Topical SEED invitations: ADVANCE community

As a study participant, we will ask you to

• sign the consent form:  You'll receive a DocuSign message from research assistant Diana Roque.  (You can pre-read the consent form if you wish: review copy here)
• accept our invitation to join our secure SERC website where you will find discussion prompts and group bios. (You'll receive this invitation from SERC specialist Mitchell Awalt-Bender, 10-14 days before your SEED session.)
• review the materials on the SERC site to prepare for your SEED:  We'll ask you to read everyone's bio sketch and reflect on discussion prompts  (~30-40 min).
• take part in one SEED session, online via Zoom (2 hours, with a break).
• complete a short follow-up questionnaire (3-5 minutes).
• communicate with us if your schedule changes, so that we can find someone else to fill your spot.

For spring term 2024, we are scheduling SEEDs on two topics, with two dates offered for each:

• Building and Sustaining a Leadership Team: Feb. 20, Mar 7
• Developing Strategic Relationships: Apr 4, Apr 17

You'll choose just ONE session, with the topic and date you prefer. To review the specific dates and times in your time zone, and to claim a spot in the SEED of your choice, go to the Sign-up link. Groups are already filled for some dates.

These change processes are distinct from the particular interventions or strategies chosen to enact change. By interventions, we mean activities such as training faculty search committees or altering policies to better support faculty work/life balance. Rather, we believe that certain change processes support change interventions, for example helping

• to organize people and work
• to identify and strengthen synergies across multiple strands of effort
• to use data for making decisions and communicating outcomes 
• to build connections with allies or stakeholder groups. 

By strengthening linkages among interventions and deepening their impact as a group, effective change processes may also help to sustain and institutionalize changes that a project has achieved. Because of their supportive and structural role, we call these "scaffolding" processes. As examples, processes related to leadership, data use, evaluation, collaboration, and communication have been important in prior ADVANCE projects. Our research team seeks

1. To identify, analyze and explain these scaffolding processes as seen in ADVANCE change projects
2. To deepen and test our understanding of these processes with experienced change leaders of equity-directed change projects both within and beyond ADVANCE, thereby exploring the relevance of this new knowledge to a variety of change domains across hiehr education
3. To offer useful findings and strategies to scholars and change agents who study and carry out work on faculty-based institutional change to improve STEM education and broaden participation. 

Why take a systems approach to institutional change in higher education?

Many agencies call for "systemic" and "institutional" change in STEM higher education to address challenging problems, such as ineffective teaching, disengaged learning, and exclusionary environments. At root these challenges are embedded in complex systems of multiple, intertwined subsystems. These systems are often based in tradition and cultural patterns that may be neither explicit nor purposely designed. Thus solving these challenges will require more than a single intervention by a single stakeholder-- a systemic approach is required. Systemic approaches will combine interventions strategically and deploy multiple levers of change at multiple levels of the institution. Given their complexity, such change projects will be more likely to succeed if their leaders can draw upon robust research as they design and implement their projects. Change leaders must consider not only what to do to address the problem they want to solve, but how they will do so: how they will promote, connect, and sustain the interventions they have designed; engage institutional leaders and stakeholders; and respond to resistance or setbacks.

What types of institutional change inform the study?

Projects supported by NSF's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) program, and increasingly by ADVANCE Adaptation projects, have developed multi-level, multi-lever portfolios of interventions to address the multi-faceted, multi-causal sources of gender inequity on STEM faculties. In prior research, our team has specifically studied interventions to increase gender equity, and in doing so identified a set of processes that seem to function as essential scaffolding for the change interventions. We are now investigating these scaffolding processes that support and link particular interventions, and in doing so appear to enhance their synergistic effects and deepen institutional impact. 

Because ADVANCE projects already draw on a well-established body of interventions that identify what to do, they serve as good study sites to learn how such change work can best be accomplished.In this phase of the research, we are also expanding the set of study sites "beyond ADVANCE," to include other types of institutional change in higher education, such as reforms of STEM instruction to better support student learning, persistence, and inclusion.

SEEDs emphasize structured dialogue between our research team and a group of experienced change leaders and observers, and draw on participants' expertise on their own change work and institutional context. Through a collaborative enquiry process, we generate insights that are useful to us as researchers and to project teams as change agents. Topical SEEDs involve 4-5 people from different change projects or who hold different change roles (scholars, leaders, evaluators, and more), and each focuses on a particular scaffolding process.

Our research also draws on documents from change projects, individual interviews, and campus SEEDs with people who have worked together on a particular change project. Together, these sources of qualitative data enable us to develop a rich and nuanced picture of individual change projects, make conceptual connections across projects, and describe the range and variety of processes that change projects may deploy in diverse institutional settings. 

What topics will SEED participants discuss?

Each SEED will address a single topic. In spring 2024, we are exploring two topics with ADVANCE community members:

1. Building and Sustaining a Leadership Team: How are change teams constructed? What skills, capacities and roles are helpful? How do teams work together? How do teams manage conflict, plan for succession, and respond to opportunities or road blocks?
2. Developing and Nurturing Strategic Relationships: What relationships with other people and units on campus are helpful? How do teams identify mutual interests, find allies and build relationships with them? What approaches have been fruitful for cultivating connections with senior institutional leaders? What challenges do teams face in relating to senior leaders and other allies, and how do they address, sidestep or overcome these?

Past SEEDs have explored Strategic Use of Data and Strategic Communication Processes.

What is involved in a SEED?

The SEED discussion will explore organizational change processes with other people who can offer diverse perspectives on your project and its internal workings. We want to hear about working processes that you have found important in your particular context and why. We will ask you to be reflective and analytical, and to speak to what has not worked, as well as what has worked. We do not expect the group to reach consensus; we value differences in perspective and honor them as revealing insight. 

