In it for the Long Haul: The Groundwork of Interdisciplinary Culture Change in Engineering Education Reform

Abstract

How do STS scholars and engineering educators work together over an extended period to make change? In 2015, the National Science Foundation created the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) initiative to address persistent challenges in engineering education. A distinguishing feature of RED was its focus on culture change via interdisciplinary teams that brought social scientists and engineering education researchers into long-term departmental planning. We analyze how this national imperative translated into local practice. Focusing on the groundwork of critical participation over a six-year period, we reconstruct our visible and invisible negotiations as we worked to enact culture change. We do so to analyze the often unexamined mental, social, cultural, and political labor of critical participation that make interdisciplinary culture change possible. Attention to this groundwork brings out essential differences between the revolutionary framing of interventions like RED and the evolutionary practices of achieving them over the long haul.