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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. Understanding Organizational Cultural Influences in Multisector Multi-Team Systems

   Castillo, Florence; Pearson, Yvette; Frizell, Sherri; Skaggs, Sheryl; Bisbey, T (June 2024, ASEE)

   Complex problems require complex teams comprised of individuals with different backgrounds, skills and perspectives to work effectively toward their solution. Increasingly, this is being accomplished through the creation of multi-team systems (MTS) that are developed and implemented in alignment with team science-based strategies. MTS are comprised of individual teams with their own goals that are interconnected and work collaboratively toward a larger, common goal. Attitudinal (cohesion, trust, commitment), behavioral (coordination, communication, shared leadership) and cognitive (situational awareness, shared mental models) competencies support MTS effectiveness. Multisector MTS are even more complex, as team members bring aspects of their organizational culture into the MTS, and if priorities and practices are not well aligned, team function and effectiveness can suffer. Thus, for multisector MTS to work, they must begin with a foundational understanding of the component parts, that is, each organization’s culture and priorities, and how – or if – they align for the success of the collaborative. We created a multisector MTS to develop and implement a project funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program. The project’s objectives are to: increase the number of domestic low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need obtaining master's degrees in supported disciplines and entering the US STEM workforce; implement and evaluate the impact of our Flexible Internship-Research-Education (FIRE) model, which integrates evidence-based strategies that provide student career and educational development support, on student success; and implement, study and disseminate an MTS model for multi -organizational collaboration toward career and educational development. The partners include four universities – three Carnegie R2 public Historically Black Colleges and Universities and one Carnegie R1 private, highly selective admissions institution – and a major government employer. Six teams comprise our MTS; with the exception of one, each team has representatives from each partner organization. We sought to understand how each organization’s culture influenced – or might potentially influence – team interactions. The guiding research question for this study is: In what ways – positive or negative – do partner organizations’ cultures impact team members’ engagement with the project? We were interested in gauging how organizational culture, operationalized by performance values (rewarding individual performance vs. team performance), communications (transparent vs. need-to-know, clarity, frequency), conflict resolution and collaborative vs. competitive environments, manifested in their engagement with the MTS. We also explored how – or if – their organization’s priorities aligned with the overall project’s aims and what specific areas might be sources of support and/or challenges as the teams progressed. We conducted open-ended structured interviews with eight project team members who each served on at least one of the six teams. We are completing both content and thematic analyses to understand how team members speak about their organizational influences and engagements within and among the teams. We are finding team members are adaptable; regardless of individual or organizational priorities, when challenges arise, they can re-center on the project’s aims and work collaboratively toward student success. We expect results will illuminate factors multisector MTS teams should consider when forming collaborations. 

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3. Best Practices in Building Relationships and Partnerships Between Community Colleges, Universities, and Organizations (Work In Progress)

   Davuluri, V.; Vempala, V.; Mondisa, J.-L. (January 2022, Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   Understanding how to build relationships between universities, organizations, and community colleges could encourage more inter-organizational work through the formation of intentional and strong positive relationships. In this work in progress paper, we discuss how we fostered a research collaboration between faculty, administrators, and researchers at two community colleges, two universities, and several professional welding organizations. The intent of the overarching research project is to study and improve the educational experiences, outcomes, and career pathways of welding technology (WT) students. During the facilitation of this project, the team has successfully cultivated and leveraged relationships and partnerships to help inform the study. As a result, the Project Team recognizes the importance of capturing how we develop and leverage these relationships to address project needs and produce deliverables. The formation of the relationships between researchers, practitioners, employers and professional organizations is rarely examined and documented in technological education. Thus, this work allows us to capture and share the theoretical and practical knowledge about how we have developed, maintained, and leveraged these partnerships with engaged leadership from our community college principal investigators. In this work, we present: (1) a brief review of literature about team science and (2) best practices related to our process of cultivating and leveraging relationships between the Project team members, faculty and industry employers. This work provides theoretical and practical knowledge about partnership development in Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects that can provide critical insights about creating and leveraging partnerships between researchers, faculty, and practitioners. 

