Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Applying Systems Dynamics to Explore Faculty Motivation in Integrating Sustainability Concepts in Undergraduate Engineering Curriculum

About This Grant

Training the nation’s engineers to understand the economic, environmental, and social context and long-term potential impacts of their work is key to fostering competitive technological innovation. Engineers increasingly face challenges that demand not only technical expertise, but also a deep understanding of how their decisions shape economic, environmental, and social outcomes, an awareness that is essential for advancing responsible innovation, earning public trust, and sustaining national leadership in a rapidly evolving global economy. Yet, despite their importance, these topics remain underrepresented in undergraduate engineering education. When addressed, they are often introduced through upper-level or graduate electives, limiting their reach to a relatively small number of students and restricting their depth of content to mostly introductory levels. Efforts to integrate these themes more broadly into required curricula have proven difficult, and past institutional initiatives have achieved only limited success. One reason for this persistent challenge is that academic change, particularly around curriculum and instruction, is a complex and dynamic process. Faculty, who play a central role in enacting change, operate within institutional systems shaped by competing demands, incentive structures, and cultural norms. Without a clear understanding of what motivates faculty to act, efforts to promote meaningful and lasting curricular innovation are unlikely to succeed. This project will investigate the conditions that reinforce or hinder faculty motivation to incorporate economic, environmental, and social considerations into undergraduate engineering courses, suggesting practical, evidence-informed strategies to support instructional change. These insights will help institutions better prepare engineering graduates to navigate the societal implications of technology and contribute to a resilient, future-ready engineering workforce, thereby advancing NSF’s goals of strengthening the STEM workforce, fostering innovation, and promoting scalable institutional transformation. The project will examine faculty motivation through a systems thinking approach, using New York University (NYU), a large, private research university, as a single-institution case study. NYU offers a rich context in which both top-down (administrative) and bottom-up (faculty-led) efforts to promote curricular change have been pursued. The study will focus on the adoption of the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) framework and pursue two primary goals: (1) to identify factors in the academic system that influence faculty motivation to adopt the EOP framework in their teaching; and (2) to understand how the dynamics among these factors affect faculty motivation to integrate this framework into their curricula. To accomplish these goals, the research team will use qualitative system dynamics modeling. Data will be collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with engineering faculty, designed to elicit their experiences, motivations, and insights related to adopting the EOP framework in their classes. These data will inform causal loop diagrams (CLDs) that illustrate relationships among institutional factors, such as departmental culture, leadership priorities, tenure and promotion practices, and faculty development resources, and how these factors ultimately reinforce or hinder faculty motivation. Integrating the CLDs will produce a qualitative system dynamics model representing a case-based theory of faculty motivation. This theory will serve as the foundation for actionable recommendations to institutional leaders, educators, and policymakers, identifying potential leverage points that support or inhibit instructional change. The project will contribute to the broader effort to modernize engineering education and ensure its relevance in addressing complex societal challenges. 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.