First-Hand:History of an ASEE Fellow - Richard M. Felder

Birthplace: New York, NY

Birth date: July 21, 1939

Family

My father’s family came from Odessa, Ukraine. I’ve heard stories that their original name was not Felder but Brandt or something like that, and my great-grandfather Chaim (after whom I’m named in Hebrew) got himself “adopted” as the first-born son in a family named Felder to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. It’s a good story, but my grandfather was long gone by the time I heard it and I’ve never been able to confirm it. The family emigrated to the United States through Ellis Island in 1907, when my father, Robert Isidor Felder, was one year old. Like many Jewish immigrants at the time, they all first lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and later moved to Brooklyn.

My mother, Shirley Volkman Felder, was descended (I’ve been told) from 11 generations of rabbis in Southeastern Poland. Her paternal grandfather, Beresh Volkmann (the family later dropped the second n), was a self-taught rabbi and physician who was famous all over that part of the country. Her father and oldest brother came to the United States in 1912, worked in New York for three years, and eventually made enough money to bring my grandmother and her three remaining sons and two daughters to New York through Ellis Island in 1916. Before then, war between troops of the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Russian troops was raging in Poland, and in 1915 my grandmother and her family managed to get to Cologne, Germany, dodging bullets along the way. They lived with relatives in Cologne until they got the letter telling them to go to Rotterdam and take the ship to New York. When they got there, they followed the same pattern of living on the Lower East Side and then Brooklyn.

Fast forward 16 years. My parents met in 1932 and married in 1934. My father got a law degree but never practiced law. He held a variety of jobs, including a position with the New York City Department of Welfare, selling stainless steel cookware in Buffalo, taking and selling photos in a small studio on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, running his father’s insurance business in NYC after his father died in 1957, and finally working as an agent for the Internal Revenue Service in New York. My mother was a clerk at Macy’s before she married my father, and afterwards never worked outside the home except for a brief stint helping in the Hollywood photo studio. I was born in 1939, and my younger brother Paul (now an architect in Easton, PA) was born in 1944. We lived in Queens, New York City, until 1946; in Buffalo until 1952; and in North Miami, where I went to North Miami High School, until 1957 when we moved back to Queens and I enrolled in chemical engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY).

I married Barbara Cowl, whom I met at CCNY, in 1963, and we had three children: Kenneth (b. 1966), Elena (b. 1968), and Gary (b. 1970). Barbara and I divorced in 1982, and I married Rebecca Brent in 1990. Rebecca had a degree in music education from Millsaps College and an Ed.D. from Auburn University. She was an elementary school teacher before getting her doctorate and a professor of education at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. after the doctorate. We both lived in Raleigh, NC, where I was a professor at N.C. State, and she commuted from Raleigh to an apartment in Greenville on Monday morning and back to Raleigh on Friday afternoon. After about seven years that got old to both of us, and she retired from ECU and embarked on a joint faculty development career with me (more on that later) and an educational program evaluation career on her own.

Kenny got a dual degree in physics and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cofounded a software development company several years after he graduated, co-developed a version control system that Microsoft bought and made their standard system, worked for Microsoft in Redmond for 3 years, and then came back to North Carolina where he now teaches math at a charter high school in Raleigh. Elena got a degree in creative writing at Oberlin College and a master’s degree in psychotherapy, and now has a thriving private practice in San Francisco. Gary got a undergraduate degree in physics at Oberlin and a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford with inflationary cosmology as his dissertation topic, and he is now a professor of physics at Smith College. I don’t take personally the fact that none of my kids went into engineering, and even if I resented it, the fact that they gave me seven spectacular grandchildren would earn my complete forgiveness.

Education

Details of my precollege education and the educations of my children can be found in a 1986 article in the Roeper Review, http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/RoeperPaper.pdf.

Early on at CCNY I decided that I would go for a doctorate after graduating, graduated in 1962, and got my doctorate in chemical engineering at Princeton with a dissertation on what happens to fast-moving atoms impinging on a stationary medium. I finished in 1966, and Barbara and one-year-old Kenny and I then spent a glorious year in England, where I held a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. A line in the abstract of my dissertation mentioned that the work had potential applications in solid-state physics, and that was enough for someone at the AERE to assign me to the Solid-State Physics Division. I had never even taken a course in solid-state physics and knew nothing about it, and I spent the year mainly trying to figure out what everyone around me was talking about. I also managed to do enough follow-up work to my doctoral research to get a couple of publications out of it (including one in which the hot atoms impinged on a solid).

