Collaborative Research: PaiRED: Partnering Across Insider-views of RED

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Engineering programs across the country are working to become more responsive to the changing needs of today's students. In response to this need, the NSF has funded 19 five-year Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) projects from 2015-17, with a call for new proposals published in 2018. The preliminary results from funded RED projects show many examples of success. Transformative organizational change is difficult, however, and most project teams have navigated challenges related to leadership team dynamics. Most of these challenges are not shared with the broader community, in part, because of a fear of identifying individuals and of highlighting failures instead of successes. Yet, understanding the challenges associated with relationships in leadership teams is critical to making revolutionary change in engineering education. This project will develop a deeper understanding of team dynamics in large-scale engineering teams. This new knowledge will ultimately increase the effectiveness of RED teams and their organizational change initiatives, and will have implications for other large-scale initiatives such as Engineering Research Centers.This exploratory research project is focused on developing a critical understanding of roles, perspectives, and relationships within RED teams and the potential impact of these concepts on creating and sustaining organizational change to improve the education of engineers nationwide. The NSF PFE/IUSE: RED solicitation requires the inclusion of faculty and administrators who serve in specific roles and from specific backgrounds; this project develops an understanding of the lived experiences of the individuals who served in these roles on teams funded from 2015-2017. In particular, the work will investigate how the experiences of team members shape attempts at organizational change. The project explores the following research questions: How do roles, perspectives, relationships, and structures shape how teams face, frame, and navigate challenges and tensions, as they work towards revolutionary organizational change in engineering education? How have RED team roles, perspectives, relationships, and structures evolved over time? Data collection and analysis include artifact analysis of proposal documents, project websites, and shared RED documents. Narrative interviews with members of RED leadership teams, including principal investigators, social scientists, engineering education researchers, and disciplinary engineering faculty members will also be conducted. These data will be analyzed to identify larger patterns across interviews and develop broader themes. Findings will be disseminated in traditional venues, in workshops, and through white papers. By looking at the experiences of RED team members within specific roles across RED sites, key aspects of RED team dynamics (that cannot be reported on easily in individual teams because of the identifiable nature these roles) will be uncovered.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.