Abstract
As colleges and universities strive to change and improve, organizational learning has emerged as an important tool to facilitate change. At the same time, foundations and funders are increasingly promoting scaled change through projects that bring multiple institutions together to learn from one another. However, to date, there is little research on organizational learning in multi-institutional change initiatives or the unique challenges of promoting learning in cross-institutional settings. This paper focuses on one such effort, the AAU STEM Initiative, and outlines barriers to organizational learning that can result when national organizations attempt to facilitate learning among sets of college campuses.
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Notes
Scaling change refers to significantly increasing the usage of a policy or practice. Scale can occur at multiple levels. It can be at the institutional level where a small-scale or pilot project spreads across an institution. It can also refer to a practice or policy that is diffused from one institution to many others.
The research also explored how AAU aligned and worked with other groups such as the National Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Center and the National Academies, for example. But this paper does not focus on that issue, as it was not central to the learning argument.
In general, though, there is very little research in higher education on organizational learning. Two recent literature reviews by Ortenblad & Koris (2014) and Dee & Leisyte (2016) identified only 73 studies of organizational learning in higher education and noted that this literature was not cumulative and studies were disparate, not building on each other. Many of these studies were descriptive or prescriptive, and few were empirical.
There is also a growing research base outside higher education, often termed inter-organizational learning, which may not be formally coordinated by external organizations but is driven through practices such as benchmarking or through loosely affiliated groups and organizations (Easterby-Smith et al. 1999; Jones and Macpherson 2006). One study by Jones and Macpherson (2006) is distinctive, though, in examining the role of a coordinating organization among a group of small and medium sized (SMEs) manufacturing organizations. These authors identified a pattern in which the external organizations provided information, but without helping the SMEs set up systems to process the information the learning was not well integrated back into the companies. The more active the external organization was in supporting learning in the individual companies it was working with, the more organizational learning that occurred.
Some scholars argue that a focus on rationality leaves little room to conceptualize a role for human agency in the learning process because self-interests and emotions are inherent in the concept of agency (Caldwell 2012).
Due to space restrictions, we do not review the mechanisms that seemed related to creating learning. Our study identified the following processes as supporting learning and change—the format of the request for proposals for the project sites, encouragement to work in teams and across departments, site visits by AAU, visiting another project site, networking meetings, feedback on annual reports. Yet, the largest gap in knowledge appeared to be around barriers, thus the focus of this paper.
It is important to note that there are multiple levels of learning and they are interconnected. The Initiative shared information across the participating universities—this is the cross-campus learning level. Actors inside these universities (faculty and administrators at the project sites) acquired this information and then that knowledge needed to be transferred to the STEM academic departments or central office that supported their work of pedagogical innovation (within-campus learning). So the knowledge may have had to “move” twice: first, from the AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative to the key players inside the institution; and second, from those key players needed to support and scale changes to a broader set of individuals to implement. We focus on the first level in this paper. It is also important to note that very little learning occurred on individual campuses, as well. Scaling of changes was minimal at sites or in the network. Barriers to individual campus learning reflected many of the existing challenges noted in the literature, made less of a unique contribution to the literature, and thus are not a focus in this article.
The AAU was very aware of the concept of isomorphism and one of their assumptions on the project was to use normative isomorphism in order to influence change. This is the topic of another paper from the study.
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Kezar, A.J., Holcombe, E.M. Barriers to organizational learning in a multi-institutional initiative. High Educ 79, 1119–1138 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00459-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00459-4