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1. Board 354: Organizational Partnerships S-STEM Research Hub

   Knight, D. B. (June 2023, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The objective of the Research on Organizational Partnerships in Education and STEM (ROPES) Hub is to advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students. Partnerships across the education system are essential for improving STEM; achieving the systematic, structural, or sustainable change desired by programs such as NSF’s Scholarships for STEM Students (S-STEM) program is seldom achieved by individual isolated units and often requires partnerships across silos within an academic institution (i.e., intra-institution partnerships) and across institutions (i.e., inter-institution partnerships). However, how such partnerships are built, designed, and sustained remains a great challenge facing the field. This Hub, led by a collaborative team from Virginia Tech, Weber State University, Northern Virginia Community College, and the University of Cincinnati, is working to organize groups to conduct research focused on supporting low-income undergraduate engineering, computer science, and computing students in ways that are congruent with the institutional context and resources while going beyond the direct impact on S-STEM Scholars to impact departments and institutions involved. We are zooming in on the institutional infrastructure and collaborative work between researchers, administrators and practitioners, and policymakers. The overarching research question guiding the hub is: How can intra- and inter-institutional partnerships be designed, built, and sustained to systematically support low-income engineering student success? Answering this question requires a research hub because understanding different models of organizational partnerships—and linking such research to student outcomes across a variety of institutional contexts—requires a focus across S-STEM programs that is only enabled by a research hub approach; it cannot happen in a single S-STEM program. An important contribution of this work will be to characterize aspects of problems in which collaboration and partnerships can be most helpful—supporting low-income engineering students aiming to earn a bachelor’s degree fits these conditions, representing the kind of complex system of interacting, interdependent stakeholders with differing expertise and with no systematic organization of stakeholders. 

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2. Forming Strategic Partnerships: New Results from the Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments Participatory Action Research

   Margherio, C.; Doten-Snitker, K.; Williams, J.; Litzler, E.; and Ingram, E. (June 2018, American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   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. 

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3. Using Possible Selves and Intersectionality Theory to Understand Why Students of Color Opt Out of Honors

   Ticknor, C.; Frazier, A.; Williams, J.; Thompson, M. (January 2020, Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract: Honors education values diversity, not simply to enrich our classrooms but for equity and social justice. At Columbus State University, students of color were underrepresented in honors education, and we sought to determine if institutional structures hindered them from being able to access educational programming that was commensurate with their ability. We used focus group interviews with students of color who were academically eligible to enroll in honors education yet never participated. We combined focus group interviews with an analysis of our recruiting practices. Using a theoretical framework based on intersectionality and possible selves theory, we found that our participants valued diverse learning environments, balance, and co-curricular engagement that supported their professional, hoped-for selves. However, they perceived honors students as stressed, studious, and lacking leisure time, and they perceived honors education as disconnected from their future professional selves. Since their perceptions, which were informed by participation in advanced programs in middle school and high school, as well as our recruiting practices, were in conflict with their educational aims, our participants were unwilling to invest in honors education. While not generalizable, the results provide unique insights that may implicate institutional practices as barriers to participation because they fail to address the concerns of high-achieving students of color. 

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4. 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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5. 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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