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The overall objective of this project funded by the NSF-IUSE program is to employ a sociotechnical systems lens and framework and identify and evaluate organization-wide capacities and change catalysts in a predominantly white institution's college of engineering. The college of engineering is viewed as a sociotechnical organization with social and technical subsystems. The social subsystem models who talks to whom about what. The technical subsystem models the main activities and programs in the organization. Our project aims to: (1) assess the technical system’s capacity to support recruitment and retention through a technical system analysis; (2) assess the social system’s capacity to support recruitment and retention through a social system analysis; and (3) generate systemwide catalysts for URM student success. We conducted semi-structured hour-long interviews with 38 stakeholders including students, faculty, administrators and staff from various departments and student organizations within and outside the college. We are qualitatively analyzing the interview data to identify technical and social system barriers and enablers. Data analysis is ongoing, but our preliminary findings and insights are as follows: (1) social system barriers for URM students were interactions with peers in classroom environment (leading to a sense of isolation and a lack of belonging), interactions with faculty and staff especially in relating to their needs and being empathetic, and familial concerns and being able to support their family financially. (2) interactions with their friends was the top social system enabler for URM students. Family also provided them comfort and solace while attending to the rigors of college. They also felt that living at home would alleviate some of the financial burdens they faced. (3) the lack in numbers (and hence the lack of diversity and identity), curricular and instructional methods, and high school preparation were cited as the most important technical system barriers these students faced. (4) students identified as technical system enablers the professional development opportunities they had, their participation in students organizations, particularly in identity-based organizations such as NSBE, SHPE and WISE, and how that helped them forge new contacts and provided emotional support during their stay here. (5) there is recognition among the administrators and the staff working with URM students that diversity is important in the student body and that the mission of enabling URM student success is important, although the mission itself with respect to URM students is somewhat poorly defined and understood.
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Systems Engineering Initiative for Student Success (SEISS) Framework for Transforming Organizational Designs
In this paper, we present the Systems Engineering Initiative for Student Success (SEISS) framework we are developing for enabling educational organizations to scan, evaluate and transform their operations to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in student recruitment, retention, and graduation. The underlying structure and logic in our SEISS framework is that an organization such as a college of engineering is a sociotechnical system (STS) consisting of a social subsystem and a technical subsystem. The social subsystem consists of people, their roles and is a model of who talks to whom about what. The technical subsystem consists of all the activities, programs, policies, and operations that help the organization achieve its goals. In a sociotechnical system, the social and technical subsystems are interdependent in their functioning, and they must be jointly optimized from an organizational design perspective. Our SEISS framework which views a college or a similar organizational unit as a sociotechnical system lends the organizational designer a unique systems lens with which to view, analyze and design the operations and organize the capacities and resources in the college. The systems lens views an organizational unit, its sub-systems, components, and its corresponding capacities not in isolation, but as entities that interact with each other. With support from an NSF IUSE grant, we have been developing the SEISS framework and have piloted the framework in a predominantly white college of engineering to identify existing and potential technical and social system capacities for underrepresented minority (URM) students to succeed in the college. Preliminary results from our qualitative analyses of URM student interviews reveal the utility of the SEISS framework and the STS lens in unearthing the barriers and enablers for these students in the social and technical subsystems in the college. We also model the interactions between the social and technical subsystem elements in the SEISS framework, revealing latent opportunities for leveraging the connections between the social and technical subsystem capacities and resources.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2042363
- PAR ID:
- 10463565
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE 2023 Annual Conference and Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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“A culture of disengagement” is what Erin Cech [1, see also 4,9] has named the phenomenon that, within engineering schools, students graduate with less interest in societal issues than when they arrive. Much of this disengagement is attributed to mindsets ([2]: centrality of military and corporate organizations, uncritical acceptance of authority, technical narrowness, positivism and the myth of objectivity) and ideologies ([1]: technical-social dualism, depoliticization, meritocracy) that create a socio-technical divide that encourages many students to marginalize social issues related to engineering. In recent years, some scholars have proposed ways to overcome this disengagement, for example Jon Leydens and Juan Lucena’s (2018) “Engineering for Social Justice Criteria.” However, little research has been conducted to trace how engineering students are taking up these programs. This paper builds on an NSF-funded ethnographic study of cultural practices in a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program that serves 1st and 2nd year engineering students [6, 22- 23]. That research study sought to answer: How does this program cultivate engineering students' macro-ethical reasoning about science and technology? Radoff and colleagues [6] identified four salient ways that students described the cultural practices of the STS program: 1) cultivating an ethics of care, 2) making the invisible visible, 3) understanding systems from multiple perspectives, and 4) empowering students to develop moral stances as engineers in society (developing a sense of agency). This paper builds off of insights uncovered from Radoff et al by zooming in on the ways students describe how their sense of agency manifests during their time in the program. On top of interview and focus group data, we draw examples from STS student participant observations in STS courses [27]. We use examples drawn from this data to reflect on how encouraging student agency can help overcome the socio-technical divide.more » « less
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