The Nature and Sources of Resistance to Science Educational Innovation in Higher Education Institutions: A Comparative Ethnography

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This project is conducting an analysis of a large body of ethnographic interview data that has been gathered in the course of three evaluation studies of science education innovations of different types. This includes over 1200 ethnographic interviews of faculty who were developing and adapting educational innovations for science undergraduates, their colleagues (including chair persons and administrators), teaching assistants, teaching support staff, and undergraduates at 44 institutions. The research is extracting and synthesizing from these data an understanding of the nature and sources of resistance to educational innovation in higher education, and, more broadly, the conditions that enable and inhibit classroom innovation and departmental change. Exploration and comparison of themes within and across these subsets of interview data are clarifying the issues raised by innovation in science classrooms for faculty, students, administrators and others, and the work is also uncovering how (singly and together) these issues encourage various types of resistance, their consequences for innovators, and the degree to which each issue is tractable.