Collaborative Research: Creating National Leadership Cohorts for Making 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 students are educated. Knowledge of change processes are familiar to individuals in business and industry, but represent new arenas for engineering and computer science faculty who envision change in engineering and computer science education on their campuses. In this project, faculty are introduced to the knowledge, skills, and abilities of research-based change strategies through the customized Making Academic Change Happen Curriculum. This curriculum is delivered annually at the Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) Program Investigator Meeting. After the meeting, faculty receive monthly support through coaching and through the community of change leaders represented in each RED cohort. The research part of this project uses observations, document analysis, phone interviews and focus groups to determine how the strategies impact the success or failure of each planned change project. In addition, the formation of a national cohort of change leaders in STEM education enlarges the community of scholars known to be engaged in change practices and can provide important models for change. The lack of systemic change within the STEM education community points to an important problem with the approach to change that has been pursued thus far. Change has been targeted at the course and curriculum levels, focusing on teaching and learning. The project seeks to address this specific problem by addressing the following question: Can the limits of change in STEM education be overcome by focusing on the individual change agents in terms of their skills and change expertise?In this project, the Making Academic Change Happen customized change curriculum is being offered at the Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) Investigators Meeting. The work of three cohorts of RED recipients is being tracked as they use the knowledge, skills, and abilities offered in the customized curriculum to enact change on their own campuses. The intellectual merit of the research work lies in determining - through observation, document analysis, interviews, and focus groups - how change knowledge, skills, and abilities are learned, applied, and contribute to the success of each change project. The research questions addressed are as follows:1. What are the baseline skills in change management that RED recipients possess at the start of their projects?2. What traits/components/characteristics contribute to the success of engineering education change project leaders?3. How does the MACH curriculum support a change leader's ability to make change?4. How do change agents empower stakeholders to develop a shared vision for change?5. How does contents, broadly defined, affect the ability to create and sustain change?The broader impact of this project lies in the creation of a national leadership cohort for change in engineering and computer science education. By enlarging the community of scholars known to be engaged in change practices, the engineering and computer science communities benefit from models for change (described in the case studies produced by the project) and increased understanding of an individual's agency to affect change.