Guiding Faculty Development with Strong Structuration

We will present on the Rutgers Teaching Excellence Network (TEN). TEN was funded by a 5-year NSF IUSE grant (institutional and community transformation track) as part of a multidisciplinary collaboration of science and engineering faculty and Learning Center staff. The main goal of the TEN program was to create structural support for faculty who were attempting to transform their courses and engage with research-based pedagogy.

Up until 2020, faculty teaching development efforts on the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus were de-centralized, and the siloes and disconnected communication channels resulted in poor awareness of programs and opportunities, as well as a perception that teaching support was scarce. This challenge was exacerbated by many STEM departments including only a few dedicated teaching faculty, who were isolated from each other, a context that persists in some departments. TEN was designed to network resources, centralize communications, and bring siloed faculty together to increase access to the various programs across campus.

TEN is grounded in the theory of Strong Structuration, which we have used to guide our change process and inform the program structure. Strong Structuration connects social and institutional structures to faculty agency, allowing us to design and modify structure to support faculty as pedagogical change agents. We interviewed faculty who teach at Rutgers to understand how institutional structures impact faculty members' agency and decision making in course transformation. We have used an iterative thematic analysis to support deductive, theory-based coding of our interview data (using Structuration theory for our analysis) to determine how structural changes achieved through TEN supported faculty success in pedagogical growth and implementations of course transformations. Our presentation will focus on how Structuration theory has guided the development of TEN programs, and the impacts we observe in our interviews with instructors who have participated in TEN programing.