Presentation Schedule
Characterizing Evolution in Departmental Change (102075)
Session Chair: Jaclyn Rivard
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 7 January 2026 18:00
Session: Session 3 (Parallel)
Room: Live-Stream Room 3
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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Innovations and improvements in STEM undergraduate education have historically been focused on the individual classroom level, but such efforts are largely ineffective in accomplishing systemic, sustained change. Recently, team-based change models at the department level have succeeded in catalyzing sustained cultural and curricular change in STEM. However, the rapid growth of departmental change projects has resulted in a group of practitioners that are not well networked, and structures for sharing practices and resources are not well developed. To address these needs, we conducted a landscape study of undergraduate STEM education departmental change projects that investigated their methods for supporting change. Our landscape study included two completed phases. First, we assembled a comprehensive database of past and current departmental change projects across many academic disciplines. We included projects that were situated at the department level, involved multiple departmental change agents, and aimed to improve undergraduate education via department-wide structural, climate, curricular, and/or pedagogical change. Second, we enrolled a purposive sample of change projects from the database in an in-depth qualitative study, including at least one project from each institutional type represented in the database and incorporating diverse approaches to departmental change. Our findings from the qualitative study paint a picture of the departmental change landscape that shows this work is spreading across institutions and disciplines. The approaches being implemented are rich and diverse, demonstrating the growing momentum and varied pathways for sustainable STEM education transformation at the departmental level.
Authors:
Jaclyn Rivard, The University of Southern Mississippi, United States
Sarah Wise, University of Colorado, United States
Courtney Ngai, Colorado State University, United States
Joel Corbo, University of Colorado, United States
About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Jaclyn Rivard is currently an Assistant Professor and Chair of Higher Education Leadership at National Louis University in Chicago, IL, USA.
Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaclynrivard/
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