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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. Surfacing Deeply Held Beliefs about Gender-and Race-Based Minoritization in Engineering: Emerging Insights After Two Years Focused on Data Collection

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--41977  

   Delpech, Dira; Dringenberg, Emily (August 2022, ASEE Conferences)

   Engineering educators in many contexts are increasingly being called to contribute to equity. The focus of our CAREER project is to investigate the ways in which engineering faculty, staff and administrators think about the cause of gender- and race-based minoritization in engineering. Specifically, we investigate the beliefs they express about why women and people of color remain minoritized in engineering and how they arrive at those beliefs. Long term goals of the work include designing evidence-based professional development that can support faculty at any stage in their development as change agents for equity in engineering. The overarching project design includes a series of four one-on-one interviews with participants. The first two interviews are focused on their beliefs about gender- and race-based minoritization, respectively. The third interview will explore their narrative, and the fourth interview (or some type of interaction) will be designed based on how the project evolves and what we learn. We are currently in the second year of the project. To start, our research team used crowdsourcing as a method of recruiting our participants. We asked students to identify engineering educators that they considered to be inclusive based on their lived experience. We oversampled for students from minoritized groups (non-male, non-white). We also allowed those nominated by students to refer to any peers that they felt were inclusive. This resulted in the following participant pool with at least one majority identity (race or gender): 11 white men, 11 white women, and 5 men of color. After piloting our initial interview protocol, we completed gender beliefs interviews with all 27 participants during the 2020-2021 academic year. We had the interviews transcribed, and members of our research checked them for accuracy and de-identified them. The clean transcripts were then sent back to the participants for review. We began data condensation by generating a summary sheet for each participant, which includes the main concepts captured in each section of their gender beliefs interview. We are currently (2021-2022) conducting race beliefs interviews with those same participants. We published the results of piloting the use of our methodological framework, Thinking as Argument (TaA) in the 2021 ASEE proceedings. In short, we believe the framework shows promise for studying beliefs at a deeper level by inviting participants to work through the types of evidence they draw on to commit to their beliefs about the cause of minoritization in engineering. In this paper, we offer some insights that are emerging at this early stage of the project: Different participants draw on diverse ways of knowing to commit to their beliefs, including lived experience and scholarship. These ways of knowing seem potentially related to their own identities. For example, several participants who identify as men of color leverage their own experiences with racism to explain the cause of sexism. This insight has given us pause on the ways in which our framework, TaA, privileges academic or argumentative ways of knowing. We are gaining awareness of the incredible complexity that exists within trying to characterize or evaluate someone's contributions to equity as they relate to their ways of thinking. This finding has given us a pause about the ways in which we, as researchers, assign value to ways of being or acting. At this current stage, we are exploring further by engaging ourselves in reflection of other ways in which beliefs in this context are formed and we are inviting others to do the same. Future work will include ongoing analysis and sensemaking. With the race beliefs completed, we will be able to use data display techniques to explore any patterns between the participants’ beliefs and positionalities. We look forward to honing our protocol for the narrative interviews and are soliciting feedback in terms of how to use the fourth and final interaction of the project in a more participatory way to encourage and give back to our participants. 

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3. Is satisficing really satisfying? Satisficers exhibit greater threat than maximizers during choice overload

   https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13705  

   Saltsman, Thomas L.; Seery, Mark D.; Ward, Deborah E.; Lamarche, Veronica M.; Kondrak, Cheryl L. (October 2020, Psychophysiology)

