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Transforming academic organizations to be more equitable and inclusive requires a range of change agents working together and engaging in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Central to this DEI work is learning how to create change. Yet, change agents do not always know at the outset what resources are necessary to enact change; they often acquire the necessary resources and skills over time. This research paper investigates how change agents participating in a community of practice (CoP) across academic institutions learn about and mobilize resources to transform engineering education. This analysis of resource mobilization mechanisms comes from research with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant recipient teams. To date, 26 teams have been funded through the RED mechanism to create revolutionary organizational and cultural changes within their departments with the goal of improving equity, inclusion, and educational outcomes. Projects vary in how they define and the degree to which they focus on equity. We find that resource mobilization practices in the CoP center and strengthen DEI values in two main ways. Firstly, participants learn about and gain access to resources that are explicitly DEIrelated: they mobilize resources to advance equity at the institutional level as an outcome of the projects and collaborate on additional projects to embed DEI into the process of change-making itself, starting from the initial stages of writing a proposal. Secondly, the way participants engage with each other, and approach change goals puts equity and inclusion into practice: participants identify and tackle structural barriers to change through DEI-aligned behaviors, from addressing how institutional circumstances create resistance to DEI, to developing a shared vision for systemic change that is inclusive and collaborative.
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Institutional Mentoring to Incite a Revolution through NSF’s RED Program
A recent initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IUSE/PFE: REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED), is serving as a catalyst to encourage widespread, revolutionary, and radical change in engineering and computer science departments across the nation. After two years and 13 RED awards being funded, there is little diversity in the types of institutions—one is private, two are undergraduate-focused, and two are Hispanic-serving institutions. To address this lack of institutional diversity in funded RED projects, previous awardees of the program utilized a framework developed by the team, termed institutional mentoring, to develop a series of webinars aimed at helping diverse institutions envision a revolutionary idea for radically changing their program, assembling a team capable of realizing this vision, and using change strategies to help increase the likelihood of success and lasting change. This team deliberately reached out to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and minority-serving institutions in an attempt to make more diverse institutions aware of this opportunity, with the hopes of increasing submissions of proposals to the RED program and the quality and likelihood of success for these proposals. In this paper, we describe the institutional mentoring framework, the process used in developing the seminars, and a synopsis of the sessions that made up the webinar.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1654315
- PAR ID:
- 10040278
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2017 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This research paper investigates the process of forming strategic partnerships to enact organizational change. There has been increasing interest in forming strategic partnerships in higher education due to a variety of motivations, such as pooling of resources and improving the professional development process for students (Worrall, 2007). It is important to examine how strategic partnerships form because the process of formation sets the objectives and expectations of the relationship, which in turn impact the likelihood of success and sustainability of the relationship. Further, despite the growing interest in forming strategic partnerships, the majority of these partnerships fail (Eddy, 2010). This analysis of strategic partnerships emerges from our participatory action research with university change agents activated through the NSF REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) Program. Through an NSF-funded collaboration between [University 1] and [University 2], we work with the change-making teams to investigate the change process and provide just-in-time training and support. Utilizing qualitative data from focus group discussions and observations of monthly cross-team teleconference calls, we examine the importance of motivations, social capital, and organizational capital in the process of forming strategic partnerships. We find that change-making teams have utilized a variety of strategies to establish goals and governance within strategic partnerships. These strategies include establishing alignment among institutional goals, project goals, and partner organization goals. Further, the strategic partnerships that have been most successful have occurred when teams have intentionally built mutually beneficial relationships and invited their partner into the visioning process for their change projects. These results delineate practices for initiating strategic partnerships within higher education and encourage faculty to build mutually beneficial strategic partnerships.more » « less
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