In Fall of 2018, NSF received the final summary report on TECAID, Transforming Engineering Culture to Advance Inclusion and Diversity, an NSF-funded project awarded to the Women in Engineering Proactive Network (WEPAN) in collaboration with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Purdue University. We were thrilled to provide subject matter expertise on this project by designing and leading the faculty development efforts at the core of this project. The Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) served as the evaluator.
Five teams of faculty participated in TECAID, taking a deep dive into planning, implementing, and leading culture change in their departments. While TECAID itself has received considerable attention as a faculty development strategy focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, there is much to be learned from the work of the faculty themselves in their efforts to engage and transform their departments.
A brief written description of the five projects can be found here; the evaluators also collected a summary of accomplishments emerging out of these department change projects. These comments from TECAID department leaders focus on how their departments changed over the course of their TECAID projects.
Two on-demand webinars focus on the experience of these change teams as they made change in their departments. Webinar 2 in the TECAID webinar series features team members describing their projects; Webinar 3 continues this conversation with a focus on how TECAID prepared these change leaders to deal with a classic challenge: resistance to change. I had the honor of facilitating both of these conversations.
Interested in the work we do related to diversity, equity, or inclusion? Start here, listen to our podcast on leadership for broadening participation, or give us a call.
