Engineering Unleashed
How a shared language turns individual faculty into a community that carries change wherever it goes.
The most powerful driver of change isn’t a program or an institution, it’s the individual. It’s people coming together in a professional setting. That’s why career development is so important in higher education because it distills broad objectives, disparate language, and values into a discreet way of thinking. It creates a philosophy that’s instilled in individuals. People then carry those ideas with them wherever they go, creating connected, likeminded communities capable of affecting change at scale.
Experience has shown that an overarching, institutional initiative is certainly important to provide the roadmap for change and to articulate aspirational values, but its individuals that animate that change. It is at this person-by-person level that language can get conflated and break-downs can occur. That’s why the goal at Engineering Unleashed has been making sure individuals have a shared language that enables them to get on board with an idea, understand the reasons behind it, and then discover how they can contribute to a larger community.
It’s this community-centered approach that runs counter to much of the traditional professional development that’s focused on navigating and advancing a single institution or field. What has become clear over the course of Engineering Unleashed’s work with engineering faculty and administrators is that individuals take the learning with them, applying it wherever they are. “The faculty development aspect is more powerful than I even imagined,” says Doug Melton, Program Director at the Kern Family Foundation. “The fact that the idea resides in each faculty member is a really powerful dynamic and that it is also mobile adds to the sense of a movement building around an idea.”
“Part of the power of Engineering Unleashed and KEEN are they’re really designed around people and the connections that those people will form with each other,” Gillespie says. Gillespie used that training and network to initiate conversations with faculty across the country. She reached out with a basic pitch saying: I have an idea, would you like to be a part of it? What she found was likeminded faculty that then decided to collaborate to create and submit a conference session proposal highlighting their own professional experiences with the entrepreneurial mindset.
“I was able to bring people together around a topic that I had never met before. And it didn’t just end with that one conference session that we ran together,” Gillespie says. “Those are now people that I have stayed in touch with for multiple years as they’ve moved institutions, as I’ve changed positions.”
Kaitlin Mallouk is an Associate Professor at the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering at Rowan University who went from attending her first workshop in 2018 to co-founding the Entrepreneurial Mindset in the First-Year (EMIFY) project and facilitating workshops at the national level. For Mallouk, the special sauce that animates an idea is individuals connecting to forge community. “We have pretty good evidence that one of the most effective ways to support change is through community,” Mallouk says. “KEEN provides a platform for that community-building, opportunities to engage with people and form relationships. From my perspective, that’s the most impactful part.”
The true power of these connections around an idea is that they compound not just across the country, but over time. “When we use the word community, we’re thinking about not only the community now, but the community in 10 years or 50 years’ time,” says the Kern Family Foundation’s Doug Melton. Creating that community infrastructure is how you build for the long-term, he says. “And that’s what we’re about.
