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Detail, Christ and Child from Christ and Child or E. and W. Dunston Memorial window
No full textLead Investigator: C. Cody Barteet ([email protected]). Photograph: Katie Oateshttps://ir.lib.uwo.ca/chriswallis_stainedglass_on_london_stmarks/1082/thumbnail.jp
Detail 1, Gabriel and Mary from Blessed Art Thou Among Women or E. AND M. Garrett Memorial Window
No full textLead Investigator: C. Cody Barteet ([email protected]). Photograph: Katie Oateshttps://ir.lib.uwo.ca/chriswallis_stainedglass_on_london_stmarks/1094/thumbnail.jp
Counter-narratives and Revisionism: A Transformative Journey to Closing the Achievement Gap for Indigenous Learners through Culturally Responsive School Leadership, Equity Transformation, and Nurturing Collective Teacher Efficacy
Get PDFProfessional learning in the areas of Indigenous education, reconciliation, and antiracism is as much a personal journey as a professional one for educators today. At New Beginnings Middle School (NBMS, a pseudonym), Indigenous learners experience a significant academic achievement gap. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) explores how to cultivate teaching practices that create a more inclusive school environment and improve academic achievement for all Indigenous students. It proposes to guide educators through bias mitigation with integrated professional learning to develop culturally responsive pedagogy. Given the compelling correlation between inclusiveness and academic success, NBMS educators must work collectively to build confidence in Indigenous learners, reduce racial barriers, mitigate ignorance, and develop programming that reflects student culture. Implementation of the proposed solution is interpreted through a critical social justice lens, and it relies on transformative leadership and culturally responsive and adaptive practices. A proposed blended change implementation plan encourages teachers to listen and awaken, uncover and mobilize, reimagine and accelerate, and move and institutionalize. Measuring and monitoring the plan includes a 10-month timeline, a teacher’s cultural proficiency receptivity scale, various student agency measurement surveys, and a classroom data dashboard tool. The NBMS administration will set conditions for educators to centre Indigenous students by implementing processes to build student voice and agency as cocreators of their learning. This OIP builds collective teacher efficacy for an envisioned state of continual reflexive pedagogy in teachers specific to Indigenous students, with an end goal to close the achievement gap for these learners at NBMS
Achieving Equitable Support for Adjunct Faculty Using Upside-Down Change
Get PDFLifelong learning equips members of society to face their greatest challenges, which is the moral purpose of higher education. Online continuing education (OCE) serves this purpose well. In recent years enrollments for OCE have outpaced enrollments for more traditional education and the number of adjunct faculty facilitating OCE continues to rise. However, these adjunct faculty do not enjoy the comfortable respectability afforded to faculty facilitating full-time education. The organizational culture in higher education institutions (HEIs) is bifurcated between continuing and full-time education, with OCE assumed to be a poor substitute for full-time education. Consequently, adjunct faculty receive inadequate and inequitable support compared to the support offered to their full-time counterparts. This organizational improvement plan problematizes higher education’s organizational culture in relation to its failure to equitably support adjunct faculty. Upside-down change originating from the bottom of the hierarchy is adopted as a solution to the problem of practice, built upon Kotter’s change framework and the Plan-Do-Check-Act/Adjust framework for continuous improvement. Leading change by distributing leadership among the adjunct faculty with an ethic of community will result in faculty support initiatives that enact strategic, socially just, and substantive change. The change initiatives will be communicated using knowledge mobilization; measured using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals; and evaluated using mixed methodology. In the context of community, adjunct faculty will engage in socially constructing the envisioned future and generate momentum to change the organizational culture locally and across HEIs
Leading EDI Department Level Change
Get PDFHigher education leaders face challenging times amidst persistent calls for actions to address discrimination and bias on their campuses. Critics point to the imbalance of women and racialized persons in faculty positions as evidence of structured inequalities. Increased scrutiny and research into this disparity reveals that there are institutional barriers and structured norms that maintain a status quo, which centralizes some experiences and disregards others. This disparity extends to students and affects their experiences, participation and performance in classrooms. Evidence of inequality on higher education campuses contradicts the established goals and values of these organizations and presents a challenge for how to align current practices with stated intentions. My organizational improvement plan focuses on introducing more equitable, inclusive and diverse practices into classrooms and centering such practices into the curriculum. It draws on transformative and shared leadership models to navigate a process to address issues identified, and implement solutions that are long lasting and effective. In this document, I adopt a critical theory, social justice lens in pursuing and finding answers for how to motivate and assist faculty members to adopt practices that reflect institutional leaders’ preference for more equitable, diverse and inclusive practices, into their teaching. This work uses the ADKAR, awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement, and Appreciative Inquiry frameworks to outline a structured change process. While the scope of this plan focuses on the local, higher education (HE) program level, it is applicable to other institutions whose leaders hope to consciously center equitable pursuits and embrace diverse practices
The Know Better, Do Better Plan for Self and System Transformation
