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1. Fostering sustainable improvements in science education: An analysis through four frames

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21526  

   Reinholz, Daniel L.; Ngai, Courtney; Quan, Gina; Pilgrim, Mary E.; Corbo, Joel C.; Finkelstein, Noah (May 2019, Science Education)

   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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2. Recognizing dominant cultures around assessment and educational change in physics programs

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.20.010132  

   Sachmpazidi, Diana; Turpen, Chandra; Petrella, Jayna; Dalka, Robert P; Abdurrahman, Fatima N (May 2024, Physical Review Physics Education Research)

   Leaders, policymakers, and researchers have called attention to the need to improve critical aspects of physics programs, from teaching and pedagogy to making physics more diverse and equitable. As such programmatic changes are challenging and require a second-order change to be effective, many physics faculty responsible for carrying them out are not equipped with the necessary experience and support to do so. This can result in a significant waste of resources and time. Moreover, while there is a robust body of literature in higher education focusing on institutional and cultural change, there is a limited understanding of the baseline of the culture of physics programs (where physics programs are starting from), a critical aspect that shapes the change effort. Dr. David Craig and Dr. Joel Corbo with the support of the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers developed the Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs) to meet the needs of the physics community by supporting physics faculty to effectively design and implement departmental change focusing on areas needing improvement. In this research project, we developed case studies of five DALI-active physics programs from two DALI cohorts. We use a cultural dynamics lens to document facets of the dominant culture around how physics faculty approach and pursue change work. We see evidence of DALI participants’ growing awareness of taken-for-granted assumptions about educational change processes and assessment practices within their departmental cultures and coming to recognize and value alternative ways of collaborating and enacting change in their local contexts. We found that physics faculty typically approach change work in a rushed and way ignoring the use of formal evidence. In particular, we found that any data collection efforts are the primary responsibility of a single person, rarely becoming the focus of joint attention. Whenever data did receive joint attention, it was approached in a cursory way without meaningfully informing collective change efforts. This study lays the foundation to explore critical aspects of the dominant physics culture that may constrain enacting particular forms of programmatic change. In future work, we document the cultural shifts made by these DALI-active departments around change work. 

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3. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: A Model To Guide Cultural Transformation in STEM Departments

   https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v21i1.2097  

   Johnson, Angela; Elliott, Samantha (January 2020, Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education)

   Despite recent interest and pressing need, we lack a clear model of culturally relevant, responsive, sensitive teaching in university STEM departments. Most culturally relevant efforts within STEM education address actions individual professors can take within their own classrooms and mentoring, rather than describing how to go about enacting cultural transformation at the departmental level. In this article, we propose the application of the Ladson-Billings model of culturally relevant pedagogy to promote an inclusive culture within undergraduate STEM departments. The model consists of three components: academic success, cultural competence and integrity, and critical consciousness. We define each component and describe what it looks like and how it can be used to guide departmental transformation, including examples in biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science departments at our own institution. This model can help guide faculty committed to creating departments where all kinds of STEM students can thrive, provided they are willing to work hard. 

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4. Initial Faculty Perceptions of Scrum for Departmental Change. In Content Access.

   Pembridge, J. J.; Wilson, T. A.; Roa, O. E. (January 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   This RESEARCH paper examines faculty perceptions regarding the use of Scrum for departmental operations. Scrum is an agile methodology that applies processes and procedures that encourage transparency, inspection, and adaptation in the creation of a product. Across the literature for engineering education change, there has been a focus on identifying the barriers and affordances to cultural change in engineering departments. The objective of this paper is to examine the driving factors and barriers to implementing Scrum for departmental operations. The paper will specifically address how a group of faculty about to adopt Scrum perceive the impact of that adoption on potential changes to departmental operations and culture. Findings indicate concerns with the traditional barriers of time and workload. However, they also indicate that there is some expectation for Scrum to decrease elements of the faculty workload and reduce time to complete tasks. These findings also build on the understanding of how faculty collaboration is perceived as both a barrier and affordance to departmental change. 

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5. Constructing a comprehensive and adaptive survey for cultural analysis of engineering departments

   Berger, E.; Briody, E.; DeBoer, J.; Rhoads, J.; Francis, J.; Witek, L.; Rothstein, R.; Lee, Y. (December 2021, Proceedings of REES AAEE 2021)

   ABSTRACT CONTEXT Culture influences the dynamics and outcomes of organizations in profound ways, including individual-level outcomes (like the quality of work products) and collective impacts (such as reputation or influence). As such, understanding organizational culture is a crucial element of understanding performance; from an anthropological perspective, ‘performance’ is not an outcome of culture, it is a part of culture. A key challenge in understanding organizational culture, especially in complex academic organizations, is the lack of a flexible, scalable approach for data collection and analysis. PURPOSE OR GOAL In this study, we report on our development of a survey-based cultural characterization tool that leverages both lightweight data collection from stakeholders in the organization and public information about that organization. We also integrate perspectives from prior literature about faculty, students, and staff in academic departments. Taken together, the resulting survey covers key elements of culture and allows for scalable data collection across settings via customizations and embedded logic in the survey itself. The outcome of this work is a design process for a new and promising tool for scalable cultural characterization, and we have deployed this tool across two institutions. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We leverage prior research, our own preliminary data collection, and our experience with this approach in a different setting to develop a cultural characterization survey suitable for delivery to multiple engineering department stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students). We start with a modest number of interviews, stratified by these three groups and achieving saturation of responses, to understand their views on their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, and their perceptions of how it ‘works’. We merge this information with public data (for instance, departmental vision or mission statements, which convey a sense of priorities or values) as well as prior literature about higher education culture. We also draw upon our experience in another setting as well as pilot testing data, and the result is a carefully-constructed set of dichotomous items that are offered to department stakeholders in survey form using an electronic survey platform. We also collect background and demographic information in the survey. The resulting data are analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to extract meaningful information about the departmental culture from the perspectives of the stakeholder groups. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES The resulting survey consists of two parts, each with sub-components. The two top level survey parts contain: (i) items common to all respondents in all settings (i.e. all institutions in this study), and (ii) a set of institution-specific items. Within those sections, the framing of the items is calibrated for the stakeholder groups so that items make sense to them within the context of their experience. The survey has been administered, and the data are being analyzed and interpreted presently. We expect the results to capture the specific elements of local culture within these institutions, as well as differences in perspectives and experience among the three primary stakeholder groups. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This study demonstrates a scalable approach to survey development for the purposes of cultural characterization, and its use across settings and with multiple stakeholder groups. This work enables a very nuanced view of culture within a department, and these results can be used within academic departments to enable discussion about change, priorities, performance, and the work environment. 

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