2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 157: Creating National Leadership Cohorts for Making Academic Change Happen: Sharing Lessons Learned Through RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Tipsheets

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Our work with teams funded through the National Science Foundation REvolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) program began in 2015. Our project—funded first by a NSF EAGER grant, and then by a NSF RFE grant—focuses on understanding how the RED teams make change on their campuses and how this information about change can be captured and communicated to other STEM programs that seek to make change happen. Because our RED Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) Project is a collaboration between researchers (Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity at the University of Washington) and practitioners (Making Academic Change Happen Workshop at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), we have challenged ourselves to develop means of communication that allow for both aspects of the work—both research and practice—to be treated equitably. As a result, we have created a new dissemination channel—the RED Participatory Action Project Tipsheet.

The tipsheet format accomplishes several important goals. First, the content is drawn from both the research conducted with the RED teams and the practitioners’ work with the teams. Each tipsheet takes up a single theme and grounds the theme in the research literature while offering practical tips for applying the information. Second, the format is accessible to a wide spectrum of potential users, remaining free of jargon and applicable to multiple program and departmental contexts. Third, by publishing the tipsheets ourselves, rather than submitting them to an engineering education research journal, we make the information timely and freely available. We can make a tipsheet as soon as a theme emerges from the intersection of research data and observations of practice.

During the poster session at ASEE 2019, we will share the three REDPAR Tipsheets that have been produced thus far: Creating Strategic Partnerships, Communicating Change, and Shared Vision. We will also work with attendees to demonstrate how the tipsheet content is adaptable to the attendees’ specific academic context. Our goal for the poster session is to provide attendees with tipsheet resources that are useful to their specific change project.

Authors

Dr. Julia M. Williams http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-8367-9463 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Julia M. Williams is Dean of Cross-Cutting Programs and Emerging Opportunities and Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her research areas include technical communication, assessment, accreditation, and the development of change management strategies for faculty and staff. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Engineering Education, International Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly, among others.
Dr. Elizabeth Litzler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0626-8473 University of Washington [biography]

Elizabeth Litzler, Ph.D., is the director of the University of Washington Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (UW CERSE) and an affiliate assistant professor of sociology. She has been at UW working on STEM Equity issues for more than 15 years. Dr. Litzler is a member of ASEE and a former board member of the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN). Her research interests include the educational climate for students, faculty, and staff in science and engineering, assets based approaches to STEM equity, and gender and race stratification in education and the workforce.
Dr. Cara Margherio University of Washington [biography]

Cara Margherio is the Assistant Director of the UW Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE). Her research spans the study of intersectionality, higher education, organizational change, and social movements. Cara uses mixed methods to understand the social mechanisms which may change, or facilitate, the production of inequities within higher education. Cara also manages the evaluation of several NSF- and NIH-funded projects, primarily working with national professional development programs for early-career academics from groups systemically marginalized in STEM fields.
Dr. Eva Andrijcic Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Eva Andrijcic serves as an Associate Professor of Engineering Management at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her major interests are in the areas of risk analysis and management, critical infrastructure management and protection, systems engineering education, and change leadership.
Kerice Doten-Snitker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7552-7232 University of Washington [biography]

Ms. Doten-Snitker was a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Washington's Center for Evaluation and Research for STEM Equity, where she was part of a team conducting evaluation research for university-level educational and professional training, with a focus on increasing equity and participation of underrepresented and minority students and professionals. She has contributed to evaluation research for a range of programs funded by the NSF, NIH, and USAID. She completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington in 2020.

Download paper (2.18 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session