Pedagogically aware academics' conceptions of change agency in the fields of science and technologyPedagogical transformations in universities are typically explored as 'top down' attempts or in the context of training programs targeted towards educating more pedagogically aware individuals. In this study, promoting pedagogical development is explored on a community level as change agency: acting as a broker between the discipline-specific and pedagogical communities of practice in order to establish mutually shared new concepts and practices of teaching and learning. Thirteen pedagogically aware academics from the fields of science and technology participated in thematic interviews in which they were asked to describe change agency. The descriptions were explored utilizing a social theory of learning and categorized with content analysis. The findings reveal practical means of promoting pedagogical development between academic communities and point out various identities related to acting as a change agent. The study provides a theoretical model and further advances the understanding of pedagogical change agency in the fields of science and technology.Keywords: brokering; change agency; community of practice; transformative learning IntroductionFor the past two decades, universities have experienced considerable pressure to develop as a teaching and learning environment. Mass participation in higher education, commercialization of public higher education, and changing national economic requirements have forced universities to reform their pedagogical practices (Doring, 2002;Taylor, 1997). The development pressure has increasingly focused on a programme rather than course level (Knight & Wilcox, 1998). Promoting the reforms has been typically assigned to centralized staff development programmes that aim at improving the teaching skills of individual academics (e.g. Gibbs & Coffey, 2004;Postareff, 2007).However, as organizational development requires context-specific knowledge involving localized strategies and action, it must be based in local academic communities (Hanrahan et al., 2001;James, 1997;Taylor, 1997). Thus creating approaches that engage academics to collaborative educational development is called for (Fullan, 1993;Knight & Wilcox, 1998).In the previous research of pedagogical development in higher education, the term 'change agent' has been referred to as an organizational actor with official developer status, such as faculty developer (Fletcher & Patrick, 1998), educational developer (Knight & Wilcox, 1998), academic staff developer (Ho, 2000;Smyth, 2003), and professional developer (Roche, 2001). Because academics are usually seen to preserve their traditional disciplinary orientations, their ability to initiate change within their own institutions has been widely questioned (Fletcher & Patrick, 1998;Hanrahan et al., 2001;Knight & Wilcox, 1998;Roche, 2001;Smyth, 2003). Previous research has identified several challenges related to intruding on the individualistic academic traditions, undermining t...

In the face of organizational transformations, academics are given a role as informal 'change agents' in their discipline-specific communities of practice (DCoP). Simultaneous participation in pedagogically oriented communities of practice (PCoP) enables them to promote pedagogical development through brokering at community interfaces. This empirical study explores academics' experiences of acting as informal change agents at the interfaces of DCoP and PCoP during an organizational transition phase of three years. The longitudinal data were collected with interviews of 13 academics from the fields of science and technology. The findings reveal a variety of pedagogical development activities related to shared meanings, practices, identities, and ways of belonging. The activities are aligned with the organizational transition process and enabled by collegial support. The findings indicate that lack of supportive formal leadership may terminate the informal development activities. The resulting model of change agency provides a novel approach to pedagogical development in higher education.

Based on a narrative analysis utilizing dimensions of transformative learning, the results highlight the influence of the working environment and experiences, and imply that teacher development process in the fields of science and technology can be better understood in terms of becoming a teacher, rather than as a continual, conscious development process. The resulting teacherresearcher identity provides a basis for pedagogical development.

The paper presents a Sino-Finnish teaching initiative, including the design and experiences of a series of pedagogical workshops implemented at the Aalto-Tongji Design Factory (DF), Shanghai, China, and the experimentation plans collected from the 54 attending professors and teachers. The workshops aimed to encourage trying out interdisciplinary hands-on teaching, and enable teachers to implement their ideas for teaching development utilising the DF pedagogical platform. The majority of the participants planned teaching experimentations aiming at enhancing student understanding of curricula through various group exercises utilising concrete artefacts, but found their implementation within established practices quite challenging, highlighting the challenges of transforming strategic collaboration into grass-root activity. However, the workshops ignited widespread interest in a continuum of collaboration in teaching development, and the DF has since acted as a hub for the implementation of subsequent internationalisation efforts of the two universities, including establishing a dual-degree programme.

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