Key Innovations of an EdD Program Focused on Critical Improvement Science

• In Event: Integrating Improvement Science Into Leadership Programs: Opportunities, Challenges, and Adaptations

Abstract

In recent years, twin innovations in leadership development—developing an equity lens and using improvement science (Mintrop, 2016; Perry et al., 2020)—both pose counter-normative demands on leaders’ mindsets and practices (Biag & Sherer, 2021; Peurach et al., 2022). Developing an equity lens calls upon leaders to adopt a systems perspective and critical view of structural roots of inequity (Gorski & Swalwell, 2015; Theoharis, 2009) embedded in an institution that has historically been an engine of reproduction. Using improvement science methods calls upon leaders to remedy intractable problems of practice through inquiry that is user-centered, iterative, and disciplined (Edwards et al., 2015; Peurach et al., 2022) while in an institutional environment that orients leaders towards top-down managerialism and “muddling through” (Authors, 2019).
One means to bridge these counter-normative demands is through the development of critical improvement science as a pedagogy for leadership development and research. Critical improvement science assumes that oppressive institutional structures become reproduced by routine practices of power and dehumanization that form within a complex system. As a pedagogy and research methodology, critical improvement science aims to disrupt “unfair treatment, unequal opportunity, and unequal access to information and resources in the education system“ (Valdez et al., 2020, p. 1). This calls upon leadership development program innovations that seek to transform institutional structures that have long been used to legitimize inequalities by race, class, and ability (Deschenes et al., 2001). This requires teaching materials and methods that help leaders to interrogate their own identities and practices, identify an actionable problem, understand the system that produces this, and challenge their assumptions about it by listening to the voices of people involved in the change.
This paper reports on key innovations in one three-year online EdD program that is shifting towards critical improvement science as a signature pedagogy and in which the authors are faculty members. Drawing upon key program artifacts, including program handbooks and student work products, this paper traces programmatic changes over several years during which faculty developed and implemented critical improvement science as a signature pedagogy. Firstly, a focus on equity, particularly racial equity, was introduced at the point of application for admission and continued throughout all coursework. Related programmatic changes for centering equity included requiring students’ focal problems of practice to be equity-relevant, articulating program-wide equity literacy standards, purposefully structuring opportunities for identity work into program assessments and texts, and introducing a group qualifying exam that demands critical dialogue about oppression. Secondly, content courses and methods courses were adapted to privilege a more human-centered approach to defining and addressing problems of practice. Towards this end, course assessments and dissertation milestones were changed to require diverse stakeholder perspectives through empathy interviews and to involve stakeholders as collaborators in the improvement process. Thirdly, innovations were introduced to promote program coherence and alignment, including: changing course sequences, adding content and assignment bridges between concurrent courses, building dissertation-in-practice products into course assignments, and changing the dissertation-in-practice format.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. Zumpe, University of Oklahoma
  Presenting Author

• Phitsamay Sychitkokhong Uy, University of Massachusetts - Lowell
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stacy Agee Szczesiul, University of Massachusetts - Lowell
  Non-Presenting Author