IUSE/PFE: RED Innovation: Integrating a Living Laboratory in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering to Create a Responsive and Dynamic Educational Ecosystem

About This Grant

This project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing chemical and biomolecular engineering education in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University and beyond, through the re-envisioning of how engineering education can integrate a living laboratory ecosystem and prepare graduates for a rapidly changing workforce. A living laboratory ecosystem is a culture that values and rewards students, faculty, and staff for asking new questions, testing innovative approaches, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and continuously enhancing our knowledge and methods to tackle local, national, and global challenges. While this iterative process has been a goal of engineering education, its implementation throughout an entire curriculum has not been realized. This Track 3 Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Innovation project seeks to create this living laboratory ecosystem to address four challenges currently faced in chemical and biomolecular engineering education: 1) a rigid and packed curriculum; 2) a sequence of courses students struggle to make connections across; 3) a culture designed to reward success but that does not accommodate failure as a part of learning or being human; and 4) a community of individual excellence that lacks a shared agreement on common and discipline-specific improvement using informed risk-taking in the classroom and pedagogical innovation broadly. The project has two goals: 1) deconstruct our traditional approach to teaching and learning by revolutionizing content, assessment, and pedagogy to become a living laboratory ecosystem that is responsive and dynamic to current events, individual learning trajectories, and student and faculty needs and 2) reshape the culture of the School to value a living laboratory ecosystem as a way of being and doing that extends beyond the classroom. Communities of transformation, comprised of faculty, staff, and students, will be organized to design and prototype structural innovations both inside and outside the classroom, complementing School-wide professional development opportunities during School meetings. This project will not only transform this specific School but also provide an evidence-based model for implementing this education effort more broadly. In addition to transforming the School's culture and approach to educating engineers, this project will also generate new knowledge about how students develop and evolve the evidence-based practices for creating more responsive and dynamic education systems that can adapt to changing technologies, areas of national priority interests, and individual student needs. Our research questions are grouped into questions that 1) articulate the revolution's impact on students and the student experience as well as the educational innovations developed, and 2) document the transformation of School culture, student, faculty, and staff development, and how change occurs. In answering these questions, the project will articulate how a living laboratory ecosystem revolutionizes student development and learning, particularly during the middle two years of education, and how departmental culture can be transformed to embrace this approach. The results of this work will provide transferable models of change in understanding what levers are most successful for supporting community engagement in change, what structural changes work for whom and why, and how cultural transformation can be supported as individuals move in, through, and out of significant transitions in their ways of being, doing, and learning. We will employ a multi-methods approach over five years to gather evidence from surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, and education and policy artifacts on how the transformation influences the School's culture and the members who create and reinforce it - students, faculty, and staff. The results of this project will be disseminated to chemical engineering departments and industry, as well as to engineering educators, engineering education scholars, and administrators, through archival scholarly publications, workshops, and webinars. The IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. 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.