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This work presents a case study of a team of students and faculty working to increase the diversity of their department through cultural change. We focus on the perspective of the two faculty change leaders organizing this team, who received training and continued support by Departmental Action Leadership Institutes (DALIs). DALIs are workshops led by the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) team that prepare faculty members to lead change efforts in their local departments by forming teams based on the Departmental Action Team (DAT) model. Concurrent to change leaders' participation in DALI, the DAT pursues a change effort to address internal issues relating to undergraduate education. In this work, we look at how one DAT approaches the practice of "Students as Partners'' (SaP), a pedagogical practice that re-positions the relationship between educators and students in the endeavor of learning. While most efforts of SaP illustrated in the literature center curriculum, assessment, teaching, and research as areas of collaboration, this particular DAT used SaP in their efforts to increase the enrollment and retention of underrepresented students in their department. Through a series of interviews with change leaders and observations of DAT meetings, we document the pre-existing and emerging departmental cultures of partnering with students Additionally, we describe the culture of SaP on the DAT that appears to be operating as the transition between these pre-existing and emerging cultures . Finally, we discuss the elements present that enabled a potentially productive attempt at cultural change through SaP.
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A case study of tensions in student-faculty partnerships for departmental change work
Students as Partners (SaP) is a pedagogical approach that considers students co-creators of an educational environment along with faculty, rather than passive participants. While an increasing body of literature evidences a multitude of positive outcomes from the SaP approach, there remains limited research on the challenges that arise in such collaborations. Quan et al. (2021) outlined such challenges in a paper showing that different members of a Departmental Action Team (DAT), in which students, staff, and faculty collaborate on a change effort, had different perspectives of their partnership. In this work, we confirm and expand upon those findings in a case study of another DAT. Our case study DAT comes from the first cohort of the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI), a workshop series that supports faculty members in physics departments facing major challenges or opportunities. We find that all points of disconnect from Quan et al. are present in our case study. Additionally, we identify three specific areas of differing perspectives between faculty and students: motivation, commitment duration, and information transparency. We present evidence of these tensions with interviews from faculty, student, and alumni DAT members. Finally, we discuss how these tensions may be navigated by faculty seeking to partner with students in departmental change work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821372
- PAR ID:
- 10553525
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Association of Physics Teachers
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 10 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Sacramento, CA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2023.pr.Abdurrahman
