Pedagogically aware academics’ conceptions of change agency in the fields of science and technology

Clavert, Maria; Löfström, Erika; Nevgi, Anne

doi:10.1080/1360144x.2015.1064430

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…My work as an academic developer has provided access to working environments that allowed me to gain insights into the practice of teachers, working groups and collegial leaders. This has also meant that I have gained legitimacy in the organisation under exploration (Clavert, Löfström & Nevgi, 2015). However, there is a concern that I have not been able to define my role in the project well enough in relation to the research phenomenon.…”

Section: Methodological Reflectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is important that the academic development community who work closely with leadership and academic staff within HEI striving towards enhancement practice understand the complexity of the situation, but also understand what obstacles stand in the way of academic staff, working groups and collegial leaders. The academic developer community is concerned with how to work with academic staff in change initiatives (Gibbs, 2013;Debowski, 2014;Clavert, Löfström & Nevgi, 2015). The above concerns prompt a range of questions, including: How do leaders in the university, many of whom have little or no experience and limited training as leaders, go about decision-making and working with the process of change?…”

Section: Collegiality Academic Leadership Distributed Leadership Anmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the fact that universities have engaged in formal activities for developing teachers' and leaders' competence since the 1960s (Ashwin & Trigwell, 2004;Bolander Laksov, 2007;Steinert, Naismith & Mann, 2012), the field of academic development is still a nascent one in terms of clarifying its identity, functions and methodologies (Debowski, 2014). There is an ongoing debate in the academic developer community on how to best work with stakeholders; with some scholars suggesting a move away from centralist course-like approaches, where training is offered in the form of courses, seminars and workshops (Bolden et al, 2008;Roxå & Mårtensson, 2008;Gibbs, 2013) to more adaptive, reflective partnership approaches that enable the academic developer community to be invited to and engage with more localized groups, and that accommodates and recognises their specific needs (Debowski, 2014;Clavert, Löfström & Nevgi, 2015). My hope is that the theoretical and empirical work presented herein will offer food for thought on how academic developers engage with their audiences.…”

Section: Audiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The term 'change agent' is used in this thesis to identify someone at the university who has been appointed, often through a selection process among colleagues or by volunteering, to work as a driver of change, primarily in relation to education-oriented activity. In the literature, change agents are identified using different terms, as is illustrated in the work of Clavert et al, where they acknowledge that: "the term 'change agent' has been referred to as an organisational actor with official developer status, such as faculty developer… educational developer… academic staff developer… and professional developer" (Clavert, Löfström, & Nevgi, 2015) (References removed from original citation). The aforementioned terms are usually used in relation to people who have a specific developer role.…”

Section: What Is a Change Agent?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The respondents that were approached were known to have initiated extensive changes within their local context. We used the nomenclature of change agents when designing and writing the study, but would today perhaps opt for another term: 'pedagogical aware academics', for example, seems more apt (Clavert, Löfström, Nevgi, 2015). The study aimed at elucidating to what extent the change agents worked systematically with change and to what extent their reasoning about change was informed by theory and models.…”

Section: Framing the Five Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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During the last 15 years, I have worked as an academic developer. The last ten at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. There, I have encountered many people with a passion for education. They have attended courses and workshops, developed educational projects, conducted the scholarship of teaching and learning, they have written about their work, documented it and have had the very best of intentions on developing their practice. Most often, their work is driven by a desire to improve, and often to explore. At their core, these people are disciplinarians, and not necessarily fully-fledged educators or leaders. My work has been about informing their practice, about driving academic and educational development across campus, and has been about initiating and enabling change in academic, educationally oriented practice. At the same time, higher education in Sweden has witnessed the introduction of the Bologna process. The higher education sector in Sweden has started to charge a tuition fee for some foreign students and the sector is about to enter a new and novel cycle of national, external reviews under the guise of quality assurance. Higher education finds itself in a constant predicament, where things are always in flow and changing, but still tend to stay the same; the same river, but it keeps flowing. This thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of change practice. As an academic developer, I have witnessed many teachers whom, with enthusiasm, wish to change their own practice, only to find that this is easier said than done. This thesis and research project is driven in part by a wish to understand what makes change so difficult but also how people work with the enhancing and changing their practice. Moreover, it is used as an opportunity to reflect on my own, and others' academic development practice, to see how we can better serve the university, and its stakeholders, and to also pursue independent academic research in the context of academic development in higher education. At the same time this thesis and the research work done within, has allowed me an opportunity to take a look at the way a university works when engaging in capacity building and change practice. The title of this thesis is adapted from a collection of short stories, entitled: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. There, the short stories play out in common and ordinary settings. In a similar fashion, the studies in this thesis, and the thesis itself presents a number of snapshots or short stories from the practice of change in a higher education institution.

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Section: Methodological Reflectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Collegiality Academic Leadership Distributed Leadership Anmentioning

confidence: 99%