Preparing a Two-Year College RED Proposal:  Practices and Pitfalls

Julia M. Williams; Indira Chatterjee; Anne K Flesher; Ann-Marie Vollstedt

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Two-Year College Potpourri
Tagged Division: Two-Year College Division (TYCD)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/47863

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Paper Authors

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Julia M. Williams Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology orcid.org/0000-0002-8367-9463

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Dr. Julia M. Williams is Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She is the author of Making Changes in STEM Education: The Change maker's Toolkit (Routledge 2023). Her research areas include technical communication, assessment, accreditation, and the development of change management strategies for faculty and staff.

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Indira Chatterjee University of Nevada, Reno

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Indira Chatterjee has been with the University of Nevada, Reno since 1988. She is a Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, and has served as Associate Dean of Engineering since 2010. Currently she oversees undergraduate and graduate education, including recruitment, retention and advising. She has won many awards including Foundation Professor, Tibbitts University Distinguished Teacher Award, the Hoeper Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising, Society of Women Engineers Region A Service Award, the IEEE Student Section Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Nevada Women's Fund "Women of Achievement" award and the Silver Compass Award for Extraordinary Commitment to Students. She has had over 7 million research funding in Bioelectromagnetics and engineering education. She has served as research mentor to postdoctoral fellows and many graduate students.

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Anne K Flesher Truckee Meadows Community College orcid.org/0009-0003-5939-5246

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Anne Flesher serves as the Dean of the Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences Division at Truckee Meadows Community College, where she also oversees the Engineering program. Committed to enhancing STEM education, Anne champions educational reforms aimed at streamlining the transfer process for community college students to four-year institutions. She played a pivotal role in authoring Nevada’s Action Plans, which shifted developmental math education to a corequisite model in 2021. As a representative on the Nevada Alliance team for Complete College America, Anne contributes her expertise to statewide educational strategies. She founded the first community college Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Affinity group at Truckee Meadows and received the STEM Outstanding Community Leader Award from SWE in 2023

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Ann-Marie Vollstedt University of Nevada, Reno

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Ann-Marie Vollstedt is a teaching associate professor for the College of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). Dr. Vollstedt completed her dissertation at UNR, which focused on exploring the use of statistical process control methods to assess course changes in order to increase student learning in engineering. Dr. Vollstedt teaches courses in engineering design as well as statics and runs the Engineering Freshmen Intensive Training Program. She is the recipient of the Paul and Judy Bible Teaching Excellence Award, F. Donald Tibbitt's Distinguished Teaching Award, The Nevada Women's Fun Woman of Achievement Award, and the UNR College of Engineering Excellence Award.

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Abstract

According to the National Science Foundation website, the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and STEM Education (EDU) fund projects through the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED program in order to support:

"revolutionary new approaches to engineering education, ranging from changing the canon of engineering to fundamentally altering the way courses are structured to creating new departmental structures and educational collaborations with industry. A common thread across these projects is a focus on organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program." (nsf.gov)

Included among the three tracks for funding, the Two-Year Colleges track is intended to “develop radically new approaches among multiple two-year institutions to expand the path to engineering and engineering technology.” Clearly the NSF holds high aspirations for community college systems in the US, and the level of funding offered through the RED program could help faculty and administrators in those systems make significant changes. Over the two years when the RED Two-Year Colleges funding track has been offered, however, only one proposal was funded, from a consortium including Truckee Meadows Community College, the University of Nevada, Reno, Great Basin College, and Western Nevada College, all in Northern Nevada. As the team that collaborated on that proposal, we believe we can help faculty and administrators interested in applying for RED Two-Year Colleges funding to learn more about the program and understand how a RED proposal differs from other NSF proposals.

In this paper, we will document the various challenges that we encountered when preparing a RED proposal. Specifically, we focus on three aspects of the RED solicitation that may at first mystify proposal writing teams. First, the solicitation states “RED Two-Year projects must work with their education researcher and organizational change expert to develop a research plan…” (nsf23553.pdf). Our writing team struggled with identifying an “organizational change expert” who understood the two-year college context and thus had a change model appropriate to our setting. Second, we were challenged by the requirement that we as project participants focus on educational research, rather than the practical concerns of improving the “student professional formation experience.” Third, we needed to create a vision for our “revolution,” an activity that we knew was important but was something we had not attempted before.

