Of all the respected coaches on campus, Pedro Arce may not be the first name that comes to mind. But Arce, chairperson and professor in Chemical Engineering, is changing the way his students and his engineering discipline approach learning by using the best techniques known to successful coaches.

Arce

For his innovative work in the classroom, Arce was named this year's Brown-Henderson Award winner. The award honors outstanding performance in teaching and research or service and carries the names of our College of Engineering Dean Emeritus James Seay Brown and James Henderson, the college's first dean.

"Pedro is one of the nation's outstanding scholars and authorities on teaching and learning, and we are very fortunate to have him as our colleague here at TTU," said Chemical Engineering colleague and last year's Brown-Henderson winner Joe Biernacki. "His contributions are complex, interweaving classroom, laboratory, advising and technological innovations. He helped to discover methodologies that fundamentally enable the student not only to learn, but to become a learner."

For Arce, traditional lectures give way to integrated environments with a seamless transition from class to lab and where the student is in the driver's seat. His favorite motto is "Forget about teaching; it is all about learning."

Arce even enrolled in soccer coaching clinics to examine how coaching methods could work more effectively in engineering classrooms. As a result, his "Colloquial Approach" has been called "one of the best ongoing efforts to promote change in engineering education," and his "High Performance Learning Environments or Hi-PeLE" integrates many of the most outstanding characteristics of team-based learning.

"Traditionally, engineering has been taught through lectures or passive learning," says Arce. "The modernization of the curriculum requires that we rethink why we are teaching, the way we teach, who teaches and the resources we use."

Arce says he strongly believes that there is no student who does not wish to learn, it is just the methodologies and the way that traditional engineering education has used them that turn many students off.

His "Coach Model of Instruction" calls for five aspects to change the traditional engineering classroom experience: technical, knowing the material well; tactical, knowing when to drill or change directions; educational, knowing the purpose and designing tasks accordingly; psychological, knowing the players (students) well; and training, having the experience to do the job.

He has championed the use of other approaches, including the "Colloquial Approach," the "The Principal Objects of Knowledge or POK's," and more recently, "High Performance Learning Environment or Hi-PeLE." He has served on numerous occasions as a workshop conductor in topics related to these models in the United States, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and the United Kingdom for audiences including elementary education teachers and college professors. His methods have been successfully implemented in Argentina for learning high school physics.

Arce supports undergraduate research activities, believing it is advantageous to introduce techniques and methodologies early to enhance a student's experience. He says research affords one of the greatest opportunities for training and instruction.

"One of the reasons I am here is because TTU's College of Engineering reflects the balance of research and teaching that I think serves students well," he says.

His current research efforts focus on the analysis of the rate of transport in a variety of physical systems, from large-scale applications, like the earth's environment, to micro-environments. His interests fall under the umbrella of "applied field process sensitive technologies," where electrical, magnetic and UV fields are important.

Applications include new material development for separations of proteins and antibiotics, the elimination of contaminants from water and soil, and drug delivery by non-invasive approaches. He has more than 100 contributions to peer-reviewed journals or professional society proceedings and has delivered more than 300 presentations.

Arce received the 2005 Mid-Career Outstanding Teaching Award at the Annual Meeting of the ASEE-SE for his outstanding contributions to improve learning effectiveness in engineering education. That same year he was selected as recipient of our 2005 Leighton Sissom College of Engineering Award for Innovation and Creativity for his efforts in improving the instructional aspects of the engineering curriculum. Three times, most recently in 2008, Arce has received the Thomas C. Evans Award from the ASEE-SE for the outstanding paper in engineering education.

Born in the small town of Nogoya in Argentina, Arce earned a bachelor's degree from Argentina's Universidad Nacional del Litoral and a master's and doctorate from Purdue University. He joined TTU in 2003.