Collaborative Research: Strengthening an Ecosystem of Support with the RED Community of Practice

Transforming engineering education is critical to preparing future engineers to address complex societal challenges while fostering greater inclusion and student success. However, creating lasting change within academic departments is difficult because faculty change leaders often face organizational barriers, limited resources, and institutional cultures that resist innovation. This project will support the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program by strengthening the capacity of faculty and staff to lead and sustain transformative changes in engineering education. Through professional development, mentoring, networking, and knowledge-sharing activities, the project will help engineering educators develop effective strategies for implementing systemic improvements within their departments and institutions. By supporting a national community of practice and identifying evidence-based approaches to organizational transformation, the project will enhance the impact of prior and current RED investments, promote the dissemination of successful change practices, and contribute to stronger and more inclusive engineering education environments. The project aligns with the goals of the NSF RED program by advancing departmental transformation and increasing understanding of how sustainable change can be achieved in higher education settings. This Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Participatory Action Research (REDPAR) project will combine faculty development and community-building activities with research on organizational change in engineering education. REDPAR will provide a customized change-making curriculum, organize the annual RED Consortium Meeting, facilitate monthly consortium calls, support a RED Alumni initiative, and connect newly funded RED teams with mentors from experienced RED projects. Additional support will be provided to teams receiving RED planning grants to strengthen their capacity to develop competitive full proposals and build foundations for long-term departmental transformation. The research component will address two questions: (1) How do teams receiving RED planning grants build the foundation for transformative and sustainable RED projects? and (2) What strategies from RED teams’ change-making experiences contributed most strongly to transformative and sustained change, and how have teams adapted when challenges emerged? Using a participatory action research approach, the team will collect and analyze new qualitative data from members of the RED community, including focus groups, dialogic storytelling interview discussions, and co-design sessions. The study will build on the REDPAR team’s prior work related to resource mobilization, organizational context, and program sustainability to examine how change agents access and leverage resources, navigate institutional environments, and maintain innovations over time. RED Consortium members will serve as collaborators and co-designers in both research and professional development activities, ensuring that findings remain grounded in practice and responsive to community needs. Expected outcomes include new knowledge about change processes in higher education, enhanced capacity among engineering education change leaders, stronger support structures for the RED community of practice, and practical resources that can be adapted in both RED and non-RED contexts. Findings will be disseminated through tip sheets, curriculum materials, scholarly publications, publicly accessible online resources, and engaging multimedia formats such as zines, short video clips, and digital storytelling products, broadening access to lessons learned from more than a decade of RED-funded transformation efforts. This project is jointly funded by the Engineering Education & Centers section of the Engineering Directorate and by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education group in the STEM Education Directorate. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.