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1. The RED Teams Start-Up Session: Leveraging Research with Practice for Success in Academic Change

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35360  

   Williams, Julia; Mohan, Sriram; Andrijcic, Eva; Margherio, Cara; Litzler, Elizabeth; Doten-Snitker, Kerice (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   null (Ed.)

   At the start of their work for the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program (IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers, NSF 19-614), RED teams face a variety of challenges. Not only must they craft a shared vision for their projects and create strategic partnerships across their campuses to move the project forward, they must also form a new team and communicate effectively within the team. Our work with RED teams over the past 5 years has highlighted the common challenges these teams face at the start, and for that reason, we have developed the RED Start Up Session, a ½ day workshop that establishes best practices for RED teams’ work and allows for early successes in these five year projects. As the RED Participatory Action Research team (REDPAR)--comprised of individuals from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the University of Washington--we have taken the research data collected as we work with RED teams and translated it into practical strategies that can benefit RED teams as they embark on their projects. This presentation will focus on the content and organization of the Start Up Session and how these lessons learned can contribute to the furthering of the goals of the RED program: to design “revolutionary new approaches to engineering education,” focusing on “organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program.” We see the Start Up Session as an important first step in the RED team establishing an identity as a team and learning how to work effectively together. We also encourage new RED teams to learn from the past, through a panel discussion with current RED team members who fill various roles on the teams: engineering education researcher, project manager, project PI, disciplinary faculty, social scientist, and others. By presenting our findings from the Start Up Session at ASEE, we believe we can contribute to the national conversation regarding change in engineering education as it is evidenced in the RED team’s work. 

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2. 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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3. 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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4. Community of Practice as a Theory of Change for Infrastructure Education

   K.L. Sanford, F. Paige (June 2023, peer.asee.org)

   A national faculty Community of Practice (CoP) has created a model course for undergraduate infrastructure education as a part of its shared agenda. This CoP has collectively defined the domain of knowledge for undergraduate introductory infrastructure education; co-created and peer-reviewed more than 40 complete lessons for an introductory infrastructure course; shared best practices and resources among members; and provided mentorship to newer members adopting or adapting the materials. The Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E) considers infrastructure as a system rather than a collection of unrelated structural/environmental/transportation components; even more importantly, this system is conceived of as a social-technical system that must be designed with equity and justice factors prioritized to include the diversity of users’ lived experiences. To that end, CoP members have recently produced learning materials on Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) in infrastructure provision. The operationalizing of CoP as a theory of change by CIT-E has emerged beyond the initial National Science Foundation (NSF) funding a decade ago, employing various change strategies. Example strategies include expanding membership and creating alternative educational practices to support change and transformation. Recent NSF funding and new membership have created opportunities for the CoP to lead change at a much broader level across civil and environmental engineering education in the U.S. As part of this work, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven change leaders in engineering education and DEIJ. We asked their perspectives on community of practice as a theory of change and whether it is appropriate for this work. Their responses were coded, revealing 169 codes, some of which advisors agreed upon, and many representing alternative perspectives. Processes such as considering, accepting, asking, and acknowledging are easy to overlook while executing change through mentoring, funding, and doing. The results of this work are helpful for civil and environmental engineering (CEE) faculty members interested in operationalizing change in their classroom and on their campus to meet ABET’s relatively recent DEI criteria, and the process in this study is transferrable to other fields that are also mobilizing transformative practices for integrating DEIJ principles into their curricula. 

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5. WIP - Community of Practice as a theory of change for Infrastructure Education.

   Sanford, K. L.; Paige, F.; Parker, P. J.; Valdes-Vasquez, R (June 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference)

   A national faculty Community of Practice (CoP) has created a model course for undergraduate infrastructure education as a part of its shared agenda. This CoP has collectively defined the domain of knowledge for undergraduate introductory infrastructure education; co-created and peer-reviewed more than 40 complete lessons for an introductory infrastructure course; shared best practices and resources among members; and provided mentorship to newer members adopting or adapting the materials. The Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E) considers infrastructure as a system rather than a collection of unrelated structural/environmental/transportation components; even more importantly, this system is conceived of as a social-technical system that must be designed with equity and justice factors prioritized to include the diversity of users’ lived experiences. To that end, CoP members have recently produced learning materials on Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) in infrastructure provision. The operationalizing of CoP as a theory of change by CIT-E has emerged beyond the initial National Science Foundation (NSF) funding a decade ago, employing various change strategies. Example strategies include expanding membership and creating alternative educational practices to support change and transformation. Recent NSF funding and new membership have created opportunities for the CoP to lead change at a much broader level across civil and environmental engineering education in the U.S. As part of this work, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven change leaders in engineering education and DEIJ. We asked their perspectives on community of practice as a theory of change and whether it is appropriate for this work. Their responses were coded, revealing 169 codes, some of which advisors agreed upon, and many representing alternative perspectives. Processes such as considering, accepting, asking, and acknowledging are easy to overlook while executing change through mentoring, funding, and doing. The results of this work are helpful for civil and environmental engineering (CEE) faculty members interested in operationalizing change in their classroom and on their campus to meet ABET’s relatively recent DEI criteria, and the process in this study is transferrable to other fields that are also mobilizing transformative practices for integrating DEIJ principles into their curricula. 

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