Building Capacity for Sustainable Leadership in Science Faculty

• In Event: Symposium | Enabling Non-Leadership Faculty to Teach Leadership Concepts to Address Complex Contextual Problems

Short Description

In this session of the symposium, work will be shared highlighting the use of grants to establish professional academies on critical thinking and organizational leadership for science faculty. The purpose of these projects was to enhance the preparation of science faculty to teach these topics, blended with real issues. These academies have been created and implemented with sustainability at the forefront of the instructional methods used. Further, case studies focused on a broad range of sustainability issues have been created by faculty participants of the academies. These materials are all available through the Global Learning Lab website.

Detailed Abstract

One of the greatest challenges we face is creating a better and more inhabitable world. Universities are one such place for discourse around the complex problems that we face. However, universities are also places where faculty (lecturers/professors) from a variety of backgrounds and expertise are expected to facilitate and guide discussions of certain complexities. Universities have challenged with developing graduates’ competencies, both in technical and soft skill areas (National Research Council, 2009). Technical skills are those largely associated with core content knowledge of a degree program in which faculty have been thoroughly trained. Crawford, et al. (2011) defined soft skills to include teamwork, communication, leadership/change management, decision making/problem solving, self-management, and professionalism. However, these soft skills are not typically included in the professional development process for faculty, especially from an instructional standpoint (Owen, 2015).
One such avenue for ensuring graduates are prepared for these complexities, both in how they understand organizations and how they think about such issues, is to prepare faculty for these instructional needs. Faculty preparation models vary, some leaning on expertise within the university, others employing development experts to coach or train faculty, and another is the use of faculty academies. Such academies often require financial and time resources but are effective in their outcomes.
Grants and other sponsored project funds are structured ways to garner funding for such academies. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is one such funding agency. While their funding opportunities are structured in a manner to address key issues around agriculture and natural resources, these same issues are often at the source of our own sustainability challenges. Agriculture and natural resources are an appropriate context for working to address sustainable development goals. With that in mind, a team of faculty have two distinct academies through the NIFA Higher Education Challenge Grant Program.
Faculty participants for the Global Thinking Academy (GTA) and the Preparing Organizational Leaders in Agriculture (POLA) were recruited from colleges of agriculture across the southeastern United States and represented a breadth of agricultural disciplines, including biological, ecological, and social science fields. Each academy followed a similar model of implementation, a series of online instructional modules coupled with a field experience to give a contextual application.
Faculty participants in each academy spent a semester (16 weeks) completing the academy modules. The GTA included nine modules created by the grant team designed to improve faculty participants’ understanding of critical thinking pedagogy, use of instructional media, and how to teach contentious topics. All of these topics prepared faculty to integrate critical thinking into their courses, but also how to guide and facilitate difficult conversations around topics related to sustainability. In order to facilitate the field experience, faculty were taken to Belize to see first-hand the on-going effects of climate issues in a global context. The second academy, POLA, was designed to increase faculty capacity for understanding and teaching the Bolman and Deal Organizational Frames (2017). The frames provided a meaningful way to challenge students’ understanding of how organizations respond to crises. The way organizations sustain themselves through different environmental challenges, hurricanes, fire, flooding, and pandemics, more recently, are important illustrations for students to explore. Faculty in the POLA academy had one of two field experiences, the Florida Gulf Coast or the Texas Gulf Coast. Each field experience introduced faculty to real organizations, which faced real crises. In both projects, faculty were asked to create electronic case studies designed to introduce and reinforce the topics of the academies and the faculty field experiences. By providing faculty with tools that (a) increase their capacity for critical thinking and leadership instruction and (b) help them facilitate discussions around contentious topics related to sustainability, students’ overall ability to address complex topics is also increased.
A key aspect of both academies was the intentional use of online technology to create and deliver the instructional content. This was an important consideration in order to drive sustainability standards for the project. The grant team wanted to ensure that resources were expended in an efficient manner. In planning, the goal was to minimize travel and associated expenses by providing all instructional material via the online learning platform, Canvas. This allowed faculty to work within a reasonable schedule without removing them from their full-time positional responsibilities, while reducing carbon footprint impacts.
Further the grant requires all projects to have a continuation plan. Because of this, all materials associated with the projects are available to use in an open format. The Global Education Lab (globaleducationlab.org) is the formal home of all the electronic case studies created by faculty participants of the projects. Establishing a way for the all the resources put into the projects to be shared in an equally sustainable way was an important consideration for the project team.
Sustainability is an important consideration for all educational initiatives. In the case of the projects described in this proposal, sustainability was about not only teaching leadership and critical thinking as tools to faculty, but the ripple effect of such instruction to students. The opportunity to build the capacity for sustainability in students for our collective future. Being able to secure funding through grants is a fulfilling means to promote leadership pedagogy practices among science faculty.

Participant

• Nicole Stedman, University of Florida
  Presenter