More Than the End Goal: Why Teamwork Policies Need Processes as Much as Outcomes

Research Paper Recommended citation: Cristancho Rodríguez, J. A. (2025). More Than the End Goal: Why Teamwork Policies Need Processes as Much as Outcomes. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631492. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. MORE THAN THE END GOAL: WHY TEAMWORK POLICIES NEED PROCESSES AS MUCH AS OUTCOMES J. A. Cristancho Rodríguez a, 1 a Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana Conference Key Areas: Engineering Education Research and Quality Assurance and Accreditation Keywords: Teamwork, accreditation bodies, engineering education, processes and outcomes. ABSTRACT Global engineering accreditation bodies, including ABET, the International Engineering Alliance, and the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, consistently emphasize the industry requirement of teamwork competencies for engineers. These competencies include the ability to function effectively as team members and leaders across different modalities, while successfully navigating diverse and inclusive team dynamics. Engineers must demonstrate proficiency in collaborative work within both national and international contexts, as well as across multidisciplinary settings involving engineering and nonengineering professionals. This universally adopted educational standard necessitates that engineering educators develop and implement collaborative learning strategies that align with other accreditation standards. However, most engineering instructors receive no formal training in teamwork pedagogies. While accreditation boards emphasize the need to achieve these teamwork outcomes, they lack the equally important guide on the processes needed to achieve such outcomes in each context. Current teamwork delivery often contains fundamental flaws a) promoting individualism over collaboration, b) emphasizing technical skills instead of socio-technical scaffolding, c) encouraging assimilation rather than intercultural competence, and d) reinforcing power imbalances instead of fostering diversity and inclusion. Engineering instructors need more than broad goals. This paper suggests three strategies (1) create a policy framework that provides specific implementation approaches aligned with accreditation standards and more importantly, the benefit of students, (2) create a committee of teamwork implementation processes with local and diverse participants and researchers, and (3) callouts in which researchers 1 Corresponding Author J.A. Cristancho Rodríguez [email protected] would participate to offer guidelines to achieve the desired teamwork outcomes in their context. 1 INTRODUCTION Accreditation bodies require higher education institutions to deliver teamwork in engineering courses, yet this requirement comes to engineering instructors without any guidance from either the accreditation boards or the higher education institutions. Accreditation bodies, including ABET (student outcome 5), the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education ENAEE (program outcome 7), and the Sidney, Dublin, and Washington Accords (graduate attribute/program attitude 8), all emphasize that engineers must be able to function effectively in teams. This includes serving as both members and leaders across virtual, face-toface, and hybrid environments; working in diverse and inclusive groups; operating in national and international contexts; and collaborating in multidisciplinary settings with both engineers and non-engineers. This shared educational policy requires engineering instructors to implement effective collaborative teamwork practices aligned with other institutional policies (e.g., ethics, solving complex problems, and communication). However, most engineering instructors receive no formal training in this student-centered pedagogy. Policymakers, particularly those from educational accreditation boards, must actively collaborate with researchers to develop evidence-based goals, expectations, and guiding frameworks. Policymakers need to seek informed feedback and strategic guidance from researchers to effectively achieve their objectives (Rodriguez, 2015). In this article, I examine engineering accreditation guidelines to explore how their desired outcomes inform the engineering educators who should implement them. I use hermeneutics (Bhattacharya, 2017) to explore the connections between the teamwork policy documents, my understanding of the engineering education context, and a larger historical, cultural, social, and economic context. Educational research is a fundamental part of policymaking through reflection and iteration (Rippner, 2016). Educational policies need guiding processes, collaboration with local researchers, and/or incentives for local researchers to create processes aligned with the accreditation standards. Policies without guiding processes could look very different to different people in different cultures. Intercultural differences play a significant role in education, requiring that classroom design, teamwork pedagogies (Jaiswal, 2024), and policy development thoughtfully incorporate diverse cultural perspectives and learning styles. A lack of collaboration with local