ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Sheri Sheppard - Opening Doors
When Katherine Kuchenbecker, a Ph.D. student in mechanical
engineering at Stanford University, momentarily lost
her way in the maze of setting up a graduate research
project, she knocked on the office door of Sheri Sheppard:
a professor she knew could guide her. “I had done
some of my master’s,” Kuchenbecker says.
“I loved the teaching, but I didn’t know
how to start doing research. I didn’t know what
it meant to do research. Dr. Sheppard sat me down and
said, ‘Here’s how a research group works.’”
It’s the kind of detail that isn’t lost
on other students, especially women. “Almost every
woman I know has a Sheri story,” Kuchenbecker
says.
Sheppard, a full professor and member of Stanford’s
Design Group, is known for her ability to understand
the student perspective, perhaps because she still hasn’t
forgotten what it’s like to be one. One of her
more pivotal experiences was in 1975 when she took her
first engineering class at the University of Wisconsin.
The professor confounded her with terms she had never
heard before, and she assumed the other students, all
men, knew just what torsion and shear stress meant.
It wasn’t until another student raised his hand
and confessed his confusion that she realized, “Oh,
we’re supposed to ask questions.”
From that day on, Sheppard has been doing just that,
searching in part for answers that don’t just
come from hard-wired technology. In fact, many of her
most pointed questions concern teaching and how students
learn. Intellectually, Sheppard says she had been intrigued
by what makes students’ eyes light up even before
she became Stanford’s first—and only until
2002—female mechanical engineering professor 20
years ago. At Stanford, she took an iconoclastic route
early on as a researcher, becoming a principal investigator
for a seven-institution, multimillion-dollar National
Science Foundation (NSF) grant to systematically study,
design and assess new approaches to engineering education.
Because she was a new faculty member and still untenured,
her colleagues advised her to focus on more traditional
methods of research, such as her work on spot welding
and fatigue. But Sheppard, whose past hobbies have included
amateur race-car driving and scuba diving, accepted
the principal investigator role, taking measures to
avoid getting too immersed in the administration of
the grant and using it instead to carve out an intellectual
domain. Her main contribution was to systematically
establish a pedagogical method called mechanical dissection,
which teaches students the context in which designs
are created by having them take apart familiar objects
such as bikes or fishing reels and put them back together.
“Sheri made tacit knowledge within one design
community explicit in a way that has promoted its use
in many university courses,” including courses
at Yale and MIT, says Larry Leifer, a colleague at Stanford.
Sheppard first appreciated the interplay between people
and machines when, in college, she interned as a forewoman
on the assembly line of a General Motors (GM) plant.
Before college, her sights had been set on becoming
a professional musician, but visits to music conservatories
made her realize she didn’t want to live her life
in a practice room. She turned to engineering, thinking
it might be useful as a pathway to law school. But once
she got a taste of the plant assembly floor and witnessed
the details behind creating such products as catalytic
converters, the verdict changed, and she dropped her
legal plans for a career in engineering. She was awarded
a job at the prestigious Chrysler Institute, where she
learned the ropes at the Chrysler Corp. and simultaneously
attended the University of Michigan. From there, she
took a job with a consulting firm and did structural
analysis for companies such as GM. In the evenings,
she started teaching classes at the Lawrence Institute
of Technology and realized almost immediately that her
future was not with the corporate world. “I would
come home on the ceiling in terms of the adrenaline
rush,” she says. “It was a challenge to
make engineering principles real to a classroom of students.”
Learning About Learning
Sheppard has never
lost sight of that challenge, and analyzing engineering
education has remained a major focus of her research
at Stanford. For co-authoring the paper “Relationships
Between Engineering Student and Faculty Demographics
and Stakeholders Working to Affect Change,” Sheppard
won a 2005 ASEE award for best paper published in the
Journal of Engineering
Education. Currently, Sheppard is co-authoring
a book called “Educating Engineers: Theory, Practice
and Imagination.” It is one in a series of books
resulting from a study funded by the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching to explore professional
education. Sheppard was hired in 2001 to be the lead
scholar for the engineering component. “In some
ways our methods are principally social-science based,”
says Sheppard, who is the only engineer on a team that
includes historians, anthropologists, psychologists
and lawyers. “For me intellectually, it’s
been incredible to do qualitative research, to debate
and discuss higher education.”
The Carnegie study will give universities a framework
to ask questions about and make changes to their engineering
programs. “Implicit in the questions is an agenda,”
Sheppard says. “The intent is about the quality
of education now but also how do we clean house so we
can make room for new technologies. These are questions
that every program has to ask itself.” The study
found that students are also taking five to six years
on average to complete their coursework, and senior
courses have four or five prerequisites. “It leaves
little breathing room for students. They have to get
on the train and stay on it,” Sheppard says. “How
much of this interconnectivity is necessary? Do we need
the whole course or course elements?” The study
also found that schools emphasize learning a body of
knowledge over problem solving and undervalue the lab
component in terms of credit hours.
Sheppard is considered a leader in design education,
but when she went up for tenure in 1992, the pivotal
question was whether her educational research could
be considered a legitimate piece of scholarly work,
especially because engineers traditionally have dealt
only with the physical sciences, not the social or learning
sciences. “She took a leadership role in this
work,” says Mary Taylor Huber, a Carnegie senior
scholar whose book, “Balancing Acts: The Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers,”
looks at the effect of pedagogical scholarship on tenure.
“When you have a developing area of knowledge,
it’s very important to have people who will put
themselves out there, take these risks and participate
fully in these forums.”
Engineering education research was almost unheard of
10 years ago, says Richard Felder, a professor emeritus
of chemical engineering at North Carolina State University.
“The default assumption is that if you have a
Ph.D., you automatically know how to teach. High attrition
rates [especially among minorities] attest to the fact
that it’s not just automatic.” Cognitive
and empirical evidence is necessary to support teaching
methods and curricula, Felder says, and these days the
research is gaining respect. Although her early work
was very nontraditional and the tenure process was tense,
Sheppard did get it. Recently, she was promoted to full
professor. “On noting her recent promotion to
full professor, our school of engineering dean stressed
that the promotion is for her contribution to fundamental
knowledge in engineering—no mention of teaching,
just the fundamentals!” Leifer says. “That’s
the way it should be.”
The perspective of the student is an integral part
of education research, says Sheppard, who is also heading
a longitudinal study of student development under an
NSF grant. The study, which relies on interviews, surveys
and even performance tasks, follows 160 students at
four major institutions through at least their junior
years. A third of the students are women and underrepresented
ethnic minorities. “We want to find out why those
numbers aren’t changing,” Sheppard says.
“Half of law schools are women. Half of medical
schools are women. Women obviously want to work hard
and have the intellectual horsepower.”
Sheppard knows that it can be difficult to be the only
woman in a research group or even a classroom. Six years
ago, she founded the Mechanical Engineering Women’s
(MEWomen) group to provide a forum for women to feel
more supported and empowered. “Many of the females
were coming to her sad, frustrated or confused, wondering
how to continue,” says Ph.D. student Kuchenbecker,
a past president of the group. The organization not
only provides a support group for women, it also runs
a class called Women Perspectives in Engineering. Each
winter quarter, the class brings in 10 female speakers,
usually from technical fields, to talk about their work
experiences and the hurdles they may have encountered.
“It’s an amazing feeling to be in a room
that’s 90 percent women who are almost all engineers
asking questions that are pertinent at our age, such
as ‘How do I get tenure?’” Kuchenbecker
says. “It’s one of the things that have
kept me going. Role modeling is so powerful. It’s
really hard to picture yourself in a role without having
seen someone else do it.”
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