In it for the long haul: Negotiating interdisciplinary “culture change” in engineering education reform.
A work-in-progress by Annie Patrick, Matthew Wisnioski, and Lisa McNair, Virginia Tech (USA).
Commentary by Caitlyn Wyle, University of Virginia (USA).
Abstract
How do engaged STS scholars and engineering educators work together over an extended period to make change? In 2015, the National Science Foundation created the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) initiative to address persistent challenges in engineering education. A distinguishing feature of RED was its focus on “culture change” via interdisciplinary teams that brought social scientists and engineering education researchers into long-term departmental planning with the intention of creating sustainable, evidence-based, and reproducible results. In this study we analyze what happened when we translated this complex national imperative into local practice at our university. Focusing on the groundwork of critical participation, we reconstruct how we enacted culture change through visible and invisible negotiations. We draw on six years of documents, interviews, and ethnographic observations to show how interdisciplinary engineering education reform begins with different, often unstated, perspectives about culture change. We then trace how these meanings and practices evolved across time along with transformations in identities, departmental structures and power relations, and our own strategies of intervention. We demonstrate that culture change is a crucial but elusive concept for both engaged STS scholars and engineering educators, and that attending to its negotiations can reveal how change can be foreclosed, why efforts fail and succeed, and how projects can be revitalized and sustained.
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