researchers might overlook cultural, linguistic, or other social aspects of the classroom. Policies implemented without collaboration with researchers may not be effective in classrooms due to a lack of credibility among students, parents, or other participants involved (Rippner, 2016). With this work, I aim to question and reflect on the effectiveness of accreditation guidelines without processes, frameworks, or lenses to help engineering instructors apply them properly. Additionally, I argue that accreditation boards need to collaborate with local and diverse researchers to create frameworks that respond to the cultural, socio-economic, and political background of each engineering institution. This work is intended for engineering educators, engineering institutions, engineering education researchers, and accreditation boards. The research question guiding this work is: How do accreditation policies support or fail to support instructors in the implementation of teamwork abilities? I present a literature review on teamwork and accreditation requirements of teamwork, the framework used to guide this work, the methods utilized to analyze the accreditation board’s guidelines, a positionality statement, the findings of the research, and a discussion. 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Teamwork Teamwork as a pedagogy is rooted in Vygotsky’s idea of sociocultural constructivism. This theory conceptualizes knowledge as socially constructed and shaped by the historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts of learners. Central to this theory is Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development, which describes the distance between a learner’s current development and her potential development when supported by a more knowledgeable other. Importantly, this more knowledgeable other is not limited to teachers but can include capable peers, making collaborative learning an ideal mechanism for educational growth. Vygotsky's use of the Slavic concept Obuchenie enriches this theory, as the word means both teaching and learning, which differs from the traditional notion of a unidirectional transfer of information to a dynamic, interactive process of knowledge sharing. Interactive learning processes tend to increase learning effectiveness (Chi, 2009). Chi and Wylie (2014) created the ICAP framework, which illustrates the progression of learning strategies, ranging from Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive. The ICAP framework reveals a clear increase in learning and resources. Passive learning requires minimal learner engagement and cognitive effort; active learning introduces more deliberate participation; constructive learning demands greater cognitive investment as learners generate additional insights; and interactive learning represents the most cognitively demanding approach, requiring substantial time, energy, and collaborative knowledge construction. While these higher-order learning strategies demand more from learners, they correspondingly offer exponentially more significant learning outcomes, suggesting that the increased cognitive and temporal investment yields disproportionately powerful educational benefits. Interactive learning requires significant effort and resources from students and instructors, particularly when it involves team dynamics. To support effective teamwork multiple efforts have focused on improving teamwork areas such as group formation (Ohland et al., 2012), conflict resolution (Magana et al., 2022), cooperative learning and Co-regulation (Aggrawal et al., 2023), and multiple pedagogical strategies such as Problem-, Project-, and Challenged-Based learning (Sukackė et al., 2022), Most common constraints to implement interactive pedagogies, such as teamwork, are: engineering instructors are inadequately prepared, lack of resources (e.g., guiding frameworks), expectations from employers and students, and cooperative learning (Riebe, 2016). Beyond these pedagogical constraints, industry requires STEM graduates to work effectively in teams (Riebe, 2016). Thus, accreditation boards require higher education institutions to deliver teamwork and related interpersonal skills. 2.2 Accreditation requirements of teamwork The high Industry demand for teamwork skills has led to pragmatic and sometimes uncritical implementations of teamwork. Engineering instructors are required but not usually trained to deliver teamwork pedagogies (Riebe, 2016). Accreditation boards require engineering institutions to teach students teamwork skills, therefore, departments and instructors are encouraged to use teamwork pedagogies to fulfill this requirement. Most instructors lack formal pedagogical training, perpetuating a systemic cycle in which faculty predominantly replicate the ineffective instructional approaches they experienced as students, thus sustaining a pattern of pedagogical paralysis (Oleson and Hora, 2014). Furthermore, most institutions fail to provide the necessary support and training for instructors to implement effective teamwork training (Fathi et al., 2019). Despite these limitations, some instructors who are interested in their students' learning or encouraged by their institutions implement teamwork pedagogies. It