NSF Award
2317318
The slow progress for change despite repeated calls for improving the way undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are educated is the basis for this project’s importance. Although many years of funding and development have been provided to help make improvements, change in STEM education is not pervasive. Tradition, culture, structure, and decision-making patterns set higher education apart from other organizational settings and introduce unique challenges for creating systemic and sustainable changes. This project will enable the creation of research-based practical support for teams of change leaders trying to make change through the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant mechanism. The project will introduce faculty, graduate students, and staff serving on RED projects to knowledge and research-based skills that are necessary to initiate, implement, and sustain academic change on their campuses, build and support a consortium of RED teams, and study the process of academic change. <br/><br/>The goals of the project are to help change leaders grow in knowledge, skills, and resources by providing professional development, a community of practice and research-based information, so that academic change can be successfully implemented and sustained. The project team, Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Participatory Action Research (REDPAR), represents a unique practice-research partnership between the Making Academic Change Happen team at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) at the University of Washington. This partnership will enable REDPAR to link practical, applied faculty development focused on making academic change with research that identifies important change practices that emerge in RED projects. The outcomes of the project will be accomplished through summer faculty development workshops and during the RED Consortium Annual Meeting. The faculty will be further supported through bi-monthly RED Consortium calls which serve as opportunities for the RED Community of Practice to share experiences and advice, and identify opportunities for collaboration. REDPAR will match new RED teams with mentors (from more experienced RED cohorts) who can provide practical advice. The research team will use RED grantee focus groups and interview data to qualitatively examine 1) how organizational context matters for teams and what they have been able to achieve, and 2) the aspects of projects that have been sustained, and the role that institutional learning mechanisms, organizational change models/theories, and context play in project institutionalization. This project will partner with current and former RED grantees to ensure that the work is useful to the STEM education changemaking community. With the addition of the community colleges in RED, the project and therefore the field will gain insights into the role of context in the wider ecosystem of higher education. The findings from this project will improve our understanding of institutionalizing systemic changes in higher education, and how organizational contexts impact the success and sustainability of academic change initiatives.<br/><br/>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.
