection on working across communities

Over the last several years, the engineering education research community has aimed to disseminate and implement its work in engineering classrooms. Several investigations have explored reasons for and barriers to the adoption of evidence-based practices. Many of these investigations have been housed within STEM Education communities. External avenues, such as the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) network community of faculty developers, represent untapped resources that could enhance these dissemination efforts. Over the past year, we have hosted parallel workshops for engineering education researchers at the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference and faculty developers at the POD network's Annual Conference. Our parallel workshops were an effort to encourage conversation about engineering faculty development practices across both communities. At FIE, engineering education researchers explored ways POD could aid them in disseminating their research and wrote "messages-in-a-bottle" with things they wanted the POD community to know. At POD, faculty development experts stepped through a simplified version of the engineering design process in response to the messages from FIE participants. This paper brings together our experiences from both workshops to illustrate the challenges and benefits of furthering connections between the engineering education and faculty development communities. Increasing the fluidity of such collaborations may help disseminate educational best practices between them.