The Support Resources Dimensions: Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning

• In Event: Collaborative Engagement in Higher Education Reform Networks: Applying a Framework to Understand Network Dynamics

Abstract

The Center for the Integration of Research, teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) is a fifteen-year-old network of approximately 40 universities, working together to prepare the next generation of faculty in STEM areas (current doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows) to be excellent teachers as well as strong researchers. CIRTL bases its work on three key ideas: teaching-as-research, a process through which participants learn to use their skills of inquiry to ask questions, gather data about, reflect on, and improve their teaching and their students’ learning; learning-through-diversity, which helps future faculty learn how to use the diversity in their classrooms to deepen learning for all; and learning communities, which focuses on the ways in which functional communities in classrooms or among future faculty provide support for each individual’s learning. Participants in CIRTL programs can engage at various achievement levels, each with designated learning outcomes; participants may reach the Associate, Practitioner, or Scholar level. Each member university provides a learning community experience that offers professional development, guided by the core ideas of CIRTL, to support its doctoral and post-doc participants to prepare as future faculty. The Network as a whole offers various workshops, courses, and learning opportunities, both online and in-person, open to the whole network to supplement institutional professional development opportunities and provide diverse learning contexts for future faculty.

The Collaborative Dynamics Framework, with its elements of motivation, group norms and processes, support resources, and leadership, highlights important issues that CIRTL has had to address across its 15-year history. The element of “support resources” is an aspect of the Framework that indicates that networks must continuously grapple with the availability of sufficient resources (including funding, staffing, technology, and expertise) as well as the allocation of those resources. In this network, for example, external funding has helped to shape network priorities and processes; for example, the initial founding of CIRTL came about in response to a National Science Foundation grant competition and thus the priorities of CIRTL paralleled national STEM priorities. Also, responsiveness to one of the funders for CIRTL led to strong attention to the numbers of participants produced at each of the three achievement levels. That is, what CIRTL has focused on accomplishing, and how it prioritizes aspects of its functioning, relate to what the Framework highlights as the availability of support resources. In its several rounds of adding new institutional members, CIRTL also has had to grapple with the issue of allocation of resources to member institutions. For example, what is needed to provide appropriate and equitable support to network members as the number of member institutions grows? The issues confronted in CIRTL’s history illustrate how availability of resources and allocation of resources are important elements of network functioning. In summary, the experiences of CIRTL illustrate the issues involved in what the Framework calls “Support Resources,” part of the dynamics of network functioning that affect network impact.

Author

• Ann E. Austin, Michigan State University