Design and Development: Understanding the Contextual Factors that Impact Academic Change Through a Practice-Research Collaboration Supporting the NSF RED Projects

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Within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, we have seen repeated calls for changing the way we educate undergraduate students. And yet, despite many years of funding and development, change in STEM education is not pervasive. The purpose of this project is to prepare faculty engaged in Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) projects to make academic change on their campuses, to build and support a consortium of RED teams, and to study the process of academic change. The project team, Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Participatory Action Research (REDPAR), represents a unique practice-research partnership that links practical, applied faculty development focused on making academic change with research on the impact of contextual factors on academic change projects and the diffusion of change tactics. The project will provide a practical changemaking curriculum deployed through monthly RED Consortium calls, the annual RED Consortium Meeting, individualized consulting, and the publication of REDPAR Tip Sheets. In addition, the project includes the development of a new RED Start Up Session, a full-day introduction to academic changemaking for RED teams in their first year of funding. With the addition of the Adaptation track to the RED Program, there is an opportunity to provide specific development support to teams that are adapting existing academic change programs to their own contexts. The research will use abductive qualitative analysis through the theoretical frameworks of political opportunity theory, social movement schools, and social network theory. These findings will improve our understanding of the role of contextual factors, a key to improving change agents’ ability to predict which change tactics are likely to be most effective within their local institutional environment. The practice-research collaboration will enable both Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the University of Washington to contribute to the national conversation on how to make academic change happen.While the need for systemic change in STEM higher education is clear, it has also proven difficult to achieve in a sustainable manner. Even when one department or institution has success with a change project, these changes might not be adopted by other institutions, resulting in small-scale rather than systemic changes. In order to address this problem, this research will examine how contextual factors influence the adaptation of change strategies. This research will examine how the RED teams learn from both the practice side of REDPAR as well as each other, to gain insight into how contextual factors influence the diffusion of change tactics. With regard to research, the project team will tackle new research areas that focus on the role of contextual factors on academic change projects, including 1) contextual factors that may explain variations in strategy and outcomes across the RED teams; 2) contextual factors that influence the adoption of change tactics taught by a social movement school (i.e., the Making Academic Change Happen curriculum); 3) the types of academic change tactics that are highly transferable between higher education institutions; and 4) the contextual factors that impact the transfer of academic change tactics between institutions. Our research will increase our understanding of how to leverage social networks to propagate change projects effectively. This project will share results from the research conducted with RED teams to the higher education community. By broadly sharing these results, as well as the change curriculum, we see high potential for replication by non-RED departments.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.