Collaborative Research: Supporting Student Well-being with a Community of Transformation

Collaborative Research: Changing the Narrative of Surviving to Thriving: Supporting Student Well-being with a Community of Transformation This Track 2 Institutional and Community Transformation proposal aims to investigate how faculty can act as agents of change to drive a culture of well-being in engineering. We aim to examine institutional change through the TRIPLE change model, which posits that institutional change must be evaluated through theories of change, theories of learning and theories of power. We will employ Henderson’s model of change for our theory of change, which focuses on the examination of faculty-centered change across institutions. We will use communities of practice as our theory for learning, which encourages learning through knowledge exchange and collaboration across groups that share similar interests. Finally, we apply Collins and Bilge’s description of intersectionality to understand structural, disciplinary, cultural and interpersonal systems of power within an organization. Together, we will use these models to develop and study institutional change focused on driving a cultural of well-being engineering. In addition to the implementation of a mental health and wellness community of practice, we will provide opportunities for training on supporting undergraduate student mental health and wellness. Additionally, faculty will have access to mental health mini-grants, where they will receive financial and mentorship support to develop, implement and assess a mental health intervention at their institution. Through this work, we will evaluate how faculty can act as agents of change for the development of cultures of well- being within undergraduate engineering education. This will include understanding how faculty define a culture of well-being in engineering, identifying the barriers and facilitators to faculty acting as change agents within their College, and understanding how driving cultural change at the undergraduate level implements faculty mental health and well-being. Findings will provide future guidance towards supporting the development of an engineering environment that is supporting of student mental heath and wellness.