Get PDFEducational leadership has roots in neocolonial epistemologies and a functionalist paradigm. While Atman Jnana School Board (a pseudonym) has made a commitment to equity by recognizing the need for communities of belonging, leaders unconsciously lean toward the individual over the collective as imparted by these epistemologies and paradigm. Therefore, the problem of practice under investigation is the development of educational leaders’ capacity to create communities of belonging and purpose. As principals and vice-principals are pivotal to transforming school culture, this organizational improvement plan proposes addressing the problem of practice by creating a community of belonging with school leaders who want to engage in a process of unlearning, learning, relearning, and co-learning educational leadership. The visceral experience of engaging in this personal and systemic metamorphosis can lead to understanding the process of co-creation so it can be scaled and spread. The implementation of the selected solution requires blending servant and authentic leadership styles, with a strong focus on constructive-developmental theory. This plan proposes that leaders’ identity development in places of belonging and connection leads to the district’s identity development in a similar vein. Grassroots methodology as a form of discreet activism and self-determination will free leaders to see systems and contexts through a new lens. The change path model can be overlaid with the plan-do-study-act cycle for ongoing monitoring, assessment, and improvement. The application of a critical worldview, transformative paradigm, and anti-oppression lens will serve as an ongoing reminder to centre the voices of equity-deserving groups, without undue emotional labour, at the design stage and throughout the process
The Missing Link: Applying Embodied Cognition to Professional Learning
Get PDFPost-secondaries have been implementing a hyflex delivery model, which is a far more complex pedagogical setting than more traditional modes of face to face or online delivery. This has fundamentally changed the way faculty experience the learning environment, with some faculty noting an increase in stress and a decrease in performance. Drawing on Organization A’s implementation of hyflex, this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) observes professional learning (PL) for the hyflex environment focuses solely on technology and cognitive knowledge, with consideration to wellness and performance scantly discussed. This OIP proposes the missing link to address wellness and performance is the inclusion of the body in PL design and delivery. This OIP challenges the Cartesian view toward learning that commonly drives hyflex PL and instead advocates a holistic approach that invites notions of embodied cognition into PL practices. Doing so requires the capacity for bodily awareness, which can be fostered by acknowledging non-conscious information acquisition, recognizing physiological and affective variability in the learning environment, considering the relationship between learning and circadian and ultradian cycles, and through the inclusion of body informed tools and strategies for managing stress and performance. The faculty experience in the hyflex environment has bodily components that need to be acknowledged if it is to be a sustainable mode of delivery. Adding this missing link can foster an inclusive and sustainable approach to PL for leaders who are preparing faculty for this technologically enhanced learning environment
Nurturing a Culture of Responsible Conduct of Research to Support Safe Disclosure
Get PDFPressures to publish, which are prevalent in higher education, can lead to research misconduct and, in the absence of clear, safe disclosure policies—and mechanisms and structures to support them—individuals affected by research misconduct may fear retaliation when speaking up. This Organizational Improvement Plan examines how to foster a climate where individuals feel supported and are encouraged to speak up if they witness research misconduct at Forest University (a pseudonym), a research-intensive university in Ontario, Canada. In alignment with my values, the change process is guided by authentic and ethical leadership perspectives. The Change-Path Model, supported by Beckhard and Harris’ Change-Management Process, is the change framework to address the Problem of Practice (PoP). Krüger’s Iceberg Model of Change and an adapted readiness rubric have been used to deepen my understanding of the organizational culture and to identify expected and unexpected resistance points. The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle will be used to determine where refinement is needed. Forest University has a large, diverse population of students, faculty, and staff. A working group will be assembled using shared equity leadership to ensure a range of lived and learned experience to address the PoP and support the change. The proposed solution takes a hybrid approach that focuses on introducing mechanisms and structures to support policy, including hiring a dedicated role to develop training and education, serve as an intake for research misconduct concerns, and to keep policy up to date
Building Global Skills: Broader Concepts of Internationalization in an Ontario College
Get PDFThe Canadian federal government, national associations, and internationalization scholars have identified the need and demand for Canadian students to acquire global skills and competencies during their post-secondary education. Opportunities to acquire global skills can be offered through a wide variety of global engagement programs, such as study-abroad exchange programs, faculty-led excursions abroad, and other programs that allow students to interact with the global world. However, these programs are costly and do not consider the significant financial resources students require to participate in such activities. Most at-home students are left out of global engagement programming and therefore do not have the opportunity to acquire global skills during their time in college.
This organizational improvement plan (OIP) addresses the need for broader concepts of internationalization that include global engagement opportunities for at-home students. Using distributed and transformative leadership approaches and the change path model, this OIP provides an equitable solution to the problem of practice (PoP) by implementing virtual exchange initiatives, known as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), at a large college in southern Ontario. These initiatives provide a wider audience of at-home students with opportunities to work with students from around the world and acquire skills that are much needed and in demand in a global economy