Amidst the COVID-19 upheaval to higher education, a grantor-led community of practice (CoP) supported faculty members to deliver an innovative, sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship curriculum and maintain resiliency as teaching professionals. This paper discusses how through engagement in the CoP, this group of faculty from across engineering, material science, business, and geosciences demonstrated resilience, adaptability, and pivoted to create curriculum for students in real time, as the events of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded throughout 2020 and impacted face-to-face learning. The role the community of practice played in sustaining and supporting the faculty will be discussed. Case studies from faculty members will demonstrate how sustainable design and social responsibility can be integrated into entrepreneurially focused classes and student experiences across disciplines. The primary contribution of this research is the important role that an emergent learning framework can play in informing how best to optimize the CoP format and approach in a way that leverages and addresses individual member strengths, challenges, and experiences, and supports the needs of CoP members during a time of significant change and crisis.
The Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter)'s initiative for faculty development and institutional change -called Pathways to Innovation (Pathways) -is working with U.S. engineering schools to embed innovation and entrepreneurship learning opportunities into the undergraduate experience. Pathways' program design is grounded in the literature that identifies "best practices" in faculty development and institutional change. Each participating institution begins its work with a process of documenting resources (assets) and identifying gaps at their school to create a "landscape analysis." That analysis then becomes the basis for identifying well-defined objectives for focused work to create meaningful change over a short period. The mapping process itself becomes a vehicle through which a large number of stakeholders throughout the institution are engaged. While this process of asset mapping is well-referenced in change literature, its application to curricular change is novel. The specific objectives of the Epicenter project are to increase the access to innovation and entrepreneurship learning opportunities for undergraduate engineering students; however, aspects of the landscape analysis process are relevant to a much wider audience of faculty and administrators seeking to implement curricular change beyond one instructor and/or one course. This paper reviews the research underpinnings of the landscape tool and describes its evolution based on early formative evaluation. Further, the paper illustrates the tool's use in more than 35 engineering schools with widely-varying profiles (i.e., public/private, small/large, rural/urban) and reports on how the tool has been used by teams to identify appropriate change strategies and increase engagement in their project by stakeholders. Finally, the paper identifies future directions and uses for the tool as well as possible topics for future research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.