Characterizing the Emerging Field of Departmental Change

Innovations and improvements in STEM undergraduate education have historically been focused on the individual classroom level, but such efforts are largely ineffective in accomplishing systemic, sustained change. Recently, team-based change models at the department level have succeeded in catalyzing sustained cultural and curricular change in STEM. However, the rapid growth of departmental change projects has resulted in a group of practitioners that are not well networked, and structures for sharing practices and resources are not well developed. To address these needs, our project integrates research and the development of a community network through (1) conducting a landscape study of undergraduate STEM education departmental change projects that investigates their methods for supporting change and (2) catalyzing an inclusive community network for sharing findings and recommended practices.

Our landscape study includes two phases. First, we are assembling a database of past and current departmental change projects across many academic disciplines. We are including projects that are situated at the department level, involve multiple departmental change agents, and aim to improve undergraduate education via department-wide structural, climate, curricular, and/or pedagogical change. Next, we will enroll a purposive sample of change projects from the database in an in-depth qualitative study. We will enroll at least one project from each institutional type represented in the database, and we will include as many different approaches to departmental change as possible.

As our project is still in the early stages, our poster will focus on the first phase. We will present the state of our database and the instruments that we intend to use to gather in-depth information about the projects in our sample.