SEEDs will take place on Zoom. Each session is 2 hours long, with a break midway, and live transcription is enabled. Before your session, we’ll send everyone some discussion prompts and ask you to reflect in advance, so that you have some thoughts ready to share. During the session, our team will set the scene and guide group members to share some experiences drawn from your pre-reflections. Then we will collectively drill deeper into the specific process of focus to learn more about whether and how this process facilitated your team’s success in any way.  Our goal is to have a generative and interesting conversation informed by diverse experiences. 

Past participants have found the SEED a very interesting opportunity to reflect on their own work, to place it in context with ADVANCE and other equity initiatives, and to contribute to research that will help others drive institutional change. For example, one participant said, “I feel energized by the unique stories shared around data but more importantly the themes and patterns that emerged across our experiences. It was validating to hear of similar successes and challenges.”

Who will participate?

We find that SEEDs work best when the group represents a variety of perspectives:  campus change agents, researchers, evaluators, administrators, and people who have worked with campus projects in a variety of roles. We will ask you to read everyone's bio in advance of the SEED, and we will structure the conversation so that you get to know a bit about each other and learn from each other.

In every case, we will treat these conversations as confidential, kept within the research team and group participants. We will ask everyone to provide informed consent. (You can read a copy of the consent form in advance if you wish).

Ready to sign up?

Studying these interventions, and how they worked in different institutional contexts, led us to become curious about the broader processes that may shape, coordinate, and synergize multiple interventions within the overall change portfolio, and about how those processes are similar or different in diverse institutional contexts. We have noticed many similar processes in other change projects related to STEM instruction, evaluation of teaching, and other domains.

• The StratEGIC Toolkit includes analyses of key strategies used by ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) projects and how strategies were combined by different IT projects. Video interviews with institutional leaders describe institutional innovations and explore cross-cutting challenges for change leaders.
• Laursen & Austin's 2020 book, Building Gender Equity in the Academy: Institutional Strategies for Change, is a handbook and how-to guide for leaders. The book offers guidance on research-based strategies to enhance gender equity on STEM faculties and how to analyze the organizational context to make choices about what strategies may best fit your institution.
• Laursen & De Welde's 2019 article, The changer and the changed: Evolving theories and practices of change in ADVANCE calls for institutional transformation, examines how the National Science Foundation's call for proposals to the ADVANCE program has evolved over time. Some of the organizational change processes we are now studying arise from expectations developed in response to earlier projects' experiences and challenges.
• De Welde's 2015 book (with Andi Stepnick), Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education, examines the challenges women face in the academy and suggest tools for advancing gender equality and equity in higher education.
• Laursen led the Levers for Change study (2019), an examination of what has helped (or not) in transforming undergraduate STEM instruction toward research-based practices.
• Austin co-chaired the National Academies’ Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education, which recognizes the need for and difficulty of systemic change to improve college students’ learning and experiences in STEM.

• Sandra Laursen, University of Colorado Boulder 

Sandra is senior research associate and co-director of Ethnography & Evaluation Research (E&ER), where she leads research and evaluation studies focusing on education and career paths in science and mathematics. Her studies of organizational change in higher education have addressed STEM faculty use of active learning practices and gender equity on STEM faculties. Laursen has published widely on inquiry- and research-based learning in math and science, professional development of STEM instructors, graduate education, career development, and science outreach. She studied chemistry and French at Grinnell College and the University of California Berkeley. She is a singer, a birder, and a keen traveler.

• Ann E. Austin, Michigan State University

Ann is University Distinguished Professor in the Michigan State University College of Education and recently served as Interim Associate Provost and Vice President for MSU's Office for Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs. Austin's research concerns faculty careers and professional development, organizational change in higher education, teaching and learning in higher education, doctoral education, reform in STEM education, the academic workplace, equity and inclusion in academe and higher education in the international context. She currently co-chairs the National Academies of Sciences Roundtable on Systemic Reform in Undergraduate STEM Education. She was a founding co-PI and leader of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), funded by the National Science Foundation, and principal investigator (with Laursen) of an NSF-funded ADVANCE PAID grant to study organizational change strategies that support the success of women scholars in STEM fields. Current work focuses on how networks of organizations are contributing to reform in STEM education, and improvements in teaching evaluation in higher education.

• Kristine De Welde, College of Charleston

Kris is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and of Sociology at the College of Charleston (SC). She earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in the study of intersectional inequalities in higher education and organizational change for academic justice as well as liberation-focused pedagogies. Her book with Andi Stepnick, Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education, received a 2015 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title. De Welde has delivered numerous conference keynote addresses, interactive workshops and formal lectures at campuses across the country on concerns about equity and inclusion, social justice leadership, and gender. She was awarded the 2016-2017 Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Activism Award for her sustained commitments to social justice within and beyond the academy.

• Diana Roque, University of Colorado Boulder

Diana has an undergraduate degree in biology and masters in biology teaching, with experience as a K-12 classroom teacher and as an informal science educator in the US and her native Brazil.  She is interested in inquiry-based learning, development of students’ critical thinking and research skills, and integrated STEM and STEAM curricula.  She carried out qualitative research for her master’s thesis study of citizen science and science literacy of elementary school students.  She works with E&ER on two studies of organizational change processes in STEM higher education. 

Our advisors include people experienced with leadership, research and evaluation of ADVANCE and other change projects in higher education.

• Kimberly A. Griffin, University of Maryland College Park - external evaluator
• Mary Armstrong, Lafayette College
• Ellen Iverson, Carleton College
• Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, Caltech
• Lance Pérez, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
• Sue Rosser, California State University system (retired)
• James E. Swartz, Grinnell College