The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University focuses on the education ecosystem that empowers faculty to be agents of change in the way that they teach engineering courses -- with a special focus on the four year project sequence, the 2nd and 3rd year engineering fundamentals courses, and the upper division concentration area disciplinary courses. The project takes a systems and community building perspective on how to sustain a mindset of risk-taking, making and innovation to instill creative confidence in students and faculty. The project approaches this challenge by attending to the larger ecosystem within which innovation happens, and by using evidence-based methods to make continuous teaching and learning advances within the engineering program. The specific objectives of this project are to:
1. Characterize the ecosystem within the Polytechnic School to establish the foundation for enacting innovation across the faculty, impacting students and other stakeholders. 2. Realize a mindset of additive innovation in the students and faculty to promote sharing, scaling, sustainability, and propagation of unique understandings within the community. 3. Establish an understanding of the engineering program culture and dynamics to assess the catalysts and barriers to establishing a culture that is risk seeking. 4. Identify and implement administrative structures to support cultural change and remove perceived barriers that may inhibit such innovation.
This project leverages several pedagogical innovations from the project team's prior research. For example, making is integrated into the curriculum; the Lean Launchpad methodology is implemented to characterize the engineering educational ecosystem; and previously tested/refined engineering education research methods are implemented, particularly as it relates to the project team's expertise on faculty development, in order to contribute knowledge on advancing engineering faculty teaching practices. By taking an entrepreneurial approach and using a rapid and iterative process of customer/user/stakeholder discovery, the project captures influencers and potential barriers of the ecosystem that contribute to, or inhibit impact of the proposed work. This research provides guidance for how to establish administrative structures that lead to supporting faculty as change agents, and how embracing a mindset of making and risk-taking can lead to desired professional competencies in engineering students. Characterizing the ecosystem within which change happens serves as a model for other engineering programs that strive to excel in their educational enterprise. The leadership team is disseminating all aspects of this project using an additive innovation philosophy so that others can modify and improve innovations for their own context. The longer-term impacts of creating a culture that values risk taking and making include attracting a new kind of student to the field of engineering. In particular, students who seek out career options in which they can make a positive impact on the world or on their specific community may not have traditionally considered engineering but now may consider it as a career choice. By changing the conversation from having an impact to having the agency to make an impact, the project aims to engender a measurable increase in student interest and persistence.
