I have worked in three major systems, and I could rant about the pros and cons of each one. I will rule out 1) the Private Baptist Hospital system and leave out my commentary about healthcare systems in general and 2) the public independent K-12 school system I was an administrator for. These both awakened and instilled dissatisfaction for the inefficiency of information management, access to tools and opportunities, feedback up and down the administration chains, and the worst offense being redundancy of effort across programs and people. Let me instead focus on the system I deal with most often and daily as a university program director.
I work in Higher Education as an associate instructional professor. My service to the university is satisfied by directing two unique programs: the Writing Lab and Studio. The system I work with can be grouped into two areas: directive/operational and non-directive/pedagogical. For this reflection, I am going to focus on the directive/operational which includes, policy creation, budgeting/begging, purchasing, outreach, website management, recruiting, hiring, evaluating, firing, assessment, reporting, and professional development. In the beginning of this job, 9 years ago, I did all these duties as 50% of my effort with no outside influence, partners, or integrated programs. I just ran the programs. BUT then, I got to talking to the Tutor Coordinator and the Peer Coach Coordinator, and the Math Lab, and the Library Public Service students about having them train in their expertise areas to my students, and I offered my services in kind. When we started talking, would you be surprised to find out that we were all doing this work independently for the same outcome with the same resources!
Our resources independently included flat organizational structures with limited, fluctuating budgets based on student tuition and reliance on student worker employment which has a high turnover rate resulting in knowledge loss for the programs. As at most campuses, these services are distributed across diverse divisions and departments as well as separated by political, personal, and spatial barriers. Because my university is a branch campus serving 2000 students from undergraduate to phd students, the staff wear many hats, often in conflated and contradicting roles. Each program supported a variety of student workers from 2 to 50 with wild ranges in pay from $7.25 to $15.00 per hour. However different our programs seemed, the identity and role we all share is supporting student success.
Educational institution environments, climates, and cultures are inherently provocative, but soundly and bureaucratically structured, which makes change a precarious endeavor. Nonetheless, the work began to improve the economy of our time by joining our trainings together including coordinating our student leader training and weekly meetings. After a pilot year of merged trainings, recruitment, marketing, assessment, and budgeting, we found our unique student visit and total student visit numbers more than doubled. We were making students more successful, connecting their learning across the programs, and providing better workplaces and professional development for our staff and student workers. We were also making people uncomfortable with our success. Initiating this new program involved awareness of the political nature of higher education environments and navigation of administrative fears to create realistic and sustainable change. I suspect the collective joining of seemingly powerless programs into one structure created an influential and less malleable organization by the administration which was the downfall of this initiative in the end. RIP Learning Commons 2019-2022.
Caton, A. & Noack, L. (2019). Radically rethink & reshape: creating a cohesive commons community. The Learning Assistance Review. 24 (1), 65-85.
Comments