Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Abstract

This case explores the complexity and dilemmas that faculty and academic administrators at Southwestern University (SU) encountered as they engaged in the development and establishment of a partnership with the local city’s school districts. The partnership—carried at SU’s College of Science but funded and based through a university-based agency—aimed to prepare math and science educators to better respond to the increasing pressure of improving student achievement in those subject areas. The complications and dilemmas that the math and science partnership encountered are traced and made visible as its establishment coincides with a period of institutional changes at SU. The changes involve the university’s redefinition of its mission and goals including an institutional shift from a focus on teaching to one on research. The shift brought into stark relief a long-standing tension between two cherished but unequally valued academic practices: disciplinary (or basic) scholarship versus transdisciplinary (educational or applied) scholarship. Thus, set against the backdrop of institutional change and the resulting unstable institutional environment, the College of Science faculty who were part of the math and science partnership were confronted with an irreducible task: to work to reconcile the traditions and expectations of their department’s disciplinary orientations that privileged disciplined based scholarship with the institutional commitment acquired through the partnership expecting a more transdisciplinary, applied educational scholarship. What follows describes how faculty and academic administrators navigated through this complex institutional tension and context, the dilemmas they confronted, and some of the outcomes that resulted.