2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Higher education has increasingly adopted a capitalistic approach that emphasizes productivity within a hierarchical structure. The policies and procedures stemming from this model are built around the "ideal worker," who typically doesn’t have obligations outside the workplace [1]. The ideal worker is expected to devote most of their time and energy to their job, significantly impacting anyone with caregiving responsibilities [2]. While most people associate caregiving with childcare and eldercare, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) define caregiving more broadly, including caring for spouses, dependent adult children with severe medical conditions, extended family, end-of-life, and bereavement care [3]. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, academics have been shouldering the increased caregiving responsibilities, but numerous studies show that women have carried a disproportionate share of the burden. This gendered landscape in STEM fields is reflected in the underrepresentation of women in full professor, tenured, and leadership positions [1]. For female academics, the situation has intensified by unmodified workloads and heightened expectations placed on faculty caregivers, resulting in significant stress and burnout.
Caregiving challenges in academia have become so prominent that NASEM released a report in April 2024 titled Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action [3]. The report emphasizes the invisible labor of caregivers, not just faculty but also undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and staff. It reviews policies and practices that support caregivers locally and nationally that highlights best practices for policy design and implementation. In response, an R1 Engineering Faculty Development Office designed an initial workshop to identify the specific needs of different caregiving communities and connect academics with the NASEM report. The forum was developed to initiate dialogue around the challenges of balancing work and the “'invisible labor” that academic caregivers carry.
Following several meetings with campus and external stakeholders, there was a clear call to action for doing more. Using the Kotter Change Model [4], the Office developed the Cultivating Action, Resilience, and Empowerment (CARE) for Academic Caregivers Leadership Program. While the Kotter Change Model is typically applied top-down, it has also proven effective in higher education administration and student-focused initiatives [4]. This two-year initiative guides faculty using a shared vision to develop micro-initiatives supporting caregivers. These initiatives specifically target caregiving communities on campus and focus on a particular type of caregiving (i.e., childcare) outlined by NASEM.
The CARE program consists of four phases: (1) a forum to understand the landscape and build urgency, (2) a workshop to develop a coalition vision and design small initiatives, (3) coaching during implementation, including a symposium to share results, and (4) forming a community of practice to sustain efforts and advance policy development. This paper details the design of the initial forum and the early use of the Kotter Change Model to build a community of practice capable of driving incremental changes that lay the foundation for broader institutional shifts and inclusive policy reforms.

This paper is a work in progress and would prefer to be presented as a lightning talk.

References:
[1] A. J. Vadnais, T. Peter, J. Dengate, A. Farenhorst, and C. Mavriplis, ‘COVID-19 Caregiving Avalanche:
The Impact on Emotional Exhaustion on Female Natural Science and Engineering Academics’, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 89–102, 2024.
[2] J. Acker, “Gendered organizations and intersectionality: problems and possibilities,” Equality, Diversity
and Inclusion: An International Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 214–224, Mar. 2012, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/02610151211209072.
[3] K. Wullert and E. Fuentes-Afflick, ‘Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action,’ 2024.
[4] O. Kuffuor, S. Aggrawal, A. Jaiswal, R. J. Smith, and P. V. Morris, ‘Transformative Pathways:
Implementing Intercultural Competence Development in Higher Education Using Kotter’s Change Model’, Education Sciences, vol. 14, no. 7, p. 686, 2024.