Understanding Faculty Resistance as Agentic Authorship within Individual and Organizational Learning Processes: A Theoretical Framework

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Creating and sustaining organizational change that can address persistent challenges in higher education is complex and difficult work that often fails. Within the extant literature on change in higher education, faculty resistance is generally ignored or demonized, framed as an obstruction. This poster describes a theoretical framework that draws on theoretical and empirical work on workplace learning, agency, resistance, and intersectional power relations to broaden and reframe our understanding of faculty resistance, considering it a form of engagement and an exercise of agency and authorship shaped by identity and commitments and aimed at developing workplace policies and practices. This framework supports an ongoing study examining how agency, professional identities, power relations, and workplace practices are both interdependent and renegotiated in the context of faculty resistance, as well as the role of resistance in individual and organizational learning and change.

Author

• Susannah Davis, University of New Mexico