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1. How Communities of Transformation Support Change Agency

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47533  

   Güler, Selen; Han, Rae; Litzler, Elizabeth; Andrijcic, Eva; Mohan, Sriram (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   This research paper addresses how faculty learn to become change agents in driving and sustaining change efforts in engineering education. Despite repeated calls and ample funding allotted to transform STEM higher education, initiatives targeted at the course and curriculum levels have not led to pervasive changes in how we educate undergraduate engineering students. Shifting the focus from what or how faculty teach, we turn to the structures that support change-making. Specifically, we examine the types of shared practices and interactions that help faculty develop change capacity and agency in the context of a cross-institutional community of practice (CoP). Our analysis emerged in the context of participatory action research with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant recipient teams, who come together during monthly virtual CoP sessions facilitated by our participatory action research team. Using participant observation, transcription, and qualitative analysis of 31 1-hour long meetings across three years, we map out facilitation practices and interpersonal interactions that empower participants to develop into a community of change agents in a field particularly prone to inertia. We situate our work at the intersection of theories of change from sociological and situated learning perspectives. Doing so, we address the relationship between structure and collective action, and how faculty exert control over social relations and available resources in their collective contexts to advance change goals. This exchange between social theory and engineering education has the potential to empower engineering faculty to mobilize for pervasive changes. Our findings address the ways that the organizational structure of and types of interactions in a CoP inform its participants’ ability to advance change goals. Firstly, participants learn to be a community of changemakers through regular reflective practices, which help diffuse knowledge between participants across organizational boundaries and levels of changemaking experience. Having a dedicated space to reflect on experiences leads to community building and a collective understanding of goals and how to achieve them. Secondly, faculty use their interpersonal interactions in the community of practice to leverage and build their connections to external individuals and to existing resources and social networks. These connections help them compile and reclaim resources or extend the existing resources to new contexts. In the practice of mobilizing change-making resources, we see faculty developing into a community of change agents: engaging in reflective processes and utilizing the resources within their institutional cultures to transform those very contexts. 

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2. Best Practices in Building Relationships and Partnerships Between Community Colleges, Universities, and Organizations (Work In Progress)

   Davuluri, V.; Vempala, V.; Mondisa, J.-L. (January 2022, Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   Understanding how to build relationships between universities, organizations, and community colleges could encourage more inter-organizational work through the formation of intentional and strong positive relationships. In this work in progress paper, we discuss how we fostered a research collaboration between faculty, administrators, and researchers at two community colleges, two universities, and several professional welding organizations. The intent of the overarching research project is to study and improve the educational experiences, outcomes, and career pathways of welding technology (WT) students. During the facilitation of this project, the team has successfully cultivated and leveraged relationships and partnerships to help inform the study. As a result, the Project Team recognizes the importance of capturing how we develop and leverage these relationships to address project needs and produce deliverables. The formation of the relationships between researchers, practitioners, employers and professional organizations is rarely examined and documented in technological education. Thus, this work allows us to capture and share the theoretical and practical knowledge about how we have developed, maintained, and leveraged these partnerships with engaged leadership from our community college principal investigators. In this work, we present: (1) a brief review of literature about team science and (2) best practices related to our process of cultivating and leveraging relationships between the Project team members, faculty and industry employers. This work provides theoretical and practical knowledge about partnership development in Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects that can provide critical insights about creating and leveraging partnerships between researchers, faculty, and practitioners. 

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3. Mobilizing Resources in a Community of Practice: How Academic Change Agents Work Toward Equity in their Change Projects

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43936  

   Güler, S.; Litzler, E.; Margherio, C.; Williams, J.M.; Andrijcic, E.; Mohan, S. (June 2023, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   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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4. The Visual Science Communication Toolkit: Responding to the Need for Visual Science Communication Training in Undergraduate Life Sciences Education

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14030296  

   Zhang, Ke Er; Jenkinson, Jodie (March 2024, Education Sciences)

   Vergara, D; Jeronen, E (Ed.)

   Visual representations are essential to scientific research and teaching, playing a role in conceptual understanding, knowledge generation, and the communication of discovery and change. Undergraduate students are expected to interpret, use, and create visual representations so they can make their thinking explicit when engaging in discourse with the scientific community. Despite the importance of visualization in the biosciences, students often learn visualization skills in an ad hoc fashion without a clear framework. We used a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study design to explore and assess the pedagogical needs of undergraduate biology students (n = 53), instructors (n = 13), and teaching assistants (n = 8) in visual science communication education. Key themes were identified using inductive grounded theory methods. We found that extrinsic motivations, namely time, financial resources, and grading practices, contribute to a lack of guidance, support, and structure as well as ambiguous expectations and standards perceived by students and instructors. Biology and science visualization instructors cite visual communication assessments as a way of developing and evaluating students’ higher-order thinking skills in addition to their communication competencies. An output of this research, the development of a learning module, the Visual Science Communication Toolkit, is discussed along with design considerations for developing resources for visual science communication education. 

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5. Data from: Building communities of teaching practice and data-driven open education resources with NEON faculty mentoring networks

   https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh03  

   Naithani, Kusum; Jones, Megan; Grayson, Kristine (January 2022, Dryad)

   With the growing availability and accessibility of big data in ecology, we face an urgent need to train the next generation of scientists in data science practices and tools. One of the biggest barriers for implementing a data-driven curriculum in undergraduate classrooms is the lack of training and support for educators to develop their own skills and time to incorporate these principles into existing courses or develop new ones. Alongside the research goals of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), providing education and training are key components for building a community of scientists and users equipped to utilize large-scale ecological and environmental data. To address this need, the NEON Data Education Fellows program formed as a collaborative Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN) between scientists from NEON and university faculty interested in using NEON data and resources in their ecology classrooms. Like other FMNs, this group has two main goals: 1) to provide tools, resources, and support for faculty interested in developing data-driven curriculum, and (2) to make teaching materials that have been implemented and tested in the classroom available as open educational resources for other educators. We hosted this program using an open education and collaboration platform from the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) project. Here, we share lessons learned from facilitating five FMN cohorts and emphasize the successes, pitfalls, and opportunities for developing open education resources through community-driven collaborations. 

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