Employment

After my fourth and fifth undergraduate years I had summer internships at Esso (now Exxon) Research and Engineering in Linden, NJ and Florham Park, NJ. During the first internship I worked in a high-energy propellant laboratory, where the goal was to see how many fluorine molecules could be attached to a hydrocarbon backbone without causing an explosion. It didn’t always work. In the second internship I worked on a variety of engineering research and development projects, none of which I now remember. I enjoyed both summers, but neither one intrigued me enough to make me want to work in industry for the next 40 years, and I started entertaining the idea of joining a university faculty after getting my doctorate.

After my postdoc in England, I took a research engineer position in the Division of Applied Science of Brookhaven National Laboratory as a stepping stone toward an academic career, and spent from mid-1967 to mid-1969 at Brookhaven drifting from chemical physics back into chemical engineering, mainly studying mixing effects in radiation-catalyzed reactors. Starting in 1968 I interviewed at several universities, liked what I saw at North Carolina State University, accepted an offer from them, and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in July 1969. I advanced through the ranks, eventually becoming the Hoechst Celanese Professor of Chemical Engineering. I retired to an emeritus position in July 1999.

Research and Scholarship

I have a low boredom threshold, and so worked in a succession of technical research areas from graduate school until I made the switch to educational research. I began with energy distributions of hot atoms and moved through photoreaction engineering, applications of radiotracers in chemical and environmental engineering, diffusion of gases and vapors in polymer membranes with applications to the design of interfaces for stack gas sampling, design and analysis of fluidized bed reactors for coal gasification, and finally design and analysis of stochastic processes in the production of specialty chemicals. My research led to more than enough funded grants and publications to meet the university’s criteria for tenure and promotion, but I can’t honestly claim that any of it was particularly distinguished.

My first and arguably most noteworthy contribution to chemical engineering education began in 1972, when my fellow assistant professor Ron Rousseau and I started out to write a textbook for the introductory chemical engineering course on material and energy balances. It was a crazy thing for two untenured faculty members to do, since an undergraduate textbook counts for exactly one publication in the engineering faculty incentive and reward system, and we each could have written a couple of dozen research papers in the five years it took us to write the first edition of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes. Sometimes crazy things turn out well, though. The book came out in 1978, and within two years had about 75% of the market for textbooks in that course. It is now in its fourth edition, and in the 40 years since it first appeared it has held between 75% and 90% of the market.

In 1982 I took a semester-long sabbatical at the University of Colorado and reconnected with a childhood friend, Linda Silverman, who had grown up and gotten a doctorate in educational psychology and was on the Psychology faculty of the University of Denver. In conversations with her I discovered that there was much more to teaching than standing up and lecturing at students for 50-minute stretches. I started reading educational and cognitive science books and papers and getting ideas for things I might do in my chemical engineering courses. During that semester, I was notified that I had won the N.C. State University R.J. Reynolds Award for Achievement in Research, Teaching, and Extension, an honor that called for the recipient to write a monograph and give a talk to the College of Engineering Faculty. I started out to write something about my technical research, which was what every recipient up to then had done. Then one morning I picked up the Rocky Mountain News and read the headline: "Teacher gets honor, and then is a goner." It was about an unfortunate professor at the University of Colorado-Denver who one day won the university's Outstanding Teacher Award, and the next day was fired for perceived inadequacies in his research productivity.

That headline irritated me, and I decided to make the imbalance between research and teaching in the engineering faculty incentive and reward system at most universities the topic of my Reynolds Award monograph. I started researching the subject, in the course of which I identified other deficiencies in the engineering curriculum, such as its almost exclusive focus on mathematical analysis ("Derive this equation." "Given this and this, calculate that.") and almost complete neglect of such real-world issues as troubleshooting and profitability of processes and high-level thinking skills such as critical, creative, and systems thinking. The monograph continued to grow in scope, and eventually turned into a broad critique of contemporary engineering education with recommendations for remedies. The monograph, Does Engineering Education Have Anything to Do with Either One: Toward a Systems Approach to Training Engineers, can be seen at http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/RJR-Monograph.pdf. I couldn't know it at the time, but it turned out to be a road map for most of the rest of my professional career.