is important to highlight that these efforts usually come in their free time. 3 FRAMEWORK Sociotransformative constructivism (sTc) (Rodriguez, 1998) is a pedagogical framework based on socio-cultural constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978). Sociotransformative constructivism is based on social constructivism in which learning is understood as a social activity mediated by historical, institutional, linguistic, and cultural context. Although social constructivism aligns well with concerns about equity, one of its main drawbacks is the lack of concrete guidance for application. In contrast, sTc offers four key components that serve as a framework for integrating socio-constructivist principles into academia and learning: dialogic conversation, authentic activity, metacognition, and reflexivity. Dialogic conversation aims at understanding what is literally being said and the reasons why things are being said. The reasons could be emotional, ideological, or conceptual, and in any case, they are attached to a specific context that must be considered to understand where the transmitter is coming from. Authentic activity refers to pedagogical activities that are socioculturally relevant and are connected to the students’ daily life. Metacognition is the students’ awareness and control over learning. Finally, reflexivity is to become critically aware of one’s background influences our learning/teaching (Rodriguez, 1998). Sociotransformative constructivism recognizes that instructors and researchers might find policies and materials that resonate with their values, but when they try to implement them, they face different obstacles. Some of those obstacles are: time, resources, conflicting policies, student beliefs and assumptions, and lack of support, among others (Rodriguez, 2022). 4 METHODS To analyse the information on teamwork on the accreditation documents, I used document analysis as a qualitative research method (Bowen, 2009). Document analysis aims at going beyond the superficial or syntactic and semantic comprehension of the text. Thus, to explore the documents beyond their literal interpretation, I used hermeneutics (Bhattacharya, 2017). Hermeneutic analysis acknowledges the essential connection between the reader and the text that drives interpretation, allowing me to engage with the accreditation documents beyond the text and through the context and application of its desired outcomes. This methodological approach recognizes that my own social and cultural history as a researcher influences how I interpret these texts, just as the authors’ backgrounds shaped how the documents were produced. Through this hermeneutic lens, I was able to identify implicit assumptions embedded within the language of the accreditation documents that might not be immediately apparent through superficial reading. By reviewing accreditation documents, I identified teamwork related outcomes, how policies have evolved over time, how these policies support or fail to support instructors implement such outcomes, and I conceptually outlined four current challenges with the effective implementation of teamwork in engineering education. By applying hermeneutics to the accreditation documents, I sought to build a bridge between the desired outcomes, the changes of such outcomes, and the pieces that are missing to achieve these goals in the academic context. The value of using hermeneutics for this analysis lies in its ability to create shared meaning between communities, connecting the authors of the accreditation documents with diverse readers across various situations. Using this method, I was able to identify some missing pieces from the desired outcomes of the accreditation texts to the application in our current socio-economic, cultural, and political context. The accreditation documents that I explored were ABET 2025-2026 (ABET, 2024), European Accreditation of Engineering Programs EUR-ACE (European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, 2021), and the International Engineering Alliance (2021). 5 POSITIONALITY I am an Electronic Engineer with 11 years of experience teaching engineering courses in Colombia. During the last seven years of my teaching path, I implemented teamwork pedagogies using institutional and international accreditation policies. Most of the tools and strategies I used were either shared by more experienced colleagues or self-taught during my personal time. Three years ago, I moved to the US to learn more about engineering education and accreditation bodies. Studying teamwork from both an instructor and researcher lens has allowed me to critically examine what accreditation policies demand and what instructors need to do effective teamwork implementation in their classrooms. By critically examining teamwork I mean Dewey’s (2009) reflection and connection to different parts of the whole, and Freire’s (1978) examination of power structures influencing teamwork dynamics, a constant dialogue with all participants, and a praxis that aims at improving the situation of students and instructors. Having experienced teamwork implementation in two contrasting contexts such as Colombia, a country in the Global South and the US, a country in the Global North, I bring a particular perspective on how socio-economic and institutional context shape teamwork in engineering education. 