Studying faculty communities of practice through social network analysis

Creating systemic change in undergraduate engineering and STEM education is difficult to achieve and just as difficult to study. It has been proposed that organizational learning and change theories can be coupled with social network analysis to achieve both of these goals. In this paper, we describe an institutional change effort designed around principles from Communities of Practice. We then present the design of a social analysis network study that we are executing to study and analyze whether this change effort has been successful in achieving its goals. We present some preliminary data to demonstrate the promise of this approach for executing and studying institutional change in engineering education and STEM education more broadly.