Herding Cats? Obtaining Staff Support for Curriculum Change and Implementation

Academic staff can be notoriously difficult creatures, particularly when others might seek to intervene in their teaching. How then do we go about something as threatening as the overhaul of an entire undergraduate curriculum within a Faculty? Change management literature provides some direction for dealing with such a challenge and leading staff through the development and implementation issues. A prominent aspect of successful change such as this is to go beyond merely obtaining majority compliance – it involves considerable negotiation and communication, inclusiveness and teambuilding, and leadership and drive. This paper reports on a recent occasion when a radical transformation of a Faculty’s curriculum was attempted. In doing so it reviews the approach that was taken against criteria developed for models provided in the literature for change management in organisations. It looks to these criteria for explanations of successes and difficulties encountered. It seeks to evaluate performance of the change management processes adopted. This in turn has informed plans for future action. The approach taken here with this case study demonstrates how a framework can be applied when widespread collaboration is critical to achieving transformation within a higher education setting. It is an approach that can be utilised in other contexts and applied to other situations where academic staff are to be effected by major change.