Characterizing students' subcultures in engineering and their alignment with the adoption of the Freeform pedagogical system.

This research-to-practice full paper investigates the alignment of a specific pedagogical innovation, the Freeform pedagogical system, with the student culture(s) of the mechanical engineering department of a small private college (SPC) in the upper Midwest of the United States, we ask the research question: What are the defining characteristics of the student culture or (sub)cultures in the engineering department where the Freeform system is being propagated? Based upon interviews with on-campus stakeholders (students, faculty, and staff), we constructed a 64-item survey to characterize the culture of their engineering department. We analyzed student responses using the cultural consensus theory model (CCT), a quantitative method that looks for patterns of responses to cultural statements. Grouped together, these patterns of responses indicate the values of the sub-cultures present within a participant group. Our results indicate that the best fitting model contains two student subcultures: student subculture 1 (SC1) (n = 15) and student subculture 2 (SC2) (n = 60). These two subcultures exhibit differences across a handful of items that focus on the student experience and in particular the sense of connectedness or belonging among students. Members of SC1 seem to be disconnected from both their peers and their instructors, work primarily alone, and seem to struggle to obtain access to academic assistance. SC1 members also feel overworked with (what they perceive to be) low-value-added activities, and they do not perceive alignment between how instructors teach and how they prefer to learn. In contrast, members of SC2 seem to be aligned with the institutional mission, which focuses on faculty-student relationships and learning in the community