Faculty Roles in Curricular Change: Postmodern Narrative Ontologies

Mel Chua, Purdue University

Abstract

Faculty are the primary designers and implementers of engineering curricula within the U.S. higher education system. This places them in a unique position to respond to decades of national calls for curricular change in undergraduate engineering education. Individual and institutional faculty efforts to respond to these calls are inevitably influenced by faculty ontologies of curricular change – in other words, what faculty understand curricular change to be. By ‘ontology,’ I mean what is or what they perceive as what is. Ontologies are agentic, meaning that ontological assumptions shape how faculty envision their own roles and thereby influence the sorts of curricular change actions they envision and legitimize for themselves. Faculty ontologies of curricular change and their roles therein are complex roles within complex phenomena. By interrogating these ontologies, I make-visible the ways faculty might view – and thereby shape – the curricular worlds they and their students inhabit. To use a theatrical analogy: how do faculty stage their narratives of curricular change – what kinds of worlds do they set up in their stories? What kinds of interactions do they allow within that world? What kinds of characters do they cast themselves and others as playing? To investigate faculty ontologies of curricular change, I analyzed the narratives they told about several curricular change projects they had been personally involved with. I gathered narrative data by conducting recurring interviews with six faculty narrators. I deconstructed the resulting narrative data corpus using a postmodern approach focused on tensions and contradictions. The resulting analysis generated four distinct and interrelated ontologies for curricular change. These four ontologies are presented as a starting point rather than an exhaustive catalogue, since infinitely many ontologies could be generated. Each of the four ontologies created for this work portrays faculty roles in curricular change in relation to both curriculum and students. Creating multiple ontologies then enabled me to show how the interaction of multiple ontologies can create insights that are not apparent from each ontology alone. Among other things, the interactions of all four ontologies form a complex portrait of faculty as learners who are always unmaking and remaking themselves in the context of curricular change. By constructing a collective memory of faculty ontologies, I work to interrogate and disrupt current conceptions of roles and relationships in curricular change. These ontologies, and the methods developed to pursue and play with them, serve as tools for “cutting meaning loose” and “keep[ing] difference… at play” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 70-71). In turn, these tools open up a wider space of new ideas and possibilities for courses, pedagogies, and cultures to be expressed, evaluated, and legitimized.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Adams, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Design|Epistemology|Curriculum development

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