Raising the bar for higher education: Using narrative processes to advance learning and change

This inquiry into epistemological processes governing institutional transformation focuses on the narratives that organizational leaders constructed to help them understand their context, learn from experience, and reach decisions leading to transformation.;From 1995 to 2000, nine faculty members and administrators of Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida, implemented a Learning-Centered Initiative to transform their traditional teaching culture into a more learning-centered culture. This initiative was one of 26 supported across the United States by the American Council on Education through the ACE Project on Leadership and Institutional Transformation.;Conducting a narrative inquiry collaboratively enabled us to examine the Leadership Team's learning and decision-making processes in context. Their organizational learning tales depict complex interrelationships among individual learning, group learning, and organizational change. Three sets of layered stories, selected and presented to show how the Team fostered collaborative learning that transformed personal practice, group interaction, and organizational culture, illustrate the outcome of the methodology. In all stories, group learning, embedded as a non-authoritarian process, preceded group and organizational change. The tales tell how and why this group of leaders used narratives to challenge others to respond to turbulent circumstances. Once discerned and set apart, narrative processes became a learning tool to use toward action.;In the stories narrative processes took two forms: cognitive processes and linked behaviors. Cognitive processes brought into play most often were framing, reframing, and integrating perspectives, as well as creating organizational memory, questioning, and scenario building. In addition to experimenting and crossing boundaries, linked behaviors included collaboration, narrative inquiry, process improvement, and storytelling.;This study makes manifest that we depend upon narrative processes to a much greater extent than we realize. To fill an apparent void in the literature, I defined them as hermeneutic processes of relational thinking that foster the emergence of story and draw upon context and difference as interpretative means for learning from lived experience.;The practical model for narrative inquiry that I developed to meet the methodological challenge of the study---surfacing narrative processes---is also suitable for examining the form of collective learning in other contexts.