Presentations: Session E

Capacity within higher education institutions is held in its people. Institutional change is a complex and messy business that cannot happen unless people change attitudes and behaviors (Armenakis, Harris, & Mossholder, 1993; Abrell-Vogel & Rowold, 2014). A human-centered change approach is reflected in recent reimaginings of faculty development as institutional change (Schroeder, 2012; Kelley, Cruz, & Fire, 2017) and calls for leadership in sustainable development (Verhulst & Lambrechts, 2015), among others.

To be successful and sustainable, capacity building needs to support the development of people within the contexts that matter to them (Merriam, 2011). Such approaches must be dynamic, contextualized, and individualized. For those charged with leading capacity building and other change efforts, the questions become, how do you create a process such that people want to continue to engage in this work? How do you design a change process that foucses on connecting people to each other? In this talk we will share guiding principles and key design elements for creating engaging and human-centered capacity building to support your institutional change efforts.

These learnings come from our experience as part of an NSF-funded IUSE Capacity Building grant. As part of our dissemination efforts, we offer navigational capital for designing, implementing, and adjusting capacity building activities, resources, and initiatives. Strategies include, for example, assembling the change team and getting to know your system. The lessons are designed around four principles: 1) Hold a position of humility; 2) Center the project around the people in it; 3) Design for good process and trust that the products will emerge; and 4) Trust your team to do the work that needs to be done.

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.

There is growing accomplishment in developing guiding theories of change over the years. The successful application of connecting a change theory and practice, however, depends on the reliability of the variables of the theory. Having been participating in the activities of transforming institutions as well as other bodies advocating inclusion, diversity and equity, it has been observed that there are a number of variables which makes the educational ecosystem of the US to be different from that of Africa represented here by Nigeria. In this current project, five of these variables (Racism/ethnicity, religion, culture, gender and government funding policy) are investigated to determine their impacts on the applicability of selected existing US theories of change in the Nigeria ecosystem. The outcome is that these selected theories need to be modified if they are to be applied as guiding theories of change to effect institutional transformation in the Nigeria ecosystem. In principle, this study will have similar implications for ecosystems in the other African countries as well as other continents in which the aforementioned variables are different from those of the US.