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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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Integrating theories of intersectional power, learning, and change to explore faculty experiences on equity-centered change projects.
Efforts to lead diversity, equity, inclusivity, and justice (DEIJ) change in higher education, and in STEM departments in particular, are prone to failure. We argue that these complex efforts entail orchestration of learning, change, and power, and therefore, understanding how organizational change teams function necessitates a combination of theories. We examine how faculty experience change projects in postsecondary engineering education, including the ways in which their experiences—and the change efforts they’re engaged in—are shaped by identity and intersectional power. Using a narrative approach, we report on the experiences of three composite cases of faculty members on change projects across multiple institutions, drawing on theories of learning, change, and power to glean understanding of these experiences. Our findings suggest that bringing these three theoretical lenses together through what we call the TRIPLE (Theories and Research on Intersectional Power, Learning, and Evolutionary) Change Framework helps develop a more critical and nuanced understanding of faculty experiences on organizational change leadership teams.
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- PAR ID:
- 10578410
- Publisher / Repository:
- ProQuest
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Diversity in Higher Education
- ISSN:
- 1938-8926
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- organizational change composite case study faculty engineering education intersectional power
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)At the start of their work for the National Science Foundation’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Program (IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers, NSF 19-614), RED teams face a variety of challenges. Not only must they craft a shared vision for their projects and create strategic partnerships across their campuses to move the project forward, they must also form a new team and communicate effectively within the team. Our work with RED teams over the past 5 years has highlighted the common challenges these teams face at the start, and for that reason, we have developed the RED Start Up Session, a ½ day workshop that establishes best practices for RED teams’ work and allows for early successes in these five year projects. As the RED Participatory Action Research team (REDPAR)--comprised of individuals from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the University of Washington--we have taken the research data collected as we work with RED teams and translated it into practical strategies that can benefit RED teams as they embark on their projects. This presentation will focus on the content and organization of the Start Up Session and how these lessons learned can contribute to the furthering of the goals of the RED program: to design “revolutionary new approaches to engineering education,” focusing on “organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff, and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program.” We see the Start Up Session as an important first step in the RED team establishing an identity as a team and learning how to work effectively together. We also encourage new RED teams to learn from the past, through a panel discussion with current RED team members who fill various roles on the teams: engineering education researcher, project manager, project PI, disciplinary faculty, social scientist, and others. By presenting our findings from the Start Up Session at ASEE, we believe we can contribute to the national conversation regarding change in engineering education as it is evidenced in the RED team’s work.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000601
