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Change Topics (Working Groups) Show all
Guiding Theories
23 matchesTarget Audience
- College/University Staff 18 matches
- Graduate Students 6 matches
- In-Service K12 Teachers 2 matches
- Institution Administration 19 matches
- Non-tenure Track Faculty 18 matches
- Post-doctoral Fellows 10 matches
- Pre-Service K12 Teachers 1 match
- Teaching/Learning Assistants 3 matches
- Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty 20 matches
Change Topics (Working Groups)2023 Transforming Institutions Conference Takeaways
Posted: Apr 29 2025 by
Target Audience: Graduate Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, College/University Staff, Teaching/Learning Assistants, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Institution Administration
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Institutional Systems:Incentive/Reward Systems, Supporting Students:Learning Communities, Professional Development:Accessibility, Supporting Students:Student Engagement, Institutional Systems:Evaluating Teaching
The 2023 Transforming Institutions Conference was held June 12-13, 2023, in Minneapolis, MN. With this most recent convening, we are proud to have brought together change researchers and change agents for 12 years. The meeting was made possible by the efforts of a conference planning committee consisting of 10 change agents convened by NSEC (Network of STEM Education Centers) and ASCN (Accelerating Systemic Change Network), supported by 40 reviewers from the systemic change community. Now that the dust has settled, we would like to share some key takeaways, attendee feedback, and future conference plans to continue to build momentum for our community to thrive with change. More
Frameworks for Inclusive Excellence and Systemic Change
Posted: Apr 29 2025 by
Target Audience: Post-doctoral Fellows, Institution Administration, Teaching/Learning Assistants, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
Program Components: Professional Development:Cultural Competency, Diversity/Inclusion
In the work I and my colleagues have done to create change around STEM Education on our own campus we've intentionally worked at two levels. We try to focus both on what will help individual faculty to make changes to their teaching and on how we can shift norms, structures, and teaching culture at the institutional level. My focus as a faculty developer has historically been focused on helping faculty make changes to their pedagogy through exploration and adoption of a variety of active learning pedagogies. I've also been interested in how the spaces in which faculty teach and the norms and policies that guide their practice can promote the adoption of evidence-based teaching practice. More recently, and for a variety of reasons, I've become more interested in how to support faculty to pay attention to their classrooms as inclusive places for learning and the degree to which their courses help to support equitable outcomes for students. While these ideas are connected to good pedagogical practice, thinking about inclusivity has prompted me to expand my toolbox. More
What we wish we would have known about theories of change and change theory at the beginning
Posted: Dec 7 2023 by
Target Audience: Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff, Post-doctoral Fellows
Six years ago when we first met, we were two individuals who identified a common challenge on our campuses – namely supporting students who arrived with varying comfort and experience using quantitative (Q) skills in STEM and social science contexts. Talking with others, we were eager to think about how we might collaborate to do better for our students. We wanted to make a change, but change theories or theories of change? We didn't know what those were! As we have learned about change strategies and change theory over the last six years, we've repeatedly come across ideas that make us think, "Wow, we wish we would have known this when we started this project!" This post is an effort to share some of what we've learned with other practitioners who might be trying to change things on their own campuses. More
From Civic Engagement to Civic Courage—Science Education's Next Chapter
Posted: Jun 8 2023 by
Target Audience: Graduate Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion, Pedagogical Training, Supporting Students:Student Engagement, Outreach:Inter-Institutional Collaboration
It is hard to escape the fact that the relationship of evidence-based or scientific thinking to civic life in a democracy--which had been acknowledged by the science advocacy community for over a century--has attained a new urgency in the age of fake news and alternative facts. Recently a colleague remarked that the project I helped found and now lead, Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) "was ahead of its time," and I've been reflecting on that idea. Historians love to quote the philosopher Kierkegaard who observed, "we live forward, but understand backward." And I've spent a lot of time this year trying to "understand backward" the broader cultural and educational context that produced SENCER to consider whether SENCER was indeed "ahead," or more accurately an embodiment of the best thinking available in its own time.[1] I'm especially concerned with considering what elements of our collective past can support a future of civically and socially-engaged learning in science, despite a dramatically altered academic landscape. This changed landscape includes the precarity of faculty status and autonomy, the contraction of institutional finances, unprecedented student needs and expectations, and frankly, the decline of administrative leadership in the face of political pressure, which has provided much less space for creativity and academic innovation. More
Creating new knowledge about change by combining research-based knowledge with the wisdom of practice
Posted: Feb 28 2023 by
Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
Kadian Callahan, Kennesaw State University
Target Audience: College/University Staff, Graduate Students, Post-doctoral Fellows, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
One of the core ideas behind the formation of the Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN) is to create and amplify knowledge by fostering interactions between two basic types of people who are working to improve postsecondary education: change researchers and change agents. While there is some overlap in these groups, they mostly operate independently. And, more importantly, each has access to different ideas and types of knowledge.
Through knowledge creation and amplification, ASCN builds capacity within and across these two groups to more successfully enact change in undergraduate STEM education. Specifically, ASCN uses the model of a "Knowledge Creating Company." This way to think about business organizations was first published by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) who credited it for the success of Japanese companies in the 1980s and 1990s. It has since become highly influential in focusing businesses worldwide on the importance of knowledge and knowledge creation. In contrast to the Western approach to knowledge management, which views knowledge as explicit, Japanese companies place significant value on tacit knowledge. More
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