6 RESULTS In this section I present the required teamwork outcomes each of the three accreditation bodies use, how they have changed to adapt and improve, I show at what extend these accreditation bodies address guidance to instructors on how to achieve their intended outcomes, and I conceptually describe four current teamwork implementation problems. Accreditation bodies emphasize that engineers must be able to function effectively in teams. ABET (2024) offers the student outcome number 5 as “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.” (p.6). ENAEE (2021) provides the program outcome 7 on communication and teamwork, the teamwork section says, “ability to function effectively in a national and international context, as an individual and as a member of a team and to cooperate effectively with engineers and non-engineers.” (p.11). The International Engineering Alliance gives the graduate attributes profile number 8 for the Washington, Dublyn, and Sydney accord as “[f]unction effectively as an individual, and as a member or leader in diverse and inclusive teams and in multidisciplinary, face-to-face, remote and distributed settings” (p.14). These accreditation guidelines are oriented toward the desired outcomes each engineering institution should instill in its engineering graduates. However, they don’t offer guidelines on how to implement them in the different contexts of each engineering institution. We know accreditation bodies care about the improvement of their policies, and I hope it is for the well-being of people and Land involved. Changes in accreditation guidelines respond to new needs in engineering education and efforts to address existing shortcomings. ABET went from their engineering Criteria 2000 “an ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams” (Lattuca et al., 2006, p. 18) to “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives” (ABET, 2024, p. 6). EC2000 helped engineering accreditation policies to go from a prescriptive input or what should be taught in engineering, to outputs or what should be learned in engineering classrooms (Lattuca et al., 2006). Using hermeneutics as a lens, I argue that ABET’s change from EC2000 to current policies responds to the industry requirements to include leadership as a learning outcome; encourage collaboration due to the increase of complexity and amount of unstructured engineering problems; and provide project management skills in teamwork settings that respond to the implementation and formalization of agile project management methodologies in industry. In 2008, under transferable skills, ENAEE introduces the idea that engineers should “function effectively […] as a member of a team [… and] function effectively as leader of a team that may be composed of different disciplines and levels” (Augusti et al., 2011, p.9). In 2025, ENAEE states that engineers need an “ability to function effectively in a national and international context, as an individual and as a member of a team and to cooperate effectively with engineers and non-engineers” (ENAEE, 2021, p.11). Possibly the inclusion of multiple countries around 2013, ENAEE included the national and international context as part of their desired outcomes. The International Engineering Alliance has also changed in time. In 2013 the Washington Accord Attribute 9 said “Function effectively as an individual, and as a member or leader in diverse teams and in multi-disciplinary settings” and in 2021 it changed to Attribute 8 “Function effectively as an individual, and as a member or leader in diverse and inclusive teams and in multi-disciplinary, face-to-face, remote and distributed settings.” Using hermeneutics as a lens, I argue that three changes respond to include collaboration in teamwork to avoid individualism in team dynamics in which students would divide the work and then put it together as a team effort, losing the benefits of collaboration; building inclusive teams to value different ways of knowing and being; and after Covid-19, working in face-to-face, remote, and distributed settings. However, these new principles of teamwork follow the same problem as the previous ones, they lack guidance on how to achieve them in each of the diverse contexts of engineering institutions. From the analysis of evolving teamwork policies, accreditation bodies show their efforts to adapt to new situations and information of their processes. Now I call their attention on a pressing need to help instructors who are trying to incorporate teamwork pedagogies in their classrooms and students who are not getting the benefits of teamwork pedagogies. Using the socio-transformative constructivism framework (Rodriguez, 2022) I identified obstacles present in these teamwork policies. Many instructors might be interested in implementing teamwork and achieving the desired goals that these accreditation boards intend, but they are restricted by different obstacles. For example, not having a guide on how to implement the desired outcomes (e.g., teamwork framework), scientific support to justify its application in front of students and other people involved, time to invest