Board # 60: Learning to Make Change by Revolutionizing Departments: Initial Team Experiences

Abstract

Ella L. Ingram is an Associate Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for the Practice and Scholarship of Education at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her educational research interests include promoting successful change practice of STEM faculty, effective evolution and ecology instruction, and facilitating undergraduate research experiences. Her teaching portfolio includes courses on: nutrition, introductory biology, ecology and environmental studies, evolution, evolutionary medicine, and research practices in science. Ella is the co-coordinator for the project Making Academic Change Happen, an initiative focused on helping faculty and administrators develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to become successful and satisfied change agents. Dr. Elizabeth Litzler, University of WashingtonElizabeth Litzler, Ph.D., is the director of the University of Washington Center for Workforce Development and an affiliate assistant professor of sociology. She directs research and evaluation projects from conceptualization, methodological design, and collection of data and analysis to dissemination of findings. Dr. Litzler is a member of ASEE and a former board member of the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN). Her research interests include the educational climate for students in science and engineering, and gender and race stratification in education and the workforce. The launch of NSF's program "Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments" (RED) provided an unparalleled opportunity to examine change in action from its inception. This program charges grantees to achieve "significant sustainable changes necessary to overcome longstanding issues in their undergraduate programs and educate inclusive communities of engineering and computer science students prepared to solve 21st-century challen ges" with the goal of creating "coherent professional and technical threads... to ensure that students develop deep knowledge in their discipline more effectively and meaningfully " (NSF Solicitation). To date, thirteen teams have commenced their projects, which range in scale and scope from re-visioning curriculum units to coordinated change across aggregated departments to experimental co-curricular opportunities. The faculty teams enacting this change represent intentionally interdisciplinary groups, with disciplinary experts working with social scientists and engineering education researchers. Their work is supported by our project -RED Participatory Action Research -in that we coordinate activities across awardees and also create cross-institution analyses to develop larger lessons to share with the engineering education community. The work described here explores the initial conceptions of RED team members with respect to readiness to enact change, captured via focus group interviews and informal discussions conducted within six months of their award being granted.We found that the teams reported significant negotiation at the onset of the project. First, teams reported the n...

Comparing grounded theory and phenomenology as methods to understand lived experience of engineering educators implementing problem-based learning

“…Unlike the NSF-funded study (Ingram, Litzler, Margherio, & Williams, 2017), there was no need to re-negotiate the promises they made grantors. Nevertheless, this FLC still had to set boundaries for the discussion and create a vision for itself.…”

Board 159: The Researcher/Practitioner Strategic Partnership: Linking Theory and Practice for Change in Engineering and Computer Science Education

“…From the research side, one of the recent findings is that many teams utilized informational communication, in which change leaders provide details about plans and goals, essentially offering a proposition for faculty to join or resist. In contrast, formational communication empowers faculty or other stakeholders to contribute to the change process, offering alternative or additional ideas for goals or how to implement the change, and this can have strong effects on the extent to which teams can move forward with their change projects [14,17]. This research finding is completely obvious in retrospect, but neither practitioner would have captured the strength and importance of this outcome without the qualitative data to back it up.…”

“…We have engaged in a wide variety of outreach and dissemination efforts, both with the partners as coauthors and with individual members representing the partnership and assuming authorship credit. We have produced both individual and joint publications and presentations and shared our work across platforms [e.g., 13,14,15,16]. For example, we identified that effective communication was a challenge for change teams; they were communicating with multiple stakeholders, all requiring different parts of the story, and confusion resulted among stakeholders.…”

Board 157: Creating National Leadership Cohorts for Making Academic Change Happen: Sharing Lessons Learned Through RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Tipsheets

“…It also includes how we disseminate the research and practice work that is the foundation of our project. Specifically, we have considered with care the various channels for communication and the modes of conveying our work that are at our disposal, such as conferences like ASEE and research journals like Journal of Engineering Education [1], [2], [3]. These two examples represent typical forms of communication that are accepted within the engineering education community, but both require extended time frames in order to reach their intended audiences.…”

“…As a mode that supports both research and practice, the tipsheet accomplishes several important goals. First, the content is drawn from both the research conducted with the RED teams and the practitioners' work with the teams on specific skill sets considered important tools for change makers [1], [2], [3]. Each tipsheet takes up a single theme and grounds the theme in the research we have conducted while offering practical tips for applying the information.…”