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Background. While educational change often involves bold talk about disruptive ideas that eventually need to be institutionalized, a critical but often less visible element of sustaining change is work such as maintaining a shared vision, onboarding new people, negotiating small issues in light of department culture, and coordinating big changes with existing efforts. While knowledge about these forms of invisible work exist in other disciplines, these issues seem understudied in engineering education. This work approaches this issue of invisible knowledge with a design orientation, and specifically draws on the field of design-based research. Increasingly, design is recognized as a knowledge producing activity, resulting in insights into generative ways of defining problems, frameworks for generating solutions to problems, examples of what it looks like to connect theory to specific problems. Purpose: As a design effort, this work asks: How might a specific department create a sustainable practice to support the invisible work of coordinating and sustaining change? As a scholarly effort, this instance of design can result in a culminating problem definition, a solution framework, and examples of theory use that represent knowledge contributions. Approach: A mechanical engineering department in a small, private educational institution worked for four months to develop a sustainable practice to support invisible work of coordinating and sustaining change. Following an initial commitment of 60 minutes once every three weeks and 3-hour retreat to explore possibilities, the department then iteratively designed and then carried out sample conversations. Each iteration involved specifying the goals of the conversation, how to have the conversation (the design) and the rationale for connecting the design to the goals. Traces from the process represent the data for this work. Results. Over time, the conversations came to be designed along four dimensions: topic, time allocation, turn-taking, and traces. We have learned that topics that are of immediate relevance to everyone are particularly powerful (initial topics included "being back on campus" and "navigating in-person"). We are currently leveraging a time allocation that devotes the most time to hearing from each participant on the topic, then time for the group to cautiously explore synthesis, and finally time for the group to weigh in on future conversation topics. Approaches to turn-taking have involved decentralization (e.g., each current speaker invites the next speaker) and respect (speakers have a chance to "pass" and then choose the next speaker). Finally, we are experimenting with how to balance the creation of traces as a natural part of the process, such as through real-time transcription in the chat feature of zoom. Undergirding each of these dimensions are connections to the intended goals, connections to relevant theory, and connections to the long-term goal of sustainability. In presenting these ideas, we will focus on how the information being offered connects to the current body of knowledge in engineering education. Conclusion. It is promising to treat the work of department culture as a design problem. The ideas in this framework may serve as inspiration to others seeking to create their own sustainable mechanisms but with different conditions. During the winter and spring of 2022, the approach will be additionally tested via six deployments, and insights will be shared in subsequent publications.
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Fostering sustainable improvements in science education: An analysis through four frames
Abstract There is a pressing need to improve the sustainability of educational improvement efforts, but sustainability remains undertheorized in science education. In this article, we draw upon frameworks from organizational culture and sustainability to characterize change within a single undergraduate science department. This in‐depth longitudinal case study over 15 years provides careful documentation of the types of changes that are required to make improvements over time. In particular, we argue that cultural shifts are an important aspect of sustainable improvements. As we show, even a department that was considered an educational improvement “success story” was unable to sustain the improvements made through its initial effort. Nonetheless, we do argue that the initial effort resulted in shifts to multiple aspects of the department's culture (e.g., ways of thinking, the status of education in the department), that we characterize with Bolman and Deal's four frames. These cultural shifts provided the groundwork for a later effort, to ultimately create sustainable structures in the department resulting in sustained improvement. To conclude, we provide recommendations for how to improve the sustainability of change efforts and describe important methodological considerations for future studies of sustainability.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1626565
- PAR ID:
- 10102313
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- Volume:
- 103
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1125-1150
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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