A Case Study of How STEM Education Practitioners Think about Change Theory, Change Strategies, and Making Relevant Project Choices

Practitioners can be challenged in understanding the language around change strategies and change theories in developing projects to bring about institutional change because of a lack of insider knowledge about how change theory research and its applicability in different contexts. We will describe a project (with origins that go back nearly a decade) that was designed to employ emergent approaches to expand the toolbox each faculty member has in supporting student quantitative skills development and review across multiple courses and disciplines, and communities of practice to support faculty in efforts to help students strengthen quantitative skills. We will provide an overview of the context in which we were trying to initiate change – a consortium of small liberal arts colleges – and what we saw as the benefits and drawbacks of working across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. We will consider how approaches to engagement changed when the project transitioned from an informal grassroots effort to a more formalized effort informed by some of the literature on change theory and change strategies. Finally, as project leaders, we will consider the frameworks and approaches that we intended to use to promote and measure change at the beginning of the project and reflect on what we've learned from our change efforts – both in terms of successes and failures. From this case study of a single project, we will distill lessons learned from the project and our engagement with the change theory literature to support other practitioners in successfully moving forward with their projects.