For sustained and sustainable engagement with student learning, SoTL must be woven into the fabric of our institutions rather than relying on individuals operating in isolation. Unfortunately, the current global climate of fiscal austerity means that there are fewer faculty and these faculty have increased administrative and teaching responsibilities. SoTL champions are needed in order to bring about a change in institutional culture. By institutional culture, we refer to the entrenched behaviors of individuals working within organizations as well as the common “values, assumptions, beliefs or ideologies that members have about their organization or its work” (Peterson and Spencer, 1991, as cited in Kezar and Eckel, 2002, p. 142).
In order to effectively weave SoTl into institutional cultures, SoTL champions need an awareness of how to weave SoTL into institutional cultures. To support this, we have developed a multi-level model for integrating SoTL into institutional cultures (Williams, Verwoord, Beery, Dalton, McKinnon, Pace, Poole, & Strickland, 2013) describing how SoTL can become embedded institutionally and thus increase its impact. The model features networks and communities of practice, working within and across three levels of the institution (micro, meso and macro) and how SoTL practices get disseminated across these levels. To apply our model, we propose the use of three necessary and inter-related processes: (1) dissemination/ communication; (2) network development; and (3) sustained support. In our latest exploration of our model, we build on the work of Roxa & Martensson (2009, 2012) in the area of significant networks, to look more closely at the nature of networks and how their impact can be maximized to weave SoTL into institutional cultures.
In this workshop, participants will be invited to bring their institutional contexts to our models to determine what aspects of our model “hold true” across diverse institutional contexts and which aspects may need conceptual clarification. In this session, participants will work in small groups to discuss the realities of how well SoTL is woven in to their institutional cultures and where they place themselves in relation to the levels within organizations. Through small group discussion, they will be invited to apply Roxa and Martensson’s (2009) notion of significant networks to the model in order to maximize the impact of networks operating at the micro and meso levels. By the end of the session, participants will have a deeper understanding of how to weave SoTL into institutional cultures and will be able to articulate the components of one model to support the weaving of SoTL into their institutions.