2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

The Modalities of Governance in Engineering Education

Presented at Identity, Culture, and Socialization

In this paper or poster presentation, we hope to present to and interact with our audience with respect to a key touchpoint in our national study of engineering education reform. Based on an NSF collaborative grant, our project team has conducted approximately 280 semi-structured interviews at over 40 different institutions with regards to change processes that operate within engineering education. Originally inspired by our earlier work on ABET, we framed our study around questions of governance, namely how national organizations and national conversations do and don’t shape changes in engineering education. However, our early interviews made it very clear that US engineering schools viewed themselves as participating in a competitive market, where local initiatives and innovations are as important if not more important to their student experience and institutional reputation. This said, market mechanisms and the way in which local innovations circulate (entrepreneurship, maker spaces, humanitarian engineering) are themselves a form of coordination, pointing to more subtle modes of governance that operate within engineering education. Drawing on the multi-theory framework of Austin and Jones’ for understanding Higher Education Governance (2015), we use this presentation to begin to tease apart the different modes through which change occurs within engineering education.

For the sake of argument, we pose the relationship in terms of a tension between governance and local innovation, while during the presentation of each, we point to their inevitable interdependence. With respect to governance, we focus on ABET and the different modes of compliance and engagement with ABET’s expectations for continuous improvement; differences in state systems of higher education, and the impact on public institutions; market mechanisms that are brought to play through national ranking systems and especially US News and World Reports; and the expanding role of industrial advisory committees following ABET EC 2000. With regards to local innovation, we focus on local cultures of innovation, especially at undergraduate institutions; the role of academic freedom in promoting innovation, but also limiting coordination; concerns about the cost of education and its varied responses; and institutional initiatives designed to address concerns about diversity and inclusion.

Our data sample includes public and private universities; research universities and undergraduate institutions (of different rank); general universities, engineering schools, liberal arts colleges, and two-year institutions; and both primarily white and minority (primarily Hispanic) serving institutions. By describing the diverse ways in which these various forces for change interact, we hope to reveal broad patterns that characterize the change processes that operate within the complex institutional ecology for engineering education in the United States. Especially if organized as a poster session, we will use this as an opportunity to interact with our audience to test our findings against the diverse experiences and institutional affiliations of those in attendance.

Authors

Dr. Atsushi Akera Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [biography]

Atsushi Akera is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY). He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. His current research is on the history of engineering education reform in the United States (1945-present). He is a the current Chair of the ASEE Ad Hoc Committee on Interdivisional Cooperation; Chair of the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES); past chair of the ASEE Liberal Education / Engineering and Society Division; and a former member of the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Executive Council. Publications include /Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research/ (MIT Press, 2006).
Dr. Soheil Fatehiboroujeni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5129-7428 Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Soheil FatehiBoroujeni is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University School of Engineering Education as well as a lead instructor at Purdue First-Year Engineering Program. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Merced in 2018.
Sarah Appelhans University at Albany-SUNY [biography]

Sarah Appelhans is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University at Albany (SUNY). Her dissertation research, "Flexible Lives on the Integrated Circuit: Gender and Belonging in Semiconductor Manufacturing", investigates the boundaries of membership in engineering in the Northeastern United States. She is honored to be a research assistant on two NSF-sponsored studies entitled "The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education" and "Developing Human Social Networks to Identify and Develop Data Driven Metrics and Methods for Expanding Learning Opportunities Across the Lifetime" under the direction of Dr. Alan Cheville and Dr. Atsushi Akera. In addition to her academic experience, she is a former mechanical engineer with several years of experience in the aviation and construction industries.
Dr. Alan Cheville Bucknell University [biography]

Alan Cheville studied optoelectronics and ultrafast optics at Rice University, followed by 14 years as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University working on terahertz frequencies and engineering education. While at Oklahoma State, he developed courses in photonics and engineering design. After serving for two and a half years as a program director in engineering education at the National Science Foundation, he took a chair position in electrical engineering at Bucknell University. He is currently interested in engineering design education, engineering education policy, and the philosophy of engineering education.
Dr. Jennifer Karlin Minnesota State University, Mankato [biography]

Jennifer Karlin spent the first half of her career at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where she was a professor of industrial engineering and held the Pietz professorship for entrepreneurship and economic development. She is now a professor of integrated engineering at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she is helping to build the Bell Engineering program, and the managing partner of Kaizen Academic.
Dr. Donna M. Riley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-9583 Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Donna Riley is Kamyar Haghighi Head of the School of Engineering Education and Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University.
Dr. Thomas A. De Pree Bucknell University [biography]

Thomas De Pree is postdoctoral researcher at Bucknell University for the project, "Developing Human Social Networks to Identify and Develop Data-Driven Metrics and Methods for Expanding Learning Opportunities Across the Lifetime" (NSF, DUE-1745922), PI Alan Cheville and Co-PI Atsushi Akera. De Pree holds a Ph.D and M.S. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and a M.A. in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Rafael Julián Burgos-Mirabal University of Massachusetts- Amherst

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