2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Activity theory is a productive analytical tool for informing external evaluations of academic plans in higher education, particularly since the social landscape of academic evaluation is quickly shifting in tandem with increasingly porous relationships that are emerging between academia and industry. The increased involvement of external stakeholders in the design and implementation of transdisciplinary curricula is in turn inspired by the belief that the public sector needs more university graduates who can work on complex problems in mixed-disciplinary teams. In this paper we present a case study that draws on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork among faculty, external stakeholders from both business and industry and the non-for-profit sector, administrators, and students who are involved in a transdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum at a Research 1 university in the United States. In the process we introduce the idea of a meta-activity theory that emerged in our ethnographic approach for examining the socialization of both engineering and non-STEM students in this program. We also describe the implications that this analytical framework can have for identifying reflection points that faculty and staff can draw on to reexamine various assumptions underlying the scope and aims of their transdisciplinary academic plans. In doing so, this paper describes how external reviewers can draw on ethnographic methods to identify points of connection as well as investigate points of practice that are influenced by the involvement of external representatives. In this way, this paper tracks how curricular understandings of the societal relevance of engineering knowledge and innovation are reproduced and become part of an educational environment through the continual use and valorization of tools, language practices, and related socio-material artifacts. In the process, we illustrate that social analyses of these processes can provide critical resources for considering how power, practice, and agency impact transdisciplinary design and engineering processes.