Using a Sociocultural Perspective to Gain a Better Understanding of Barriers to Change in Engineering Education

Abstract

In engineering education, various stakeholders have been raising requests for change related to both content and form. At times, slow reactions and absent responses to these requests have been criticized, though some engineering programs have been quicker to adopt the desired changes. The aim of this chapter is to understand differences in responses by exploring various approaches across engineering programs and some of the consequences of these variations, in particular in terms of barriers to change. A sociocultural perspective—the concept of teaching and learning regimes—is used to identify and interpret these variations. The empirical research presented in this chapter was conducted at a research-intensive technical university and included semi-structured interviews, observations, and text analysis. The focus of the study was on how faculty members in three engineering programs handle connections to research and professional practice in the curriculum. The findings show varying approaches across the engineering programs and, consequently, varying reasons for resisting change in terms of including additional curricular connections to research or professional practice. In one engineering program, the respondents aimed to preserve a research-focused culture and thus to protect the program from the influence of external actors in industry. In another program, the respondents aimed to maintain relevance in relation to industry and to protect the program from research relationships that could jeopardize connections to industry. These varying approaches may thus be understood as constituting barriers to change as they aim to protect and preserve a particular culture or regime within a program. Consequently, the results of this study suggest that if curriculum changes are to be achieved, the proposed changes need to be recognized within the particular teaching and learning regime. These results align with previous research showing that suggestions for change need to coincide with the current local culture to be accepted. However, the present study advances the knowledge base in this area as it provides a deeper understanding of the local cultures or teaching and learning regimes in engineering education, which, in turn, increases our understanding of factors that influence acceptance of and resistance to curricular change.