2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Since the inception of the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program in 2015, RED teams have worked to implement significant changes in engineering education at their institutions. Along the way, they have encountered numerous obstacles, ranging from changes in leadership and support for the RED team, to lack of policies and procedures to support the proposed changes, to lack of buy-in from colleagues and students. This poster explores the types of obstacles faced by RED teams in their efforts to implement significant engineering education changes at their institutions.

This poster reviews results of a group working session involving members of 16 current and past RED teams, focused on identifying obstacles that the teams have experienced in the past, or are currently experiencing, that are preventing them from implementing or institutionalizing some important elements of their RED projects. The obstacles were identified and analyzed from four perspectives, informed by Bolman and Deal’s (2008) four frame model for reframing organizations. The four frame model provides a structure for considering organizations through different cognitive frames: (1) the structure frame is focused on rules, goals, policies, and technologies of an organization; (2) the human resources frame is focused on the needs and skills of the people in the organization, as well as the relationships between them; (3) the political frame is focused on the sources of power, conflict, and competition, as well as on allocation of scarce resources; and (4) the symbolic frame is focused on the cultural aspects of an organization, encompassing both visible and invisible cultural elements like rituals, stories, and shared values.

This poster will present and analyze the identified obstacles and discuss the significance of considering obstacles from multiple perspectives or “frames” when identifying potential solutions. Systemic problems in engineering education, like the ones that RED teams are trying to solve in their engineering disciplines, are a function of multiple variables, including people, cultures & values, policies, processes, institutional & disciplinary politics, and inequitable allocation of resources, to name a few. Hence, any barriers to implementing changes to the status quo must be considered from multiple perspectives in order to develop sustainable solutions that will be acceptable to multiple stakeholder groups. Overall, our multi-perspective examination of the obstacles that RED teams commonly face can inform others interested in institutionalizing changes in engineering education or the common challenges that academic change champions commonly encounter and enable them to better manage their response to those challenges.

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2008). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.