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  • Orchestrating a culture-aligned adoption and adaptation of an instructional innovation: A story of an engineering professor’s pedagogical decisions between innovation and school culture
Title: Orchestrating a culture-aligned adoption and adaptation of an instructional innovation: A story of an engineering professor’s pedagogical decisions between innovation and school culture
Engineering education researchers and practitioners have driven instructional innovation in undergraduate engineering instruction. Much of the research about educational innovation has focused on undergraduate classrooms in large enrollment courses and/or research-intensive institutions. Propagation of innovations across settings, especially those quite unlike the original context, has received less attention in the literature. This includes liberal arts institutions, which collectively educate a large number of undergraduate engineering students in various contexts. Therefore, this study focuses on the implementation of an instructional innovation in a liberal arts institution that started a new engineering program to educate a regional engineering workforce. This qualitative study documented the experiences of one engineering instructor who adopted and adapted a blended learning environment for undergraduate dynamics designed to promote active and collaborative learning in undergraduate engineering courses. We analyzed interviews, documents, artifacts, visual materials, and field notes to examine the propagation of the instructional system in context with cultural features in local institution settings. Our findings show how an engineering instructor orchestrated a culture-aligned adoption and adaptation of an instructional innovation. Using reflective practice, the research participant adapted the implemented innovative instruction to their hands-on institution culture, such as adjusting expectations in content, adapting resources to students’ individual needs, adjusting uncertainty of problem solving, and adapting to a hands-on institution culture. This research highlights the important role of institutional culture in local adaptations of educational innovations, and it provides the community with an expanded way to think about innovation propagation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1915574
NSF-PAR ID:
10355877
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ASEE 2022
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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