Research on change efforts in higher education highlights the importance of change
teams having sufficient authority to bring about the change they envision. This paper employs
an activity-theoretical framework for organizational change known as expansive learning, along
with theory on agency and intersectional power, to examine how faculty exhibited change
agency in dialogue in observational data from an engineering department undergoing a major
reform project. We analyzed discourse from audio-recorded faculty meetings and workshops
within this six-year change project to characterize change agency in talk. Findings highlight the
importance of meeting stakeholders where they are, acknowledging and legitimizing their
concerns, sharing agency with them, articulating potential control, and inviting them into the
effort in ways that suggest ownership. This study extends previous work on expansive learning
by illuminating discursive practices that can further joint object-oriented activity in ways that
foster stakeholder agency.
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The consequential agency of faculty seeking to make departmental change
Over the past decade, much attention has focused on change-making efforts, especially those funded by the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments program. We bring together theory on agency and intersectional power to investigate a research question: • How and over what/whom do faculty engaged in departmental change efforts express agency, with attention to structural, cultural, normative, and interpersonal power relations? We draw upon recordings of faculty meetings and interviews across multiple change teams and years to characterize consequential change agency. Analysis of these highlights how accounts of contentious events reveals power dynamics at play, and ways those in power prevent or promote change. We argue that key elements of change agency include meeting others where they are, sharing agency with them (“we”), using potential control verbs (can, could, might, etc.), acknowledging their concerns, and inviting them into the effort in ways that suggest ownership.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10385861
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract This chapter presents the experiences of adjunct faculty in the
SAGE 2YC: Faculty as Change Agents project through the stories of five participants who share the influence of the project on them and their work. We describe the professional development that occurred in the project, which included learning with colleagues from across the country, implementing changes in their classroom teaching and beyond, and leading follow‐on workshops in teams on campus and/or in the region. The participant stories illustrate how the project gave them agency and validated their work. Adjunct faculty make important contributions to student and faculty success, and there is power in engaging adjunct faculty as leaders and change agents and fully realizing their potential. -
While changing engineering departments to become more inclusive and equitable is a common goal, research repeatedly confirms that such change is rare. Notably, change efforts commonly fail in higher education institutions (Kezar 2011), and this failure is typically attributed to faculty resistance, ineffective leadership, competing values, and conservative traditions (Klempin and Karp 2018). Recent nationwide National Science Foundation-funded efforts to revolutionize engineering departments provide insight into the salience of power dynamics as drivers of or barriers to equitable, lasting change. We interviewed members of these change teams to understand the challenges they encountered and how they navigated these. Using an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016) we explored four lenses on power relations: (1) from a structural lens, we see that policies may affect individuals differently based on their social and role identities; (2) from a cultural lens, ideas and culture organize power, often blinding those with privilege from noticing bias; (3) from a disciplinary lens, people train and coerce each other to behave in certain ways and to sustain norms; and (4) from an interpersonal lens, we see that an individual’s social (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and role (career, position, voluntary memberships) identities can shape how they experience bias. Using these lenses, we characterized ways members positioned themselves in relation to change efforts and the degree to which they held substantive power or were endangered through their participation. In many cases, disciplinary norms revealed clashes between the original structures and cultures, and the sought-after changed structures, cultures, and disciplinary practices. For some, such clashes revealed a veneer of change progress; for others, clashes served as inflection points. We share strategies for deliberately engaging power relations in change projects.more » « less
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While changing engineering departments to become more inclusive and equitable is a common goal, research repeatedly confirms that such change is rare. Notably, change efforts commonly fail in higher education institutions (Kezar 2011), and this failure is typically attributed to faculty resistance, ineffective leadership, competing values, and conservative traditions (Klempin and Karp 2018). Recent nationwide National Science Foundation-funded efforts to revolutionize engineering departments provide insight into the salience of power dynamics as drivers of or barriers to equitable, lasting change. We interviewed members of these change teams to understand the challenges they encountered and how they navigated these. Using an intersectionality framework (Collins & Bilge, 2016) we explored four lenses on power relations: (1) from a structural lens, we see that policies may affect individuals differently based on their social and role identities; (2) from a cultural lens, ideas and culture organize power, often blinding those with privilege from noticing bias; (3) from a disciplinary lens, people train and coerce each other to behave in certain ways and to sustain norms; and (4) from an interpersonal lens, we see that an individual’s social (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and role (career, position, voluntary memberships) identities can shape how they experience bias. Using these lenses, we characterized ways members positioned themselves in relation to change efforts and the degree to which they held substantive power or were endangered through their participation. In many cases, disciplinary norms revealed clashes between the original structures and cultures, and the sought-after changed structures, cultures, and disciplinary practices. For some, such clashes revealed a veneer of change progress; for others, clashes served as inflection points. We share strategies for deliberately engaging power relations in change projects.more » « less
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Given the infancy of engineering education as an established field and the recent increase in early career faculty aligning themselves with the discipline, it is imperative that the community better understand the experiences of these new faculty members. As a result, we will be able to enhance national efforts to train and develop faculty prepared to drive change in engineering education. Accordingly, this two-phased study will investigate how institutional context influences the agency of our research team and other early career engineering education faculty as it relates to facilitating change in engineering education. Faculty agency is important because faculty play a central role in making change, and there is a need to further understand the factors that influence their ability to do so. This work leverages collaborative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography to explore the lived experiences of our research team, which consists of six engineering education faculty with different roles and responsibilities who are positioned in varied settings at different institutions. We represent diverse perspectives with regard to our goals, visions, and training in engineering education. This project officially started in May 2017; however, we have been collecting data since August 2015. Our poster will present a summary of our current progress, which includes the use of the Q3 Research Quality Workshop to guide our plans for data collection and analysis. This was important to our work, because in Phase I of our study we are combining elements from auto ethnography and collaborative inquiry to explore our research questions. In addition to our study’s methodological impact, the results will provide the engineering education community with evidence-based insights on conditions that facilitate change efforts by early career engineering education faculty. By sharing our findings with current and developing engineering education graduate programs, we will enable them to make programmatic changes to benefit future faculty. These findings also provide a mechanism for divisions within the American Society of Engineering Education to develop programming and resources to support the sustained success of their members.more » « less
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