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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. 

This research paper investigates how individual change agents come together to form effective teams. Improving equity within academic engineering requires changes that are often too complex and too high-risk for a faculty member to pursue on their own. Teams offer the advantage of combining a diverse skill set of many individuals, as well as bringing together insider knowledge and external specialist expertise. However, in order for teams of academic change agents to function effectively, they must overcome the challenges of internal politics, power differentials, and group conflict. This analysis of team formation emerges from our participatory action research with recipients of the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grants. Through an NSF-funded collaboration between the University of Washington and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technoliogy, we work with the RED teams to research the process of change as they work to improve equity and inclusion within their institutions. Utilizing longitudinal qualitative data from focus group discussions with 16 teams at the beginning and midpoints of their projects, we examine the development of teams to transform engineering education. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from social movement theory, we highlight the importance of creating a unified team voice and developing a sense of group agency. Teams have a better chance of achieving their goals if members are able to create a unified voice—that is, a shared sense of purpose and vision for their team. We find that the development of a team’s unified voice begins with proposal writing. When members of RED teams did not collaboratively write the grant proposal, they found it necessary to devote more time to develop a sense of shared vision for their project. For many RED teams, the development of a unified voice was further strengthened through external messaging, as they articulated a “we” in opposition to a “they” who have different values or interests. Group agency develops as a result of team members perceiving their goals as attainable and their efforts, as both individuals and a group, as worthwhile. That is, group agency is dependent on both the credibility of the team as well as trust among team members. For some of the RED teams, the NSF requirement to include social scientists and education researchers on their teams gave the engineering team members new, increased exposure to these fields. RED teams found that creating mutual respect was foundational for working across disciplinary differences and developing group agency. 

Principal investigators and project teams funded by the National Science Foundation are familiar with the requirement to discuss the impact of their research. Whether the discussion appears in a new proposal, or as part of annual or final reporting, describing the impacts of a project is key to demonstrating the value of the work itself. PIs and project teams may not, however, consider the ways in which their reporting on impacts can help them disseminate their work to stakeholders and propagate their innovations to other researchers. Impact statements can also be useful to NSF program officers who are often in the position of informing about and advocating for the projects under their management. Consequently, our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program helps project teams develop more coherent and persuasive impact statements. These impact statements lay the foundation for teams to persuasively disseminate their work. As part of our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, we have developed an impacts tutorial that helps proposal and report writers capture what is impactful about their projects and to communicate that impact to multiple audiences (e.g., the NSF program officer, stakeholders for the project, etc.). We piloted the tutorial during the 2019 RED Consortium Meeting to the 21 RED teams in attendance. The tutorial began with a clear statement of the purpose of impact statements generally that was included in a printed workbook distributed to all attendees. From that starting point, groups made up of representatives from different RED teams worked to draft responses to the NSF Annual Report question prompts that address impacts. Initial feedback from NSF about this session have been positive and indicate improvements in reporting by RED teams. During our poster presentation at ASEE, we will introduce this method of writing impact statements, share elements of the workbook, and help attendees apply the method to their own NSF reporting. 

Our work with teams funded through the National Science Foundation REvolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) program began in 2015. Our project—funded first by a NSF EAGER grant, and then by a NSF RFE grant—focuses on understanding how the RED teams make change on their campuses and how this information about change can be captured and communicated to other STEM programs that seek to make change happen. Because our RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Project is a collaboration between researchers (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity at the University of Washington) and practitioners (Making Academic Change Happen Workshop at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), we have challenged ourselves to develop means of communication that allow for both aspects of the work—both research and practice—to be treated equitably. As a result, we have created a new dissemination channel—the RED Participatory Action Project Tipsheet. The tipsheet format accomplishes several important goals. First, the content is drawn from both the research conducted with the RED teams and the practitioners’ work with the teams. Each tipsheet takes up a single theme and grounds the theme in the research literature while offering practical tips for applying the information. Second, the format is accessible to a wide spectrum of potential users, remaining free of jargon and applicable to multiple program and departmental contexts. Third, by publishing the tipsheets ourselves, rather than submitting them to an engineering education research journal, we make the information timely and freely available. We can make a tipsheet as soon as a theme emerges from the intersection of research data and observations of practice. During the poster session at ASEE 2019, we will share the three REDPAR Tipsheets that have been produced thus far: Creating Strategic Partnerships, Communicating Change, and Shared Vision. We will also work with attendees to demonstrate how the tipsheet content is adaptable to the attendees’ specific academic context. Our goal for the poster session is to provide attendees with tipsheet resources that are useful to their specific change project. 

This 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. The literature has identified six key characteristics of a guiding coalition (i.e., an effective change-making team): position power, expertise, credibility, leadership, trust, and a common goal. In this qualitative study of 10 teams working on systemic change projects at their respective institutions, we examine the process of team formation through the framework of guiding coalitions. We find that the characteristics of a guiding coalition shift and evolve over time, as relationships among team members (and with their stakeholders) continue to grow. The results presented in this paper connect theory to practice, sharing practices for building effective change-making teams within higher education. Permalink: https://peer.asee.org/32489. 

Our work with teams funded through the National Science Foundation REvolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) program began in 2015. Our project—funded first by a NSF EAGER grant, and then by a NSF RFE grant—focuses on understanding how the RED teams make change on their campuses and how this information about change can be captured and communicated to other STEM programs that seek to make change happen. Because our RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Project is a collaboration between researchers (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity at the University of Washington) and practitioners (Making Academic Change Happen Workshop at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), we have challenged ourselves to develop means of communication that allow for both aspects of the work—both research and practice—to be treated equitably. As a result, we have created a new dissemination channel—the RED Participatory Action Project Tipsheet. The tipsheet format accomplishes several important goals. First, the content is drawn from both the research conducted with the RED teams and the practitioners’ work with the teams. Each tipsheet takes up a single theme and grounds the theme in the research literature while offering practical tips for applying the information. Second, the format is accessible to a wide spectrum of potential users, remaining free of jargon and applicable to multiple program and departmental contexts. Third, by publishing the tipsheets ourselves, rather than submitting them to an engineering education research journal, we make the information timely and freely available. We can make a tipsheet as soon as a theme emerges from the intersection of research data and observations of practice. Permalink: https://peer.asee.org/32275. 

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. 

This research paper investigates the process of forming strategic partnerships to enact organizational change. There has been increasing interest in forming strategic partnerships in higher education due to a variety of motivations, such as pooling of resources and improving the professional development process for students (Worrall, 2007). It is important to examine how strategic partnerships form because the process of formation sets the objectives and expectations of the relationship, which in turn impact the likelihood of success and sustainability of the relationship. Further, despite the growing interest in forming strategic partnerships, the majority of these partnerships fail (Eddy, 2010). This analysis of strategic partnerships emerges from our participatory action research with university change agents activated through the NSF REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) Program. Through an NSF-funded collaboration between [University 1] and [University 2], we work with the change-making teams to investigate the change process and provide just-in-time training and support. Utilizing qualitative data from focus group discussions and observations of monthly cross-team teleconference calls, we examine the importance of motivations, social capital, and organizational capital in the process of forming strategic partnerships. We find that change-making teams have utilized a variety of strategies to establish goals and governance within strategic partnerships. These strategies include establishing alignment among institutional goals, project goals, and partner organization goals. Further, the strategic partnerships that have been most successful have occurred when teams have intentionally built mutually beneficial relationships and invited their partner into the visioning process for their change projects. These results delineate practices for initiating strategic partnerships within higher education and encourage faculty to build mutually beneficial strategic partnerships.