Engineering Education Meets Organizational Science: Toward Best Practices for Strategic Change

This Innovative Practice Full Paper explores how implementing best practices from organizational science can strengthen strategic change initiatives in engineering education. Transforming organizational culture has been a priority in engineering education for nearly four decades, but systemic change has not come easily, and long-standing goals remain elusive. Stagnant graduation and industry participation rates for women and underrepresented minorities have implications for establishing cultures of inclusion. Further, continued difficulty closing the research-to-practice gap in the engineering classroom points to faculty cultures that are resistant to, or unprepared for, change. Are such cultures immutable, or could our current interventional methods be improved? How much do we really know about planning and managing change, and could best practices from organizational science help catalyze the transformations we seek? To investigate this possibility, the state of change in engineering education is briefly reviewed and compared to two influential sets of universal best practices for managing organizational change. These practices are incorporated into six principles of good practice intended for use in engineering education contexts.