Research Initiation: Facilitating Professional Formation of Engineers through Strategic Agency of Engineering Faculty

Professional societies are a crucial part of the ecosystem that fosters the professional formation of engineers by, among other things, shaping the technical direction of their disciplines and the ethical responsibility of practicing engineers towards public health, safety, and welfare. In the last decade, in partnership with engineering education institutions, these professional societies have emphasized the need to include the social implications of engineering in parallel to techno-economic fundamentals needed to form engineering professionals.

Despite these efforts, the transfer of knowledge between academic institutions and professional societies, and its influence in undergraduate engineering formation, is not well understood. Prior studies have explored faculty stances on what social implications mean for the engineering profession and what challenges they have encountered in implementing transformations in the engineering curriculum.

However, there is still a need to uncover how engineering faculty develop strategies and the role their involvement in professional societies can play in these actions. This project will conduct a qualitative study to explore the strategic agency of engineering faculty involved in professional societies as they transform their teaching practices to address social implications in their classrooms.

In a data-driven field such as engineering, narrative inquiry research methods provide the opportunity to place the experiences of chemical engineering faculty at the forefront and find exemplar evidence-based strategies that can be shared with other engineering disciplines.

This longitudinal qualitative study will use the Strategic Agency (SA) framework to understand how engineering faculty involved in professional societies can become change agents by transforming instructional practices that create a positive social change in the formation of engineers. The three dimensions of the framework will involve reflection, strategy, and action over time as individuals participate in activities supported by a community of practice (CoP) formed by multi-institutional engineering faculty within a professional society.

SA suggests that without reflection, strategies cannot be developed, and actions cannot occur. The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) was selected as the professional society site due to its established commitment to chemical engineering undergraduate education and the researcher's positionality within the organization. The study aims to answer the following multidimensional research question guided by the SA model: How do the reflections, strategies, and actions within a community of practice (i.e., AIChE) composed of chemical engineering faculty vary over time while changing instructional practices that address social implications in the engineering profession?

In this qualitative study, Phase I will focus on the ethical validation of qualitative methods to explore participant narratives as they learn about strategic agency and social implications in engineering. In Phase II, the CoP will be formed within the professional society and facilitated for eight months. Once the CoP is formed as a setting for this study, purposeful and convenient sampling will be used to find individuals willing to share their narratives.

In this longitudinal study, interviews and journal entries will be collected and coded using a combination of in-vivo and focused coding. Finally, in Phase III, final revisions of the data and interpretations will lead to co-constructing a narrative that reflects faculty strategic agency (developed in this CoP) as they transform their instructional practices in the classroom.

The outcomes from this project will advance the engineering education community's knowledge of how communities of practice, supported by professional societies, can influence strategic agency among engineering faculty willing to positively change their students' formation as engineers. It is expected that understanding how this framework explains the role of community support in fostering individuals to become change agents can help other engineering organizations in implementing transformational actions

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.