Abstract

Background

Change leaders (faculty, administrators, and/or external stakeholders) need to develop relational expertise, recognizing the perspectives of others, to enable emergent, systemic change. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty relationships and social subgroups to identify who was involved in discussions about teaching and learning and what specific topics were discussed.

Results

Faculty discussions focused on daily classroom needs. Faculty who were in different departments or schools were mostly disconnected from each other, and faculty within these units often had subdivisions among them.

Conclusions

Faculty lacked opportunities to discuss education, specifically, systems-level perspectives. The change leaders created organizational structures to catalyze communities, including an action research fellowship program, to support faculty in education discussions.

Details

Title
Using social network analysis to develop relational expertise for an instructional change initiative
Author
Fisher, Kathleen Quardokus 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Sitomer, Ann 2 ; Bouwma-Gearhart, Jana 3 ; Koretsky, Milo 4 

1  Department of Earth & Environment and STEM Transformation Institute, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA 
2  Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA 
3  College of Education, Postsecondary STEM Education, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA 
4  School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA 
Pages
1-12
Publication year
2019
Publication date
May 2019
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
e-ISSN
21967822
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-019-0172-5
ProQuest document ID
2226004015
Copyright
International Journal of STEM Education is a copyright of Springer, (2019). All Rights Reserved., © 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.