Back at N.C. State after the sabbatical, I tried some of the nontraditional (in engineering) teaching strategies I had been reading about, and found that they worked really well in my classes (especially active learning). I started publishing my findings in education journals and began to get invitations to give seminars and workshops at other universities. A couple of years after Rebecca and I were married, I suggested to her that we present workshops together since she was the education professional and I was just picking things up as I went along, and in 1993 we gave our first one at an education conference in Brazil. We’ve now given about 500 of them.

In 1988 I began writing a regular column for the quarterly journal Chemical Engineering Education. The first column, “Impostors Everywhere” (about the impostor phenomenon) appeared in the Fall 1988 issue. Someone decided that “Felder’s Filosophy” would be a good title for the series of columns, and that’s what appeared over the first one. I threatened violence if they didn’t change it, and so they adopted my suggested title of “Random Thoughts” and maintained it from the second one to the final one (“As the Walrus Said)” in the Winter 2017 issue.

Another major shift came in 1989, when I observed that in almost all published articles on active and cooperative learning, someone used one or both methods in a course, wrote about the experience and the benefits it provided to the students, and the students probably never saw the methods for the rest of their college careers. I wondered what would happen if the methods were used in subsequent courses taken by those students, and speculated that the benefits might be even greater. I wrote a grant proposal to carry out a longitudinal study in which I would teach one course in each of five consecutive semesters to the same cohort of students using active and cooperative learning, and compare their performance with that of another cohort that went through the traditionally-taught curriculum. I sent the proposal to the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education, and was pleasantly surprised when they accepted it and funded the project for five years.

I should have been astonished when they funded it, not just pleasantly surprised. I subsequently learned from Norman Fortenberry, who was the NSF program director on the project and is now the executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education, that the longitudinal study was the first engineering education research project funded by the DUE. If I had known that, I might never have sent the proposal in. Fortunately I didn’t know, got the funding, carried out the project, and demonstrated fairly conclusively that those teaching methods work beautifully for a broad range of cognitive and affective outcomes. The data were so rich that I could probably still be writing about the study today, but I stopped after about 15 papers.

A third contribution to the field that I am particularly proud of began in 1989. At the annual ASEE conference in Portland that year, the legendary Jim Stice of the University of Texas and I were musing on the fact that the ASEE—an organization dedicated to the improvement of engineering education—had no program for its members on the basics of effective teaching. Jim and I had each given teaching workshops on our own and other campuses, and we thought it might be worthwhile producing one for the ASEE. Out of that discussion came the National Effective Teaching Institute, a 3-day workshop to be given in conjunction with the annual conference. The first NETI was given in New Orleans in 1991, and they have been given annually ever since, reaching several thousand engineering educators from several hundred campuses in the United States and Canada.

Jim and I gave the first few NETI’s with Becky Leonard of North Carolina State University, and in 1995 Becky left the team and was replaced by my colleague, coauthor, and wife Rebecca Brent. In 2002 we created the position of NETI Fellow, in which we invited someone we considered a current or future leader in the profession to co-present the NETI with us, with the object of creating a cadre of colleagues capable of picking up the faculty development torch when we were ready to put it down. In 2009 Jim retired from the NETI and was succeeded by Mike Prince of Bucknell University, one of the first two NETI Fellows, and in 2015 Rebecca and I retired and were succeeded by two more NETI Fellows, Susan Lord of the University of San Diego and Matt Ohland of Purdue University.

Somewhere during the mid-1990’s I decided that teaching and educational research were more interesting, challenging, and enjoyable to me than chemical engineering research, and so I let my remaining graduate students pass out of the pipeline, didn’t take on new ones, and devoted the remainder of my faculty career exclusively to education (including educational research). I retired to an emeritus position in 1999 so Rebecca and I could do more workshops, and we’re still doing them.

Finally, in 2003 Rebecca and I spent a semester at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Palo Alto, California, where we began to work on a book summarizing what we thought we knew about teaching science and engineering. The book, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, appeared in print 13 years later. See http://educationdesignsinc.com/book/ for excerpts and reviews from 10 STEM education journals.

Philosophy of Engineering Education

My complete teaching philosophy is laid out in the book I just mentioned. Here’s the short form.

As Jim Stice used to say, “teaching is not a mystery religion.” There is no point in testing students on material they could not have known they would be tested on. (“There’s the 483-page textbook. You’re responsible for all of it. Guess what I think is important enough to put on the exam.”) It’s equally absurd to “see if the students can think for themselves” by giving them time-limited exams on nontrivial concepts and methods they have not been taught through extensive examples, practice, and feedback.

