Collaborative Research: Preparing Engineering Faculty to Make Academic Change Happen

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Within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, there are repeated calls for changing the way we educate our students. These calls for change extend beyond the classroom experience to the curriculum, co-curricular experiences, and institutional levels. And yet, despite the development of research-based teaching strategies, innovative co-curricular projects, and many years of funding and development from a variety of foundations and corporations, change in STEM education is not pervasive. The lack of systemic change points to an important problem with the approach to change that the STEM education community has pursued thus far. Change has been targeted at the course and curriculum levels, focusing on teaching and learning methods. These beneficial activities have not, however, fostered the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) in motivation, communication, collaboration, and persuasion that are the foundation for change on larger, more institutional levels. These change strategies are well documented in the literature of other disciplines, such as organizational psychology and behavior, but have not been brought into the conversation within STEM education in a rigorous, accessible way. The work proposed here seeks to address this specific problem by answering the following question: Can we overcome limits that prevent the diffusion of new ideas, can we overcome barriers to the adaption of effective practices, by focusing on the change agents themselves in terms of their skills and change expertise?This project will study change agents who are engaged in making change on their campuses through the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program. The co-PIs will provide RED recipients the opportunity to learn and develop the KSAs that research suggests are essential for effective change management, through a customized change curriculum that will be delivered during the annual meeting of RED recipients and supported through monthly conference calls. The co-PIs will also follow the work of these agents over a two-year period, capturing their reflections on their efforts during focus group interviews. From the qualitative data gathered during this EAGER Project, the co-PIs will develop rich case studies that highlight the KSAs required to promote change in STEM; these case studies will serve as models for faculty and administrators who wish to make significant change on their campuses. The approach of this EAGER project represents transformative research that does not fit well into other funding opportunities, because change management KSAs are not well integrated in engineering education presently. By demonstrating the importance of change management KSAs to effective change projects in engineering education, this project will provide faculty and administrators with a new model for change. Consequently, this work addresses the EAGER focus on high risk-high payoff, radically different approaches that develop new expertise and engage novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.