in understanding and planning teamwork pedagogies, classrooms to effectively collaborate in teams, and other resources such as team making tools like The Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (Ohland et al., 2012). The institutional requirement of teaching teamwork without properly scaffolding instructors to deliver a specific interactive pedagogical tool leads to different types of problems, I conceptually categorize them into four. 1) Technical skills are prioritized over social skills. Specifically in engineering, there is a predominant ideology of depoliticization, in which social or political issues are supposedly external to engineering, limiting the focus on technical issues (Cech, 2013). Engineers who don’t consider the social and environmental aspects of their work lead to catastrophic results that directly or indirectly hurt people and the environment. 2) Teamwork interactions are not intrinsically collaborative; teammates need scaffolding and instruction to work together. Individualistic teams can divide and conquer their teamwork, reducing the social interactions that help achieve teamwork’s desired social skills. 3) Teammates are usually unaware of the power structures around them and within the team. This can lead to a perpetuation of oppression by sticking to the dominant ways of knowing and being while isolating, excluding, and eventually erasing other non-dominant peoples. 4) One of the desired outcomes of engineering teamwork is to educate teammates to be able to work alongside diverse collaborators. Currently, academia encourages assimilation as a way to extract what is possible from diverse cultures, without actually giving power or space for diverse cultures to incorporate their ways into academia. The idea of reason being separated from emotions, the mind being separated from the body, and the result being separated from the process stems from the same dichotomy that reinforces the analytical understanding of the world as something to be divided and studied in pieces, rather than holistically. Accreditation boards need to recognize the need to include processes to obtain their desired outcomes. 7 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Policies only offering desired outcome are insufficient to achieve what accreditation boards are expecting from education. Process-outcome is not a dichotomy; they are both intrinsically united, and they need similar attention, resources, and support. Guidance is needed by engineering educators; most engineering educators lack the time and resources to effectively implement teamwork pedagogies in their classrooms, especially in their already busy curriculum. A bidirectional alliance with local researchers and participants is needed to offer support and codevelop the process and frameworks necessary to achieve the desired accreditation outcomes. It is important to include local and diverse researchers and participants to identify parts of an undefined context. General guidelines could oversee cultural, linguistic, and social differences that each country, institution, or even each engineering school might have. Collaboration to address this gap can be achieved through any or multiple of the following three recommendations. 1) Create or adapt a policy framework that provides specific implementation approaches aligned with accreditation standards and more importantly, the benefit of students and their Land. A framework for teamwork implementation could greatly benefit instructors who don’t have time, resources, and/or knowledge to implement teamwork pedagogies in their busy curricula. This framework could serve like a guide that would help instructors in their teaching process while achieving the desired accreditation outcomes. 2) Create a committee of teamwork implementation processes with local and diverse researchers and participants. Using existing or new frameworks, this committee would be in charge of using research processes to offer guidance to instructors and institutions to achieve the desired accreditation outcomes. It is important to highlight that local and diverse researchers and participants are needed to warrant an understanding of the culture, language, and context of the place. ABET for example, oversees the accreditation of more than 30 countries, so local researchers and participants are needed to understand the historical, political, and socio-economic context of each of these countries. A framework or guidance to oversee teamwork in a public school in Colombia might be very different from a framework that would work in a private school in South Korea. 3) Finally, create call-outs similar to a special issue of a journal in which researchers would participate to offer guidelines to achieve the desired outcomes of the policy in a specific context. Callouts could serve as a way to obtain help from the community to improve local and/or specific teamwork implementation issues. With this work I hope to help with the ongoing growth of accreditation policies in ways that promote the well-being of instructors, students, and all involved in the teamwork educational process. REFERENCES Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. (2024). 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