Ethnographic investigations of the emerging culture on departmental teams: Evidence of transforming physics faculty's practices and values around departmental change

Many organizations and researchers within the physics community have highlighted the need to improve undergraduate programs in areas such as pedagogy and recruitment and retention of marginalized students. As these reforms often pose challenges and require additional resources, initiatives such as the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) have been developed. In these investigations of this institute, we developed case studies of five DALI physics programs. We document the dominant and emerging cultures around how physics faculty approach and pursue change work. We see evidence of DALI participants' growing awareness of taken-for-granted assumptions about educational change processes within their departmental cultures and coming to recognize and value alternative ways of collaborating and enacting change in their local contexts. For example, we found that while faculty in the department typically approach change work in a rushed and ad-hoc way, ignoring the use of formal evidence, DALI faculty participants take a deliberate and strategic approach to departmental change, centering formal evidence. In this talk, I will show how the emerging micro-culture is situated within the dominant departmental culture around educational change and discuss implications for practice.