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4. Team Membership Change “Events”: A Review and Reconceptualization

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601120910848  

   Trainer, Hayley_M; Jones, Justin_M; Pendergraft, Jacob_G; Maupin, Cynthia_K; Carter, Dorothy_R (March 2020, Group & Organization Management)

   Driven by views of teams as dynamic systems with permeable boundaries, scholars are increasingly seeking to better understand how team membership changes (i.e., team members joining and/or leaving) shape the functioning and performance of organizational teams. However, empirical studies of team membership change appear to be progressing in three largely independent directions as researchers consider: (a) how newcomers impact and are impacted by the teams they join; (b) how teams adapt to member departures; or (c) how teams function under conditions of high membership fluidity, with little theoretical integration or consensus across these three areas. To accelerate an integrative stream of research on team membership change, we advance a conceptual framework which depicts each team membership change as a discrete team-level “event” which shapes team functioning to the extent to which it is “novel,” “disruptive,” and “critical” for the team. We use this framework to guide our review and synthesis of empirical studies of team membership change published over the past 20 years. Our review reveals numerous factors, across conceptual levels of the organization, that determine the strength (i.e., novelty, disruptiveness, criticality) of a team membership change event and, consequently, its impact on team functioning and performance. In closing, we provide propositions for future research that integrate a multilevel, event-based perspective of team membership change and demonstrate how team membership change events may impact organizational systems over time and across levels of observation. 

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5. The Researcher/Practitioner Strategic Partnership: Linking Theory and Practice for Change in Engineering and Computer Science Education.

   Ingram, E.; Litzler, E.; Margherio, C.; Doten-Snitker, K.; and Williams, J. (June 2018, American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   Our NSF funded project—Creating National Leadership Cohorts to Make Academic Change Happen (NSF 1649318)—represents a strategic partnership between researchers and practitioners in the domain of academic change. The principle investigators from the Making Academic Change Happen team from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology provide familiarity with the literature of practical organizational change and package this into action-oriented workshops and ongoing support for teams funded through the REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) program. The PIs from the Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity at the University of Washington provide expertise in social science research in order to investigate how the the RED teams’ change projects unfold and how the teams develop as members of national leadership cohorts for change in engineering and computer science education. Our poster for ASEE 2018 will focus on what we have learned thus far regarding the dynamics of the researcher/practitioner partnership through the RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Project. According to Worrall (2007), good partnerships are “founded on trust, respect, mutual benefit, good communities, and governance structures that allow democratic decision-making, process improvement, and resource sharing.” We have seen these elements emerge through the work of the partnership to create mutual benefits. For example, the researchers have been given an “insider’s” perspective on the practitioners’ approach—their goals, motivations for certain activities, and background information and research. The practitioners’ perspective is useful for the researchers to learn since the practitioners’ familiarity with the organizational change literature has influenced the researchers’ questions and theoretical models. The practitioners’ work with the RED teams has provided insights on the teams, how they are operating, the challenges they face, and aspects of the teams’ work that may not be readily available to the researchers. As a result, the researchers have had increased access to the teams to collect data. The researchers, in turn, have been able to consider how to make their analyses useful and actionable for change-makers, the population that the practitioners are more familiar with. Insights from the researchers provide both immediate and long-term benefits to programming and increased professional impact. The researchers are trained observers, each of whom brings a unique disciplinary perspective to their observations. The richness, depth, and clarity of their observations adds immeasurably to the quality of practitioners’ interactions with the RED teams. The practitioners, for example, have revised workshop content in response to the researchers’ observations, thus ensuring that the workshop content serves the needs of the RED teams. The practitioners also benefit from the joint effort on dissemination, since they can contribute to a variety of dissemination efforts (journal papers, conference presentations, workshops). We plan to share specific examples of the strategic partnership during the poster session. In doing so, we hope to encourage researchers to seek out partnerships with practitioners in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice in engineering and computer science education. 

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