NSF Award
1830177
Emerging engineering educators, including graduate students close to completion of their doctoral work, and assistant professors who are just entering their fields, face specific challenges as they begin their careers. As recent advertisements for engineering positions suggest, engineering departments seek out new engineering educators who can bring innovation to their campuses, from designing new programs to introducing and assessing new pedagogies. In many cases, emerging engineering educators are not ready to enact change at higher, institutional levels. A typical graduate education focuses on acquiring competence in disciplinary research and it does not prepare emerging engineering educators to comprehend the academic environments and resulting cultures, value systems and constraints. As a result, many emerging engineering educators do not feel empowered or capable of implementing academic change. Furthermore, successful change agents require skills, such as, for example, strategic thinking, obtaining buy-in, and creating strategic partnerships, that are not a part of conventional emerging educator experiences. Change strategies have been well documented in the literature of other disciplines, such as organizational psychology and behavior, but have not been brought into the conversation within STEM education in a rigorous, accessible way. The "Emerging Engineering Educators Making Academic Change Happen" workshop fills the need of emerging engineering educators for research-based skills development and assistance in creating a plan for change. Through targeted working sessions on specific topics (e.g. partnership development, generating buy-in, institutional context, and identity discovery), participants learn about different types of academic institutional contexts and value systems, the interplay of their professional identity with cultural contexts and the change-making process, and research-proven strategies for making large scale change happen at different types of academic institutions. <br/><br/>Emerging engineering educators who envision themselves as change agents should work to adopt the disposition and skills of a change agent. This workshop will help these educators start on their path as engineering education innovators who are more likely to positively impact their departments and programs. The workshop covers a number of themes, such as: Cultivating an Allied Community of Colleagues and Making Change Happen on Campus. Diverse hands-on activities are structured to enable participants to better understand the development of personal and professional identities with the established academic value systems and institutional contexts, and identify the unique opportunities and constraints of their individual academic environments to develop strategies for expanding and implementing visions of academic change. By fostering the development of these skills and mindsets in the very people who must lead change efforts, this workshop promotes meaningful change in STEM higher education. Engaging emerging engineering educators in the workshop highlights the importance of developing change skills early in their careers. As part of this research, emerging engineering educators will be interviewed about their current or future change projects and will be provided with mentors and support for their change activities. Mentorship will continue after the workshop is over and the participants' progress on their projects will be tracked as they implement the MACH change strategies they learned during the workshop.<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.
