Positioning Faculty Experts as Change Agents

Centers for teaching and learning and similar units within universities can serve critical change leadership roles. This poster uses the case of one center to highlight the rationale, strategies, and benefits of positioning faculty as change agents. Our center provides professional and organizational development to other institutions by collaborating with faculty across our university who serve as experts in particular practices, disciplines, and types of courses. Partnering with faculty to fulfill center programming can serve institutional change agendas and scale effective practices across higher education while simultaneously building faculty portfolios towards tenure and promotion. The center also intentionally promotes access, equity and inclusion by choosing to position faculty with marginalized identities as having expertise and authority.

The case is organized using the POD Network's (2018) hub-incubator-temple-sieve framework. The poster describes each of these metaphors, which were originally developed to explain higher education's function in US society (Stevens, Armstrong, & Arum, 2008) and then applied to articulate the work of teaching and learning centers, in terms of their unique change strategies. Examples of how each of the four change strategies is implemented by the focal center are provided, along with specific change agents and their change work.

For example, the center sponsors Faculty Fellows to develop a practice supporting project-based learning that would be useful for others. Carried out in the summer when there are no competing priorities and supported by a generous stipend to counteract norms of unpaid labor, these fellowships serve as a critical incubator that result in citable products that count in the university's tenure and promotion policies. The resulting practices benefit the center's nation-wide change work by providing additional expertise and content to share; it sustains the university's change work to embrace PBL institution-wide by marketing its value proposition. Several other examples will also be provided.