CAREER: Overcoming Pedagogical Inertia: Amplifying the Course Transformation Narratives of Engineering Education's Positive Deviants

As a field, engineering education has focused significant effort on overcoming barriers to change, often through solutions requiring high levels of administrative and financial support. While achieving impact, these solutions have the potential to miss the hundreds of departments and institutions that do not have access to these same resources. Further, the field’s focus on specific barriers has overshadowed existing change approaches among educators in resource-limited contexts.

The stories of these educators are rarely amplified, even though they present an opportunity to explore alternative approaches to change and understand the specific strategic actions these individuals take to impact change. With that in mind, this CAREER project aims to develop visible examples of alternative approaches to curricular transformation and co-design interventions (e.g., workshops, activities, resources) that will be led and disseminated by engineering educators in their own departmental, institutional, and disciplinary communities.

By examining and making visible these alternative approaches, this work will complement and work synergistically with the existing research examining barriers to educational change, large-scale collaborative change efforts, and engineering education faculty development. Overall, the results of this CAREER project will advance knowledge by articulating the individual, structural and cultural supports and barriers for impacting course and curricular transformation that can be used by faculty and graduate student developers, administrators, and funding agencies.

This CAREER award will leverage the positive deviance approach, which is an asset-based and participatory approach to change. The three-phase integrated research and education plan builds on the core tenants of the approach: a recognition that solutions already exist within the engineering education community, partnerships with community members to discover possible solutions, and a central focus on assets (as opposed to barriers and constraints).

In particular, the research plan is grounded in theories of professional agency and designed to co-construct an understanding of how to foster agency toward curricular change by exploring the experiences and pathways of engineering educators who have overcome pedagogical inertia. In the first phase, a survey of engineering educators will provide a foundational understanding of the distinguishing and unifying characteristics among faculty pursuing curricular transformation.

From the results of this survey, educators that have successfully developed transformational curricular designs while facing barriers that have impeded change in other contexts (a.k.a., positive deviants) will be recruited for participation in Phase 2a. Phase 2a will be focused on a multiple case study examining three data sources (i.e., in-depth interviews, observations of course sessions, and curricular-change-related documents).

These data sources will be analyzed using narrative analysis methodologies to create in-depth change stories of these educators (n=12-15). The research and education plans will be integrated within Phase 2b through a collaborative inquiry of engineering educators (n=8-12) who want to pursue curricular transformation work. The outcomes of this collaborative inquiry will be community validation of the change stories and educator-led dissemination and propagation activity designs.

The educator participants will lead the dissemination of these activities to their disciplinary, departmental, and institutional communities. The final phase captures the education plan and will include activities each year of the project. This third phase will seek to make change visible by developing a professional learning framework for courses and workshops on educational change, enabling educator-led dissemination to their communities, and amplifying the change stories of the positive deviants through multiple mediums.

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.