A Framework for Transforming Departmental Culture to Support Educational Innovation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for transforming departmental culture in higher education to foster sustainable educational innovation, emphasizing systemic change across university levels.

Contribution

It presents a novel, research-based framework that integrates organizational and cultural change theories to guide holistic institutional change efforts.

Findings

Framework supports coordinated change activities across university levels

Illustrated with a real-world change project at a large research university

Enhances the effectiveness of systemic educational reforms

Abstract

This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these features have limited the success of such efforts at achieving sustained, systemic change. Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature. We use examples from a change project that we have been carrying out at a large research university to illustrate how our framework can be used as a basis for planning and implementing holistic change.