   Abstract When selecting from too many options (i.e., choice overload),maximizers(people who search exhaustively to make decisions that areoptimal) report more negative post‐decisional evaluations of their choices than dosatisficers(people who search minimally to make decisions that aresufficient). Although ample evidence exists for differences in responses after‐the‐fact, little is known about possible divergences in maximizers’ and satisficers’ experiencesduringchoice overload. Thus, using the biopsychosocial model of challenge/threat, we examined 128 participants’ cardiovascular responses as they actively made a selection from many options. Specifically, we focused on cardiovascular responses assessing the degree to which individuals (a) viewed their decisions as valuable/important and (b) viewed themselves as capable (vs. incapable) of making a good choice. Although we found no differences in terms of the value individuals placed on their decisions (i.e., cardiovascular responses of task engagement), satisficers—compared to maximizers—exhibited cardiovascular responses consistent with feeling less capable of making their choice (i.e., greater relative threat). The current work provides a novel investigation of the nature of differences in maximizers’/satisficers’ momentary choice overload experiences, suggesting insight into why they engage in such distinct search behaviors. 

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4. Diversifying Large-Scale Participatory Science: The Efficacy of Engagement through Facilitator Organizations

   https://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.627  

   Lin Hunter, Danielle; Johnson, Valerie; Cooper, Caren (January 2023, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice)

   Large-scale, scientist-led, participatory science (citizen science) projects often engage participants who are primarily white, wealthy, and well-educated. Calls to diversify contributory projects are increasingly common, but little research has evaluated the efficacy of suggested strategies for diversification. We engaged participants in Crowd the Tap through facilitator organizations like historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), predominantly white institutions, high school science classrooms, and corporate volunteer programs. Crowd the Tap is a contributory project focused on identifying and addressing lead (Pb) contamination in household drinking water in the United States. We investigated how participant diversity with respects to race, ethnicity, and homeownership (a proxy for income) differed between participation facilitated through a partner organization and unfacilitated participation in which participants came to the project independently. We were also interested in which facilitators were most effective at increasing participant diversity. White and wealthy participants were overrepresented in unfacilitated participation. Facilitation helped increase engagement of people of color, especially Black and lower-income households. High schools were particularly effective at engaging Hispanic or Latinx participants, and HBCUs were important for engaging Black households. Ultimately, our results suggest that engagement through facilitator organizations may be an effective means of engaging diverse participants in large-scale projects. Our results have important implications for the field of participatory science as we seek to identify evidence-based strategies for diversifying project participants. 

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5. Recognizing political influences in participatory social-ecological systems modeling

   https://doi.org/10.18174/sesmo.18509  

   Lim, Theodore C.; Glynn, Pierre D.; Shenk, Gary W.; Bitterman, Patrick; Guillaume, Joseph H.; Little, John C.; Webster, D. G. (January 2023, Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling)

   Stakeholder participation in social-ecological systems (SES) modeling is increasingly considered a desirable way to elicit diverse sources of knowledge about SES behavior and to promote inclusive decision-making in SES. Understanding how participatory modeling processes function in the context of long-term adaptive management of SES may allow for better design of participatory processes to achieve the intended outcomes of inclusionary knowledge, representativeness, and social learning, while avoiding unintended outcomes. Long-term adaptive management contexts often include political influences -- attempts to shift or preserve power structures and authority, and efforts to represent the political and economic interests of stakeholders -- in the computer models that are used to shape policy making and implementation. In this research, we examine a period that included a major transition in the watershed model used for management of the Chesapeake Bay in the United States. The Chesapeake Bay watershed model has been in development since the 1980s, and is considered by many to be an exemplary case of participatory modeling. We use documentary analysis and interviews with participants involved in the model application and development transition to reveal a variety of ways in which participatory modeling may be subject to different kinds of political influences, some of which resulted in unintended outcomes, including: perceptions of difficulty updating the model in substantive ways, “gaming” of the model/participatory process by stakeholders, and increasing resistance against considering uncertainty in the system not captured by the model. This research suggests unintended or negative outcomes may be associated with both participatory decision-making and stakeholder learning even though they are so often touted as the benefits of participatory modeling. We end with a hypothesis that further development of a theory of computer model governance to bridge model impact and broader theories of environmental governance at the science-policy interface may result in improved SES modeling outcomes. 

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