As engineering education scholars and engineering educators, many of us pursue educational change and innovation through our research, teaching, service, and leadership activities. In this pursuit, we take intentional and strategic actions towards educational change and innovation goals that matter to us, whether that is reimagining graduate admissions to be a more equitable and inclusive process or redesigning how students are introduced to the ideas of heat and temperature in a foundational engineering course. Our actions towards these goals represent our professional agency towards educational change.

The focus of this talk will be to explore the question of How might we empower and enable faculty to engage in educational change at their institutions? To support this exploration, I will introduce a contextualized theory for professional agency towards educational change that was developed based on a longitudinal and collaborative qualitative study of six early career engineering education scholars. The theory has since been used to examine the actions and experiences of engineering instructional faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Using both studies as examples, we will consider our own experiences pursuing change efforts through this lens and begin to imagine how we might further promote this type of professional agency within our communities.