A longitudinal perspective of the experiences and career trajectories of discipline-based education specialists in teaching and learning in higher education

ABSTRACT

We summarize the experiences and outcomes for ‘discipline-based education specialists’ involved with a large-scale, 10-year initiative: the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia. A key aspect of the initiative was the hiring of these specialists into academic departments where they held graduate-level education in a matching discipline, often coupled with teaching experience. We draw upon various data sources to provide a rich, longitudinal picture of the experiences and career trajectories of these academic developers and explore the skills, behaviours, and supports they perceive as critical for changing and advancing instructional practices and departmental culture in higher education. We also discuss how embedding agents of change this way is a successful model for the transformation of institutional norms in undergraduate education.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic development
• career
• change agents
• higher education
• undergraduate science

Acknowledgments

The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative was funded by the University of British Columbia and generous donations from David Cheriton and John and Deb Harris. The authors wish to thank this support, the initiative’s leadership of Carl Wieman and Sarah Gilbert, and all of the Science Teaching and Learning Fellows whose work we have tried to capture in this manuscript. The authors also wish to thank Gülnur Birol and Andrea Webb for providing feedback on manuscript drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warren J. Code

Warren Code is the Associate Director, Special Initiatives of the Science Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Code was a Science Teaching and Learning Fellow (STLF, like those described in the article) with the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) in the Department of Mathematics before moving to a leadership role in the initiative.

Ashley J. Welsh

Ashley Welsh is cross-appointed between the Science Centre for Learning and Teaching (Skylight) and the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at UBC as a means to improve collaboration among these groups and to enrich curriculum, pedagogy, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and inclusive practices in undergraduate science and math education. Welsh was a Graduate Research Assistant and Research Manager for the CWSEI from 2009-2015.

E. Jane Maxwell

E. Jane Maxwell As a member of the Teaching and Learning Team at Yukon University, Dr. Jane Maxwell supports and empowers instructors to create, explore, build capacity, and define their own path in their teaching practice. She was an STLF with the CWSEI in the UBC Department of Chemistry from 2013-2017.