Framework for transforming departmental culture to support educational innovation

Abstract

This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these features have limited the success of such efforts at achieving sustained, systemic change. Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature. We use examples from a change project that we have been carrying out at a large research university to illustrate how our framework can be used as a basis for planning and implementing holistic change.

Departmental Action Teams: Empowering faculty to make sustainable change

“…We have built each of these perspectives into the design of our DATs. These perspectives and their connections to the DATs are described in detail elsewhere [12]; however, we provide a brief sketch of some of these connections here.…”

Access to undergraduate research experiences at a large research university

“…Accordingly, we reflected on our process through the framework for institutional change outlined by Corbo et al [12]. In particular, we focused on two theoretical perspectives that typically underlie change efforts: a social cognition perspective, which involves identifying and potentially changing the underlying beliefs of a group; and a political perspective, which includes building coalitions to support collective actions.…”

“…We worked with both students and faculty members in order to build sustainable efforts to improve access to UREs. Because this work represents a first step in a departmentwide change effort, we reflect on our process through multiple perspectives on institutional change [12]. Our process and results may be applicable to other large research institutions working towards similar goals.…”

Improving representation in physical sciences using a Departmental Action Team

“…The SITAR framework for change posits that change efforts should focus on faculty, departments, and administration and that ignoring any of these levels would likely inhibit the effectiveness of an effort [4]. One proposed model for change focuses on a combination of grassroots faculty efforts (bottomup) and administrative initiatives (top-down) that coordinate with one another to result in departmental change [5].…”