Grounded by values: An emergent engineering practice

CONTEXT A transformational change in engineering education culture is required to address ongoing issues such as declining interest and a lack of diversity in the student cohorts and profession. This change must go beyond transforming educational pedagogies; organisational cultural change is necessary to shape perceptions about engineering and engineering in society. The creation of the Engineering Practice Academy at Swinburne University of Technology provides the opportunity to intentionally construct a culture guided by a set of espoused values that can be used to define and guide the emergent culture, and inform decisions made in the development of the Engineering Practice Academy. PURPOSE This paper describes the development process of co-constructing espoused values within the Engineering Practice Academy. APPROACH Espoused values were co-constructed by project stakeholders through a facilitated workshop. The workshops included individual tasks, reflections and sharing, and collective discussion used to facilitate the construction of the values. RESULTS The five espoused values co-constructed by project stakeholders were: collaboration with empathy, honesty through transparency, equity and diversity, sustainability through practice and, excellence – individually and collectively. The espoused values are being used in all aspects of the Academy’s creation such as evaluating and selecting potential initiatives, generating an ethical partnership policy to guide the selection of external partners and creating a culture to attract and support a diverse staff and student cohort. CONCLUSION Values-based decision making has been shown to empower individuals from all levels of an organisation to make decisions as well as being useful in the recruitment and retention of staff and students. Values present a novel resource for informing collaboration between Universities, industries, and community.