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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. 

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. 

his panel paper presents research on connecting theory to practice and the lessons learned in a change project, with a focus on team formation during the early stages of change making. An important yet often overlooked step in any change project is pulling together individuals to form a competent and efficient team. A functional change-making team requires a variety of complementary skill sets, which may come from different disciplinary backgrounds and/or different prior experiences. Kotter (1996) uses the term “guiding coalition” to refer to an effective change-making team. He identifies four key characteristics of guiding coalitions: position power, expertise, credibility, leadership. Kotter also goes on to examine the importance of trust and a common goal. In a review of the literature on guiding coalitions, Have, Have, Huijsmans, and Otto (2017) found that though the concept of a guiding coalition is widely advocated in the literature, only one study showed a moderate correlation between the existence of a guiding coalition and the success of a change process (Abraham, Griffin, & Crawford, 1999). Have et al. (2017) conclude that while the literature provides little evidence to the value of a guiding coalition, it does provide evidence that Kotter’s characteristics of a guiding coalition (position power, expertise, credibility, leadership skills, trust in leadership, and setting common goals) individually have positive effects on the outcomes of a change project. However, we don’t know how these characteristics interact. This analysis of team building and complementary skill sets emerges from our participatory action research with the NSF REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) teams to investigate the change process within STEM higher education. The research-to-practice cycle is integral to our project; data gathered through working with the RED teams provides insights that are then translated into applied, hands-on practices. We utilize an abductive analysis approach, a qualitative methodology that moves recursively between the data and theory-building to remain open to new or contradictory findings, keeping existing theory in mind while not developing formal hypotheses (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). We find that many of the teams have learned lessons in the early stages of the change process around the guiding coalition characteristics, and our analysis builds on the literature by examining how these characteristics interact. For example, the expertise of the social scientists and education researchers help discern which change strategies have supporting evidence and fit the context, in addition to what is reasonable for planning, implementation, and evaluation. The results presented in this paper connect theory to practice, clarifying practices for building effective change-making teams within higher education. 

This Research to Practice Work in Progress paper addresses the importance of creating shared vision for change in STEM education. While many educational reform initiatives accomplish their goals in the short-term, only systemic change can truly improve quality and inclusion in engineering and computing education. Developing shared vision is an often repeated recommendation for effective and sustainable change from organizational consultants and scholars of higher education). In our work, we have found that embracing stakeholders as full partners through sharing vision is a proactive way to expose concerns and incorporate a variety of viewpoints into the change process. Shared vision is a useful concept that can be made more accessible and actionable through social scientific research on how change-making teams engage and empower stakeholders to collaborate on their projects.