Instead of doing that, write detailed learning objectives that spell out the kinds of things our students should be able to do (define, explain, calculate, analyze, critique, create…) if they have learned what we want them to learn. Then share the objectives with the students, ideally as study guides for mid-term and final exams. If some of the objectives address high-level thinking and problem-solving skills, not all students will master them—they still need both the basic ability and the necessary work ethic. The chances will be good, though, that those with those two attributes will meet the objectives, and that should be our goal as teachers.

No one ever learned anything nontrivial simply by sitting and listening to someone telling them what they’re supposed to know. Human beings learn by trying to do things, getting them wrong, learning from their mistakes or getting corrective feedback from someone else, and trying again. The more people practice things, the better they get. Instead of lecturing nonstop during class sessions, we should intersperse brief intervals of individual and small-group practice of the most challenging thinking and problem-solving methods we want the students to master, providing feedback immediately afterwards. In short, use active learning.

A smoothly-working high-performance team can generally accomplish much more than any of the team members working individually. Students are not born with the organization, leadership, time management, conflict resolution, and interpersonal skills needed for high-performance teamwork, however, and they won’t acquire those skills simply by being sent off to complete a team project with no guidance. Instead, use cooperative learning. Assign some problem sets and projects to teams, taking steps to assure positive interdependence, individual accountability, occasional real-time interaction (face-to-face or virtual), explicit guidance in high-performance teamwork skills, and regular self-assessment of team functioning.

The traditional approach to teaching is deductive: present fundamental principles, use them to formulate problem-solving methods, give examples of applications of the methods in class, and have the students apply the methods in assignments and tests. The students frequently don’t know why they need to know what they are being taught, and either they don’t find out until the process is almost complete or they never find out. (For example, I didn’t learn why I needed to learn most of what they taught me in freshman calculus until I was in my third year of engineering school. In the real world it’s very rare for someone to rush up to you with a curve that they desperately need to find the area under.)

Instead of teaching that way, use inductive teaching and learning. Begin each new topic with a challenge: a question to be answered, a problem to be solved, or an observation or experimental result to be explained, in a real-world context that most students should be familiar with. Let the students work individually or in small teams for a short period of time to define the challenge, establish its importance, and figure out what they need to know to start addressing the challenge. Then teach them what they need to know; let them go back to work on the challenge until they either meet it or identify something else they need to know, teach that, and so on until the challenge is met. Whether you call it inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, just-in-time teaching, case study analysis, or any of a variety of other inductive techniques, research shows that most students taught that way will learn more at a deeper level than they will if they are taught deductively.

Not all students are alike; in fact, if you look closely enough, no two of them are alike. They have different skills, interests, goals, likes and dislikes, and responses to different approaches to teaching. Some (the so-called intuitive learners) respond better to theory and mathematical analysis, others (sensing learners) prefer concrete facts and data and hands-on experiences; some (visual learners) get more out of pictures, live demonstrations, videos, diagrams, plots, animations, and others (verbal learners) get more from written and spoken explanations; and so on. A student’s learning style is a collection of his/her preferences on a set of specified dimensions (e.g., intuitive/sensing, visual/verbal,….)

Teaching a course exclusively to one set of learning style preferences fails to address the preferences of most students taking the course, and students whose preferences are heavily out of step with the chosen teaching approach may be too uncomfortable to learn much. It is also impractical to try to teach each student exclusively in the way he or she prefers, and it wouldn’t be a good idea even if it could be done. Opposite preferences tend to be associated with different skills. Teach in a way that alternately addresses specified learning style preferences and their opposites. In that way, all students will acquire and build skills that match their preferences and equally important skills that don’t.

ASEE Activities

I was a permanent member of the Chemical Engineering Division Advisory Board for many years by virtue of being the author of the Random Thoughts column in Chemical Engineering Education, and a permanent member of the Engineering Research and Methods Advisory Board by virtue of being a founding codirector of the National Effective Teaching Institute. I have co-presented the kickoff one-day teaching workshop at the Chemical Engineering Division Summer School for the past 25 years, and co-presented a number of workshops for new faculty members at annual conference sessions. I have also chaired or served on the selection committees for several ASEE awards.

Other Professional Activities

I belong to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. My principal professional activity outside my home university has been giving invited teaching workshops and seminars on other campuses and at professional society conferences around the world. As of today, I have presented or co-presented 502 teaching workshops (half-day or longer) and 397 seminars.

For More Information

More biographical information, published and videotaped interviews, and links to most of my education-related publications can be found at http://www.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching.