A View From the Margins: Situating CTL Staff in Organizational Development

Abstract

The authors explore assumptions that underlie work on organizational development in their field, which reveal hierarchical and homogenizing tendencies, despite commitments to inclusivity. Given that the aim of recent literature, such as Schroeder and Associates’ Coming in from the Margins, is to situate educational developers in relation to organizational development, and given the field’s values, then both staff and directors must be considered. The authors examine how the margins can be valuable sites of knowledge production, highlighting the ways staff might contribute to organizational development. The authors hope that readers will gain several ideas for how to incorporate staff into organizational development.

Keywords: organizational development, CTLs, staff development, educational developers

Given our relatively recent involvement in the world of educational development, we were pleased to finally have a chance to read Connie Schroeder and Associates’ Coming in from the Margins (2011, henceforth Coming In), a highly regarded text in the field. Our experience of reading was one of simultaneous inspiration and lingering curiosity. We found the text compelling for a number of reasons. For one, it is incisive about the history of the field of educational development, including why and how the contemporary focus on the individual faculty member and instruction arose. Yet Schroeder and her associates do not stop there; instead, they imagine a larger and seemingly more significant role for educational developers, one that draws upon the diverse range of skills, knowledge, and even ambitions that many in the field have, including ourselves. However, despite our enthusiasm for the central recommendation of the book, we could not help but notice that we are not necessarily like the contributors to the volume, most of whom are leaders in the field with decades of experience and administrative titles. As a result, we concluded our reading, wondering where we, as educational developers who are not directors, might fit in terms of organizational development.

We became aware of our own “intersecting” identities (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) as both a part of a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), which is already potentially at the margins, and as subordinates within our CTLs. As an assistant director of programs and an instructional consultant at our respective CTLs, we wondered, did Coming In and its recommendations apply to us? Was there a place for other staff (i.e., any educational development professional who does not hold director status) in the organizational development call to arms epitomized by Coming In? What, if anything, could we do to become more involved?

Preview of Article

In this article, after some brief definitional considerations, we explore the assumptions that underlie work on organizational development in our field. By unpacking these assumptions, we reveal unintentional hierarchical and homogenizing tendencies that emerge in this area of educational development scholarship, despite our profession’s shared commitments to collaboration, equality, diversity, and inclusivity. Coming In, the only book length treatment of the topic written specifically for our field, will serve as our primary object of analysis because it has been such an important text for educational development in recent years. In it, CTL directors are the focus. But, as we show, it is not directors who are the most marginalized, even if educational developers—and thereby the CTLs that many of them direct—are often marginal. Rather, it is the rest of the staff, those who are lower in the CTL hierarchy. Given that the central project of Coming In is to situate educational developers in relation to organizational development while attending to the ways in which the former can be marginalized, and given our field’s professed values, then staff are an important consideration. As such, we draw inspiration from Coming In as well as from other educational development literature in order to examine how margins can be valuable sites of knowledge production, paying special attention to how staff might contribute to organizational development.

It is our hope that readers—both directors and other staff—will take from this piece several viable ideas for how to incorporate staff into organizational development, if it aligns with the mission of the CTL. If it is true, as Schroeder and her associates advocate, that organizational development is important for us as a field to move toward, then focusing on staff, in particular—those potentially at the margins of a CTL—may be especially worthwhile. Written from the perspective of a sort of “margin within the margin,” this article will ideally prompt directors and staff alike to think about how inclusion and collaboration can and should be embraced at all organizational levels, from unit to institution. After all, two of the central values held by the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network is a commitment to “humane and collaborative organizations and administrations” and “diverse perspectives and a diverse membership” (POD Network Strategic Plan and Mission Statement, 2014). Finally, we encourage readers to become more attuned to potential variability within our profession and to cultivate an awareness of the dangers of homogenizing tendencies that would lump all educational developers together, thus foreclosing important opportunities for developers at all levels to contribute to the organizational development work of our field and to thus “come in from the margins.”

Some Definitions

Naturally, how one is able to “come in from the margins” depends largely on one’s orientation toward educational development, in general (Land, 2000, 2004), and one’s definition of organizational development, specifically, of which there are many (including the POD Network’s own, cited in Coming In, p. 24). Of course, one can adopt a position in which only key leaders can effect change. This seems to have been Coming In’s implicit tack when Beckhard’s (1969) definition is approvingly cited early on: “Organization development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organization wide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s ‘processes,’ using behavioral science knowledge” (p. 22; emphasis original). If the third point is required—“managed from the top”—then there is no space for CTL staff to participate.

However, other interpretations of “organizational development” eschew this top–down approach. Consider the following definitions from elsewhere in the educational development literature:

Prominent higher education organizational development scholar Adrianna Kezar offers a range of change models in Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century. While some seem to require a “leader” (such as the popular “teleological” model), many of the others are more egalitarian. One example of the latter—the “human resource” model (associated with Bolman & Deal, 1991)—“begins to emphasize people throughout the organization as critical to the change process. Change will not occur successfully unless all people are prepared for it. This model shifts emphasis from the leaders or a few internal characteristics to activities throughout the organization. Each individual plays a critical role in adjusting to the life cycle” (our emphasis; p. 39). According to this model, encouraging only directors to move toward organizational development would be less successful than inviting everyone to become a vital participant.

For our purposes here, it is not necessary to defend one definition of organizational development. Rather, we simply wish to point out that recent models are not necessarily hierarchical; they make room for educational developers at all levels to become involved. In fact, many centers already seem to follow these models by making such room for their staff. Naturally, we favor these more egalitarian definitions as we think about our own work in the field and as we cull the past literature on organizational development.

A Brief History of Organizational Development

In Coming In, Schroeder and her associates offer an extensive overview of the literature at the intersection between “organizational development” and “faculty development.” Indeed, soon after the POD Network was formed in 1974, many educational developers began to explore the organizational development part of its charge (e.g., Gillespie, Lee, & Tiberius, 2006). While nearly all of this literature aims to be inclusive and neutral, an examination of a few key sources reveals a pattern of subtle signs and omissions similar to what we observed in Coming In, implying limits on who can become involved in such a venture.

One of the earliest articles addressing organizational development in our field was Nancy Chism’s “The Role of Educational Developers in Institutional Change: From the Basement Office to the Front Office” (1998). Chism explores organizational development in terms of the tasks, roles, skills, and enabling conditions that it requires, noting that all educational developers (a general term she uses throughout) are “ideally suited” (p. 141) to take on organizational development. Many of her recommendations seem within reach of someone who is not at the top of a CTL hierarchy (e.g., participating in committees), though she admits that there are limitations. For example, “if educational developers are isolated or nested within several layers of organizational structure so that we do not have direct communication with decision makers, our influence is curtailed” (p. 146). Yet this nesting invariably describes the working conditions of CTL staff who are, at the very least, situated below directors. Moreover, we may not be a “visible partner in activities” or have the kinds of “prestigious salary and title” (p. 147) that directors do. Even though Chism advises that all educational developers “embrace” organizational development (p. 152), it is not clear that all staff could participate equitably according to her own recommendations.

In the second edition of A Guide to Faculty Development (2010), editor Kay Gillespie devotes an entire chapter to “Organizational Development,” indicating its growing importance to the field of educational development. Following the lead of Creating the Future of Faculty Development (Sorcinelli et al., 2006), Gillespie provides ideas for how to participate in organizational development: work with academic leaders, especially chairpersons and deans; become involved in governance structures; and align CTLs or programs with institutional priorities (p. 386). Gillespie’s inclusive language throughout (e.g., “we” and the general “educational developers”) implies an intent to involve educational developers of all levels and positions. In fact, according to Gillespie, we are always already engaged in organizational development, simply by virtue of our position in the academy (p. 383). Yet there are hints that participating in organizational development may not be an option available to or suitable for everyone. For example, Gillespie writes that “readers should realize that involvement in organizational development is perhaps on the more advanced side of the spectrum of educational development activities, and it is generally not the starting place for this work” (p. 381). However, we argue that those just entering the field—people not likely to be directors—or those simply not at the top of a CTL could have an important role to play, albeit one that is different from that of a director.

Educational developers’ interest in organizational development has not been restricted to publications. There have been numerous POD Network conference presentations devoted to the subject (Gillespie, 2010), and it was even the topic of Adrianna Kezar’s (2013) keynote address during the 2013 POD Network annual conference. Earlier that same year, in June, Schroeder herself led a session titled “Organizational Development Theory: Institutional Change” at the 8th Institute for New Faculty Developers in Atlanta, Georgia. The fact that such a session was offered to an audience of new developers sends a message inconsistent with Gillespie’s recommendation above: that educational developers at all levels could become involved in organizational development.

These moments may appear insignificant, but taken together they make an impression on educational developers like ourselves. Certainly these scholars, all of whom we highly respect, desire to be inclusive of educational developers at all levels. Yet there are hints of distinctions within the field that can be obfuscated when the literature endeavors (perhaps too much) to be inclusive or egalitarian. In fact, simply referring to the general category of “educational developer” does not highlight the rich diversity within our field or the inevitably different opportunities for organizational development that staff at different levels may have. These elisions forecast some of the issues that we find on a larger scale in Coming In, in which “directors” and “educational developers” are used interchangeably (perhaps because so many of the authors are or were both), even though the working conditions for each can be very different.

Coming in from the Margins: Organizational Development and the Rest of Us

Schroeder and her associates were not the first to write about organizational development for educational developers, but because they offered the first book length treatment of the subject for our field, we examine it closely here. Coming In reminds educational developers in the United States of the “OD” of their charge (“Organizational Development”), which has been overshadowed by an increasing emphasis on the individual college instructor and thus on instructional development. This emphasis, Coming In claims, has led to us becoming marginalized as a field with regards to larger scale organizational development taking place at our institutions. The expansive study, which relies on data collected through surveys, interviews, and case studies, explores the ways educational developers can become and remain involved in institutional change. For Schroeder and her associates, the continued relevance (and the ultimate existence) of CTLs depends on their involvement in institutional initiatives, and it is the book’s purpose to offer models for organizational development, as well as to identify the factors that enable or impede a CTL’s involvement.

Along the way, Coming In includes a multiplicity of voices reflecting a variety of roles, paths, and experiences from which educational developers can draw insight. However, the book is nevertheless written by and for directors or, in the words of contributor Devorah Lieberman (2011), the “principal faculty developer” (e.g., p. 65). This focus began with the design of the initial survey and, as a result, runs throughout the book. As a part of the research, we learn that, “due to grant constraints, the population surveyed was limited to members of the POD Network who were center directors” (p. 80; our emphasis). This was the same pool from which the participants for the case studies were selected, as well, so staff members not at the top of a CTL hierarchy were not queried. Survey questions further focused on directors. Respondents were asked about factors that enabled and impeded organizational development, which were divided into three categories, including “director centered” (e.g., p. 78). There was not a cognate category for staff related factors; they only emerged as a part of the other categories. In fact, more often than not, CTL staffing was identified as a potential “impediment” (rather than an asset) for directors (p. 131).

There is clearly a tension in Coming In. On one hand, the authors want their results and recommendations to apply to everyone, that is, to “provide some of the much needed direction for developers to navigate a broader role within their institutions” (p. 79). Accordingly, they work from a position of inclusivity, as when “faculty developers” are referred to in general or when, for instance, contributor Phyllis Blumberg (2011) writes that “this unique knowledge and skill set can be divided into common knowledge areas and skills for all faculty developers” (p. 163; emphasis original). There is a sense that directors should and do want all of their staff to join them in organizational development by “ensur[ing] that all staff are prepared and knowledgeable to sit at the table” (p. 225). On the other hand, the characteristics of the survey and interview participants (i.e., directors), the authors (i.e., directors), as well as the objects of much needed professional development (i.e., not the directors) suggest that the book is not as inclusive or egalitarian as it intends to be. The very title of Part 3, “Repositioning Centers and Directors on the Institutional Radar Screen,” indicates that not all educational developers should be repositioned or become centralized, but only a select few—those already at the top. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not the very least is that, according to contemporary change models (as discussed above), it seems unlikely that Coming In’s desired “paradigm shift” (p. 141) will occur in the field if only CTL directors are involved.

More significantly, the results from Schroeder’s survey in Coming In indicate that directors are generally not, in fact, marginalized. Only 6% of directors reported being “not involved” or “marginalized” compared to the 33% who reported being “very involved” or a “key leader” at their institutions (p. 88). In short, a significant percentage of participants in a study about marginalization reported not being marginalized at all, especially compared to the relatively few that did report being uninvolved in organizational development. While this is certainly reassuring data, given widespread concerns about the marginal (Chism, 1998; D’Andrea & Gosling, 2001; Harland & Staniforth, 2003) and even “hazardous” (Nilson, Nuhfer, & Mullinix, 2011) position of educational developers, it is then unclear to what degree these directors’ experiences can shed light on marginalization in our field or what kinds of movements might be required to become more central, given that such movements would hardly be necessary if one is already a “key leader.”

Susan Gano Phillips’s chapter in Coming In provides the only sustained consideration of the potential role staff could play in organizational development. For her, it is important to acknowledge that “the entire unit needs to work together” to fulfill organizational development possibilities (p. 221). However, the way CTL staff are implicitly positioned in her work is discouraging in that they are cast as more of an obligation than as an asset. Gano Phillips begins by contextualizing her chapter with data regarding staff configurations at CTLs around the United States. While this data comes from multiple sources, including Schroeder’s research project, the range of possible positions discussed entirely overlooks staff, such as instructional consultants or instructional designers, who are not in management (i.e., director, associate director) or support (i.e., program assistant) roles. This may reflect the most common staffing structure at CTLs (though not either of ours), but it excludes an entire category of people who are involved in educational development and, according to Gano Phillips’s own recommendations, potentially organizational development. This omission is also not consonant with other research that specifically documents the immense variability of both position titles and job responsibilities within our field (see below).

There are explicit attempts to be inclusive in Gano Phillips’s piece, as when she writes about inviting her staff to work with her on “mutual goal setting.” She explains that, “in doing so, the staff had opportunities to inform [her] of the areas where they felt they needed to enhance their skills, and [she] had the opportunity to share ideas about how the center needed to grow and develop to fulfill its mission and broaden its scope to integrate involvement at the institutional level” (p. 224). A mutuality of purpose shared by the director and staff is implied here, but the description of the review process leaves little room for staff to contribute to the organizational development that the CTL may take on. Rather, her characterization makes it seem as though the staff bring deficits and the director provides vision, perspective, and skills to compensate for those deficits. Staff are treated as objects, not subjects who could contribute to organizational development initiatives. While we recognize that this may be due to Gano Phillips’s specific context (wherein she supervises mostly work study students who are certainly different than full time professional staff), her description remains problematic as she is attempting to promote general principles and approaches applicable beyond her particular situation.

Just as feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) once remarked that “it is somewhat ironic that those concerned with alleviating the ills of racism and sexism should adopt such a top down approach to discrimination” (p. 167), we find it curious when educational development scholars, for whom “openness and collaboration, not exclusivity” (Knapper, 1998; cf. Harland & Staniforth, 2003) are central professional imperatives, do not recognize the ways in which they can include and value those who work “for” them, just as they are asking to be included and valued by those for whom they work.

Variety in the Field of Educational Development

The tendency to homogenize and exclude CTL staff from organizational development is particularly puzzling when one considers that there are many ways in which educational developers are a diverse group. This is such a prominent characteristic of our field that the preamble to the POD Network Ethical Guidelines begins with the following declaration: “Educational developers in higher education come from various disciplinary areas and follow different career tracks.” Despite the variety of ways in which educational development happens (and, of course, many centers are inclusive by design), articles and chapters such as those within Coming In as well as in educational development literature more broadly sometimes speak of “educational developers” as if we are all one undifferentiated group. The layered and multifarious composition of our field demands more nuance and specificity when talking about “educational developers.” Careful consideration of who we are as “a field of practitioners” is critical as the field continues to develop (Little, 2014).

The omission of the “middle” CTL layer (which exists between the director and support staff) is presumably due, in part, to the fact that “a majority of directors who responded to the Coming in from the Margins survey did not have a large staff with which to work” (p. 220). Among the respondents, only 19% of directors indicated that they had assistant or associate directors working for them, 26% had graduate students in their unit, and 35% had a program assistant. From this data, we can surmise that at least 20% of the surveyed directors work more or less alone. However, a separate survey sent out to all members of the POD Network in 2010 provides a different picture: 59% of respondents who are directors had an associate director, 52% had an assistant director, and 63% had consultants working with them (POD Network Membership Survey, 2011). Assuming that the groups of directors who have associate directors, assistant directors, and consultants do not overlap entirely, a substantial number of directors actually do work with one or more staff members who are integrally involved in the work of their CTLs—staff that could (and, we argue, should) contribute to organizational development efforts.

Indeed, the very structures of educational development units can vary widely. They can range from multiperson CTLs comprising some combination of permanent educational development professionals, faculty, graduate (and even occasionally undergraduate) students, and administrative staff to a single faculty member or administrator who manages educational development responsibilities part time in conjunction with other duties (see also Sorcinelli et al., 2006, pp. 19 and 37). Harland and Staniforth (2003)—both of whom are educational developers, but with very different responsibilities (one is a full time administrator while the other is a tenured faculty member)—remark on this variability within the field: “development units have a variety of organizational structures and may be designated ‘administrative’ or ‘academic.’ They employ various mixes of academic and general staff and are situated within a faculty or, more often, within a university’s administrative structure” (p. 27). Although Gano Phillips reports that “the variety of ways in which TLCs are staffed is almost as diverse as the centers themselves” (p. 220), there is scant attention paid in Coming In and elsewhere to educational developers who are neither at the “top” (directors) nor at the “bottom” (administrative staff).

Looking at educational development jobs advertised on the POD Network listserv during the 2013–2014 academic year further illustrates the diversity of positions available. Position titles included e learning and curriculum specialist, teaching and learning consultant, teaching center research specialist, associate director of assessment, post doctoral researcher, and coordinator/faculty developer. Relatedly, applicants for these positions were expected to have widely varying specialties and areas of expertise, including WAC/WID, STEM, medical education, institutional assessment, formative assessment, experiential learning, ePortfolios, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), program and course development, first year development, and lifelong learning. Even positions with similar titles (e.g., instructional consultant and teaching consultant) often had very different responsibilities and qualifications articulated in their respective job postings. Similar variety can be seen on other job posting sites, such as HigherEdJobs.com.

And, of course, there is variation within job titles and roles, as well. In some CTLs, an assistant or associate director might share leadership responsibilities with the director, functioning more as a part of the management team, while other assistant or associate directors may serve a more subordinate role. No matter what the title, all educational developers, according to POD Network’s own Ethical Guidelines, encounter “multiple responsibilities, constituents, relationships, and loyalties” (our emphasis). There are many roles (and subtle differences within those roles) between the top and bottom of a CTL hierarchy. It is therefore likely that a director will have staff who are central participants in the educational development work of the CTL and thus could “come in from the margins” to participate in organizational development as well.

The diversity of educational development as a field is widespread and multilayered, and that variation should be recognized rather than elided if we are to successfully expand the work that we all do in ways that Coming In and other organizational development literature recommend. It is imperative then that our scholarship, on organizational development as well as other subjects, reflects this variety rather than putting forward some sort of universal “educational developer” that may have very little in common with the realities in which many of us do our work, and that may, in fact, represent only one particular perspective.

Retrieving the Margins

We find it critical here to turn to scholars who have sought to retrieve and revalue the margins—a move that makes particular sense for inclusive approaches to organizational development such as those noted above (Baron, 2006; Gillespie, 2002; and Sorcinelli et al., 2006). These are encouraging perspectives for educational developers, such as ourselves, for whom coming in from the margins may not be a possibility: that is, given our position as staff members in a CTL, working underneath a director, we cannot make much movement unless we change jobs. If our capacity to participate in organizational development is dependent upon such movement, then we will inevitably be excluded. If, instead, the margins can be a productive place to contribute to organizational development, then there is a place for staff, too.

In “Academic Development on the Margins” (2011), David Green and Deandra Little review the diverse associations we have with the word “margins,” many of which, as might be expected, are negative. But they point to some positive connotations too: the elaborate and often illuminating marginalia at the edges of texts, the fecund margins of ecosystems, even the productive margins of disciplinary “boundaries” that lead to exciting interdisciplinary work. Feminist author bell hooks (1990) also reminds us that the margin is “much more than a site of deprivation”; it is “the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (p. 206). The radical potential of the margin has likewise been recuperated under other linguistic guises in Victor Turner’s (1969) notion of “liminality,” Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) identification of “borderlands/la frontera,” and Peggy Phelan’s (1993) concept of the “unmarked.” Because the margin is not necessarily a negative place, state, or position, Green and Little do not advocate that we try to avoid, escape, or “come in from” it. Instead, they suggest (re)conceiving the margin as a place we can “choose to occupy” for its particular benefits (p. 204).

Like Green, Little, and hooks, we see distinct advantages of such a location, especially for organizational development. Those at the margins have particular standpoints that can allow us to see in ways that are not obvious to others. Marginality, though not marginalization, can be desirable—a space that one chooses—if it can be sustained without attendant oppression and domination. hooks explains that the margins can offer “the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (p. 207)—the very stuff of which organizational development is made. Recall that Baron’s understanding (2006) of organizational development requires this kind of imagination or vision, as when it is aimed at “changing institutional culture” or “modifying structures” (p. 32; our emphasis). If we enter into organizational development, we must be able to, as hooks writes, envision things that are “new” and “alternative,” “improv[isatory]” and “creative,” and we must likewise use language that opens up, rather than forecloses, possibility on a large scale.

Intermediary Staff Roles for Organizational Development

The primary way staff can adopt an organizational development role that complements the work of the director and takes advantage of the possibilities of the margin is by becoming what respondents to Little and Green’s survey (2012) call intermediaries. In fact, these respondents perceived this role “as the essence of academic development work” (p. 210). Being an intermediary entails “helping faculty and students (among other groups) understand competing concerns…. serving as a mediator, broker, and matchmaker or ‘connective tissue’, as bridging groups, facilitating conversations, ‘connect[ing] dots’… ‘opening up spaces’” (Little & Green, 2012, p. 210). As educational developers on the margins, and as staff on the margins of those margins, we can connect and mediate between various groups—an essential element of facilitating organizational change (e.g., Kezar, 2001). The following suggestions about fulfilling an intermediary role in the service of staff involvement in organizational development clearly emerge out of our own experiences, rather than from a representative sample of staff at a variety of CTLs, but we hope to provide some humble starting points for conversation and experimentation.

One of the first ways to serve as an effective intermediary for the purposes of organizational development is to follow Land’s (2004) suggestions of adopting an “entrepreneurial orientation” and getting into the habit of astute environmental scanning in order to establish context. After all, “organizational development works within the broader context in which learning occurs, and the details of this context will vary greatly among institutions” (Gillespie, 2010, p. 382). If possible, Gillespie (2010) recommends, “remain informed about concerns, data, trends, and innovation in higher education at large” (p. 386). Stay current by reading industry publications like Change, Insider Higher Ed, and The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as more informal venues, like blogs or social media. This kind of external scanning can help you predict and make sense of organizational development efforts at your institution. You may, in fact, have more time to do this kind of research than your director does, thus allowing you to bring issues to her attention and to offer key background knowledge and context when the opportunity arises for the center to “adjust to changing circumstances” (Baron, 2006, 32).

Staff can educate themselves about their specific institutional context by regularly reading school newspapers, press releases, and newsletters. Director or other on campus contacts can be rich sources for advice on where one might learn more about a specific issue that affects the whole institution, a more concentrated or microcosmic form of environmental scanning. For example, if you are interested in retaining underprepared students, your director might be able to point you to different units on campus that share your interest, such as academic affairs, student life, or the first year experience program. You could then reach out to these units to learn more about their mission, as well as to brainstorm how your CTL might be able to support their work. One of us recently had success getting the CTL more involved in promoting academic integrity on campus upon approaching the director about becoming more engaged in this critical institutional issue. After identifying and then reaching out to other units working on the issue, the CTL was invited to help lead the campus wide roll out of plagiarism detection software for faculty and graduate teaching associates and afterwards gained a permanent seat on the advisory board for the academic integrity committee. Moreover, basic collegial sharing about your work can go a long way toward understanding one’s environment or context. If you have a conversation in which an instructor hints at some sort of large scale change happening at your institution, cross reference it with your director or staff to see if they have heard similar whisperings elsewhere. Together, you may be able to assemble a fuller picture of what is happening at your particular institution, which might include strategies for becoming involved—something that would not have been possible without mutual sharing.

Keeping in mind Gillespie’s (2010) claim that “organizational development is about relationship; that is, it involves relationships between and among individuals and groups and relationships between and among units and subunits of an entity” (p. 382), we have found that engaging in both formal and informal relationship building is another effective and accessible way for staff at the margins to serve as an intermediary in organizational development. To give some select examples from our own experiences with relationship building: over the course of just a few weeks last year, between the two of us, we designed and facilitated a course design institute, interviewed dozens of adjunct instructors as part of a research project, assisted two departments with wholesale review and revision of their undergraduate curricula, helped librarians with a summer information literacy assignment for incoming first years, facilitated a reading group on writing instruction with faculty across disciplines, and attended lunches for summer undergraduate research fellows and their faculty mentors. (Not to mention we have been working transinstitutionally with each other on this project as well as serving as “professional peer mentors” to one another. And we are not directors.) Such a wide array of interactions gives us, like other staff, a distinct perspective. Through these more formal relationship building initiatives, we are able to gather diverse insights from instructors and administrators who often give us candid, on the ground reports about what is happening at our institutions. These insights inform organizational development because we can act upon this knowledge in thoughtful ways. Not necessarily bound to one group or the other—sometimes in between, sometimes at the edges, sometimes on the outside—staff, by virtue of being marginal, may be able to serve as the “collegial provocateur” described by Green and Little (2011, p. 13).

Many of the ways we have begun to engage in higher level or more structural work began, as Schroeder and her associates recognize (e.g., Frerichs, Pace, & Rosier, 2011), with smaller scale relationship building efforts. One simple strategy equally appropriate for CTL staff and directors alike is to meet a lot of people informally or even socially. This strategy might be particularly effective at smaller institutions because, in those contexts, it might actually be possible to meet all of the faculty and staff. Informal scenarios may involve setting up coffee or lunch appointments. You might try to meet people from as many different departments and units as possible, or try to discern who wields “positional power” on campus and contact them. You can also make connections by attending art exhibit openings, guest lectures, theater performances, student research presentations, and disciplinary or departmental talks. If there is a particular interest area you have (such as campus diversity), it can be beneficial to attend events where such issues are the focus, or to informally ask about or even volunteer to serve on any pertinent committees (if the CTL director permits) as a way to make yourself visible to potential allies or key players. Even fundamental educational development tasks, such as sitting in on classes and showing interest in the lives of the individual instructors with whom we work, build our inner institutional relationships. When conversing one on one with instructors, inquiring about the full context surrounding their teaching (e.g., changes at the departmental or unit level) has yielded many “tips” about large scale changes being enacted at the departmental or even college level of which we would not have otherwise been aware.

Finally, staff are able to serve as intermediaries from the margins by information gathering. We can bring one conversation into another, recommend an article or book we heard about from one person to someone else, or forward webinars or other online resources to people (including those with great “positional power”) who might be interested—showing ourselves to be informed, perceptive, and valuable colleagues. Through these means, we “seek to help the organization function in an effective and efficient way” (Gillespie, 2002, p. v). It is typically assumed that educational developers serve as intermediaries between bodies, groups, or people external to the CTLs, primarily faculty and administration (e.g., Land, 2004; POD Network Ethical Guidelines, 2014), as well as faculty and students, faculty and educational literature, the institution and other institutions, and so forth. Yet staff like ourselves can additionally serve as valuable intermediaries between our CTL—especially the director—and the world outside of it. Staff may even be invited into conversations or find ourselves the confidantes of people who might not speak to a director because of the director’s position of power. In other instances, we may be able to form connections with faculty simply because of a shared disciplinary background or area of interest. We are then able to bring what we observe and learn from those interactions back to inform the larger scale work that we are doing at the CTL. With a wide view and frequent access to diverse people and groups, staff from the margins may also be uniquely positioned to consolidate, synthesize, integrate, and translate information.

Although being on the margins can seem or feel disempowering at times, CTL staff, especially novices, can frame and leverage many information gathering moments as “learning moments.” Admit that you do not know; ask questions and demonstrate enthusiasm to be brought up to speed. Even if you are moving into an educational development role from a different one at the same institution, you can still ask questions and capitalize on previous relationships by inquiring about your colleagues’ work through the lens of your new position. By highlighting the very marginal status that calls for increased involvement in organizational development might suggest we disavow, we may instead be able to open doors, start conversations, ask questions that have been taken for granted, attain important information, and contribute to the important work—including organizational development—that our CTLs are doing.

Dear Directors: Suggestions From a Staff Perspective

In order to complement the suggestions offered by Coming In, we would like to offer a few additional remarks from a staff perspective that might help directors include everyone in their CTL in organizational development, if they would like to and/or if they are not doing so already. First, it is imperative that each director decide for herself not only how involved she wants the CTL to be in organizational development, but also how much she would like individual staff members to be involved. Slippage between what directors, versus all educational developers, can and should do can be confusing to the rest of us. As egalitarian as the POD Network is, many CTLs—for pragmatic reasons—function hierarchically with directors who are primarily responsible for determining the direction, vision, and future of the unit. While staff should always be prepared to follow the director’s lead, directors can also help by clarifying whether organizational development is an appropriate ambition for the CTL, in general, or for the staff, specifically.

In addition to staff development (Diamond, 2005, pp. 34–35) and “capacity building” opportunities (Gano Phillips, 2011, pp. 224–225), it may also be worth exploring what skills, knowledge, and situated perspectives the staff already have that could be put into the service of organizational development. This may be what Gano Phillips meant when she suggested that “all members of the staff will benefit from an analysis of their knowledge and skill competencies in terms of an organizational development role” (p. 221), but we would like to encourage equal focus on what staff can offer as well as what deficits need to be filled. After all, not all staff in CTLs will be novices: for example, both of us worked as graduate students in well established CTLs before assuming our current full time positions. Even staff who are new to the field of educational development may bring a range of professional experience relevant to organizational development to the CTL (e.g., working on committees, managing team projects, staying on top of current trends).

Finally, we would like to suggest that directors consider involving staff in their own evaluations. Gano Phillips recommends that “center directors may benefit from a process of self evaluation that subsequently leads them to systematically seek out additional knowledge or skills” (p. 225), but directors might also find it valuable—if this sort of activity fits with the ethos of the CTL—to engage their staff in these evaluation processes as well. Whether formal or informal, staff may be able to offer distinct perspectives that the director cannot attain on her own or from her supervisor. As intermediaries, especially between the CTL and the rest of the institution, staff may be particularly poised to receive and offer feedback that they have heard from others to the director, to which the director may not otherwise have access. This feedback can enable directors (and consequently their staff) to hone their work in ways that foster more effective participation in organizational development.

Future Directions

As we have emphasized, the suggestions and considerations we offer here regarding how staff might embody intermediary roles to support organizational development are inevitably idiosyncratic and, to some degree, limited. They emerge out of our own experiences in educational development as well as our analysis of the available organizational development literature. We recognize and welcome the need for additional research into the important issues that we have raised. Future studies that include perspectives from other CTL staff and directors would invariably add nuance to what we have offered here. Such work could complement and build on our analysis by collecting data on how CTLs are responding to being at the margins; by exploring how they may already be incorporating staff in organizational development; and by assessing the effectiveness of those efforts from staff, director, and other stakeholder viewpoints. Eventually, this research could become the basis on which best practices for increased CTL involvement for all staff matters in organizational development could be developed. These potential directions would enrich this initial contribution and enable expanded practical applications in the future.

Conclusion

Feminist standpoint theory teaches us “that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced” (Hekman, 1997, p. 342). Different positions beget different standpoints, which emerge from different experiences of institutionalized social practices. Likewise, CLT directors and staff cannot possibly know or perceive all of the same things; instead, our individual standpoints give us each a different perspective on the CTL and the institution from which to operate. So, as educational developers of all stripes take up the charge issued by Coming In, we insist upon the recognition that all members of an organization—not despite, but because of our different positions—have a perspective that is valuable and that can inform our work. From our vantage as staff in the field of educational development, we are able to identify implicit biases and lacunae in the ways organizational development is discussed in the literature precisely because we are not the target audience. Standpoint projects like ours “study up,” seeing “behind” or “beneath” (Harding, 2004, p. 6).

What lies beneath, on the so called “margins” of CTLs, is rich with variety and possibility. When Land (2004) interviewed professionals in our field, he too discovered that “what emerges from the narratives of individual developers is the many faceted aspect of their agency. [We] have different academic and professional identities, inscribed within different discourses and drawing on different metaphors to represent the issues they face and the contexts in which they work” (p. 12). There is no universal “educational developer.” Developers themselves contain multitudes. Yet this variability, like the margins themselves, is not something to be glossed over or denigrated, but rather something to be recognized and valued for what it can contribute to the richness of our work. Throughout our article, we have suggested how staff, as well as directors, can prepare for and contribute to organizational development efforts. We might even be able to, as hooks (1990) would have it, create “new worlds.”

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