In addition to sharing our experiences in proposing and winning a Two-Year Colleges RED, we will share the results of our proposed virtual workshop in which we plan to share the lessons learned and practical suggestions for two-year college administrators, faculty, and staff who are contemplating a RED proposal. We anticipate that our virtual workshop will be delivered in the spring of 2024. Based on the RED Webinar series that was delivered in 2017 (https://academicchange.org/nsf-red-webinar/) and adapted specifically for the two-year college context, we plan to expand access to the RED funding mechanism through online resources. Because two-year colleges represent a key component in the engineering education ecosystem, we hope to support and encourage others to join the RED community.

Note: this proposal is not endorsed by the National Science Foundation but instead reflects the insights and knowledge gained by the proposal team as they prepared and then were awarded the first Two-Year RED project funding.

Citation
Format

Williams, J. M., & Chatterjee, I., & Flesher, A. K., & Vollstedt, A. (2024, June), Preparing a Two-Year College RED Proposal: Practices and Pitfalls Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47863

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - According to the National Science Foundation website, the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and STEM Education (EDU) fund projects through the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED program in order to support:

&quot;revolutionary new approaches to engineering education, ranging from changing the canon of engineering to fundamentally altering the way courses are structured to creating new departmental structures and educational collaborations with industry. A common thread across these projects is a focus on organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program.&quot; (nsf.gov) 

Included among the three tracks for funding, the Two-Year Colleges track is intended to “develop radically new approaches among multiple two-year institutions to expand the path to engineering and engineering technology.”  Clearly the NSF holds high aspirations for community college systems in the US, and the level of funding offered through the RED program could help faculty and administrators in those systems make significant changes.  Over the two years when the RED Two-Year Colleges funding track has been offered, however, only one proposal was funded, from a consortium including Truckee Meadows Community College, the University of Nevada, Reno, Great Basin College, and Western Nevada College, all in Northern Nevada.  As the team that collaborated on that proposal, we believe we can help faculty and administrators interested in applying for RED Two-Year Colleges funding to learn more about the program and understand how a RED proposal differs from other NSF proposals.

	In this paper, we will document the various challenges that we encountered when preparing a RED proposal.  Specifically, we focus on three aspects of the RED solicitation that may at first mystify proposal writing teams.  First, the solicitation states  “RED Two-Year projects must work with their education researcher and organizational change expert to develop a research plan…” (nsf23553.pdf).  Our writing team struggled with identifying an “organizational change expert” who understood the two-year college context and thus had a change model appropriate to our setting.  Second, we were challenged by the requirement that we as project participants focus on educational research, rather than the practical concerns of improving the “student professional formation experience.”  Third, we needed to create a vision for our “revolution,” an activity that we knew was important but was something we had not attempted before.

	In addition to sharing our experiences in proposing and winning a Two-Year Colleges RED, we will share the results of our proposed virtual workshop in which we plan to share the lessons learned and practical suggestions for two-year college administrators, faculty, and staff who are contemplating a RED proposal.  We anticipate that our virtual workshop will be delivered in the spring of 2024.  Based on the RED Webinar series that was delivered in 2017 (https://academicchange.org/nsf-red-webinar/) and adapted specifically for the two-year college context, we plan to expand access to the RED funding mechanism through online resources.  Because two-year colleges represent a key component in the engineering education ecosystem, we hope to support and encourage others to join the RED community.
	

Note:  this proposal is not endorsed by the National Science Foundation but instead reflects the insights and knowledge gained by the proposal team as they prepared and then were awarded the first Two-Year RED project funding.

AU  - Julia M. Williams
AU  - Indira Chatterjee
AU  - Anne K Flesher
AU  - Ann-Marie Vollstedt
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Preparing a Two-Year College RED Proposal:  Practices and Pitfalls
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/47863
ER  -