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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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How Communities of Transformation Support Change Agency
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2317319
- PAR ID:
- 10585050
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47533
