2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

We share recent insights from our research about equity-oriented institutional change projects in higher education, especially those initiated under awards from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program. Increasingly, projects in engineering and science education are also taking systems-focused approaches to accomplish goals such as improving instruction across departments or colleges. Most often, a systems change approach involves a portfolio of interventions, each acting as lever of change at one or more levels of the institution. In past work, we documented the nature, variations, and outcomes of specific interventions, and noticed that change projects showed increased coherence and impact when these levers worked together.

To explore this apparent synergy, our current study examines strategic processes that help to connect individual interventions and amplify the overall coherence and impact of systems change projects. We call these “scaffolding processes” to recognize their role in supporting, strengthening and connecting interventions; they are distinct from the interventions themselves (Laursen & Austin, 2020). Our study seeks to make these often-unseen processes explicit, to better understand their role in change projects, and to help change teams identify and leverage them. To develop this knowledge, we draw on the expertise of change leaders and their collective experience in driving institutional change toward greater equity.

Drawing from our study, we will present initial findings about one such strategic process: building and sustaining a leadership team. We consider issues of recruiting and attracting team members, dividing efforts while ensuring accountability, working in ways that “walk the talk,” and developing leaders who serve as organizational catalysts as they enact the project’s interventions. In this way, the leadership team members are knitters of the change project and are themselves knitted into a unifying fabric. The findings will interest change agents who lead comprehensive system change projects and scholars who study such projects.