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It is important that change in physics programs is deliberate, evidenced-based, and engages multiple stakeholders. To assess the state of departmental change practices, the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative regularly runs a survey of department chairs to measure departmental cultures of assessment. The 2023 survey received 163 research-consenting responses. This paper presents two claims based on these survey results: (1) assessments are largely not seen as leading to change, although chairs aspire for them to do so, and (2) chairs see substantial room for improvement in how they go about changing the undergraduate physics program, especially when it comes to engaging multiple stakeholders and using data effectively. The significant difference between current and ideal points to areas where shifting the culture within departments could have support from departmental leadership. 

The Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) engages physics faculty in professional development centered around improving change efforts within physics programs. As a part of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative, DALI participants participate in a year-long cohort typically made up of two physics faculty representatives from five physics departments. The first cohort of DALI began in the Spring of 2021. Since then, there have been four complete cohorts of DALI with a fifth cohort currently underway. In this paper, we investigate who has participated in DALI as well as the participant outcomes of DALI. The physics programs that participated in DALI often serve small student populations and are primarily undergraduate-focused physics programs. We also find that at the end of DALI, participants feel well prepared to take on many aspects of change work, but report less experience with later stages of the process. 

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. 

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. 

The Communities of Transformation (CoT) framework is a variation on Communities of Practice that models groups aimed at changing existing institutional practices by challenging underlying value systems. The CoT framework has the potential to provide insight into STEM initiatives designed to promote institutional change. We share results from applying this framework to the Effective Practices for Physics Programs' (EP3) Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI). DALI supports cohorts of physics faculty (change leaders) in leading change efforts in their departments. Change leaders apprentice into effective change strategies though sustained programming while enacting these strategies within their own Departmental Action Team (DAT). Through analysis of interviews with change leaders, we identify ways in which DALI aligns with, and departs from, the CoT framework. We present the results of this initial study to showcase which aspects of STEM change initiatives can be highlighted, and what may not be captured, by a CoT lens. 

In typical Engineering and Science education, students often are not given opportunities to build skills outside of narrowly defined, technical domains (Lucena 2013). Experiences that encourage students to engage in social justice and activist work is crowded out in traditional STEM programs. Oftentimes, these structures must be created deliberately in order to provide student leaders with this type of mentorship (Leydens 2014, Nieusma 2011). One such initiative, the Access Network, aims to do just that. The Access Network is a collection of programs (sites) that are situated in U.S. universities that work towards a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and accessible version of the STEM community (Quan 2019). Access prioritizes student leaders, both at the network-level and in their local sites, by empowering them to take the lead on actions and by providing support for this work. Access sites engage in activities that build inclusive learning communities, provide guidance through peer mentorship, and support growth in students’ leadership around social justice. One major function of the Access Network is to connect students across these local efforts and to facilitate the sharing of ideas and experiences between sites. One central way that this is done is through the work of Network Fellows (NFs), student leaders who work collaboratively in network decision-making and team projects that support the network and the sites. The NF position provides space for students to take power over decision making and supports them through mentorship in social justice and activist approaches (Amezcua 2020). To better understand how students approach this role and view their work, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with nine Network Fellows who served in the role for at least two semesters. In our analysis of emergent themes, we have found that individual agency over their work, shared leadership in decision making, and building relationships across the network are key outcomes of the Network Fellow experience. We have additionally identified key conceptualizations of the team collaboration that Network Fellows discuss that cultivate the outcomes described above. We see these conceptualizations as important for capturing how the Network Fellow team conducts its work. We hope for our work to serve as a model for others that wish to cultivate similar experiences for their own students in STEM. 

Cultural change that requires revision of taken-for-granted assumptions is necessitated to enact programmatic changes. However, such cultural change processes are challenging and time-consuming and therefore require continued support and resources. Data sensemaking is one important aspect of culture that local stakeholders often overlook. In this project, we study the change process enacted by local Departmental Action Teams (DATs) resulting from physics faculty members' participation in the Departmental Leadership Action Institutes (DALIs). This study followed two faculty change leaders from one physics program in their journey in DALI and their DAT over a year. This paper discusses preliminary interview results that help us understand how the DAT's microculture is situated within the dominant departmental culture, focused on the facet of data use. For example, we found that past data collection efforts were a primary responsibility of a single person and rarely became the focus of joint attention. Within the DAT, in contrast, a broad set of stakeholders engaged in joint data collection and sensemaking that informed decision making and led to revising initial assumptions about what programmatic changes might be needed in order to reach their goal. 

This study aims to understand how physics faculty seeking guidance in making departmental changes related to recruitment and retention frame the challenges in their program. We focus our analysis on one set of applications submitted to the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) in its first year of operation. DALI is the community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative. It brings together a cohort of physics faculty to apprentice into strategies for sustainable institutional change and facilitation practices associated with leading change teams. Through analysis of DALI applications, we find that many applicants attribute their enrollment challenges to sources outside of their immediate control, while those that do propose solutions to these challenges primarily focus on curriculum change. By understanding how DALI applicants frame their enrollment challenges, developers of departmental change resources can better mold their recommendations and community engagement activities to what is needed, whether that be meeting faculty and departments where they are at or pushing departments to explore new strategies and frameworks for evaluating their challenges.