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Efforts to lead diversity, equity, inclusivity, and justice (DEIJ) change in higher education, and in STEM departments in particular, are prone to failure. We argue that these complex efforts entail orchestration of learning, change, and power, and therefore, understanding how organizational change teams function necessitates a combination of theories. We examine how faculty experience change projects in postsecondary engineering education, including the ways in which their experiences—and the change efforts they’re engaged in—are shaped by identity and intersectional power. Using a narrative approach, we report on the experiences of three composite cases of faculty members on change projects across multiple institutions, drawing on theories of learning, change, and power to glean understanding of these experiences. Our findings suggest that bringing these three theoretical lenses together through what we call the TRIPLE (Theories and Research on Intersectional Power, Learning, and Evolutionary) Change Framework helps develop a more critical and nuanced understanding of faculty experiences on organizational change leadership teams. 

Undergraduate engineering students are commonly introduced to design in their first year and tackle a more authentic design challenge during senior year, with intervening courses focused on technical problem solving. Along this trajectory, students should acquire skills related to the development of engineering requirements, which are important to the technical framing of design problems. Through the lens of framing agency, this mixed-methods study explores first-year and senior students’ knowledge of engineering requirements as they engaged problems within their respective courses. Findings suggest that learning about requirements as a framing mechanism was not well-supported across the curriculum. Implications include a need to engage students in requirements development during the middle years and improve support for iterative framing and solving activities