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The AAU STEM Initiative from the beginning has been informed by broader theoretical perspectives about organizational change in academia and about faculty work and rewards.
AAU’s Framework for Systemic Change to Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning recognizes the wider setting in which educational innovations take place — the department, the college, the university and the external environment — and addresses key institutional elements necessary for sustained improvement to undergraduate STEM education. The Framework was developed in collaboration with member universities.
The core of AAU’s Framework is pedagogy: the practices used by faculty members to engage students and guide and support their learning. To successfully enact and institutionalize the use of evidence-based teaching techniques, two layers around this pedagogical core are necessary: scaffolding, or support, for both faculty and students, and larger cultural change to facilitate changing teaching practices.
Ultimately, the Framework provides a set of key elements that need to be addressed to bring about sustainable change at an institutional level.
The Framework addresses organizational change at two levels—broadly, at the multi-institutional level and locally, at the university or college level. From a multi-institutional perspective, the Framework provides a commitment to a systems approach to change and a unifying goal, one that includes a shared understanding of the challenges and a set of key institutional elements that must be addressed to bring about sustainable change.
Yet, the Framework allows for universities and colleges to use diverse strategies and approaches to achieve the common goal, as different strategies and approaches will be effective for achieving systemic improvement in STEM teaching and learning at different institutions. Thus, the Framework is highly adaptable and respects local institutional culture and history.
Visit aau.edu/STEM to see examples of innovative institutional efforts and how they are mapped to elements of the Framework.
The Framework has proved central to several elements of the AAU Initiative, from guiding campus thinking to selection of the funded and highly visible project sites to recent efforts to organize information about resources available to campuses to facilitate continued conversation about change, especially surrounding the need for continual assessment of reform efforts.