WVU ADVANCE Center | West Virginia University Team Fosters Group-Level Equity and Inclusivity at Higher Education Institutions

Despite ongoing efforts to broaden participation in the academy, many groups remain underrepresented. More needs to be done to ensure that all faculty and students succeed in institutions of higher education. The WVU ADVANCE Center is an academic hub at West Virginia University, which provides services, events, mentorship opportunities, and other initiatives that promote the sense of belonging that leads to thriving faculty and students.

Why Broadening Participation Matters

The WVU ADVANCE Team perceives the notion of ‘justice’ enshrined in the cultural ideals of the United States as inclusive of social, economic, legal, and other forms of justice pertinent to one’s ability to experience liberty and freedom.

In academic settings, hiring faculty from varied backgrounds increases the likelihood that students are exposed to many different viewpoints – both similar to and different from their own – which greatly enriches their learning experiences. In research and development settings, multiple perspectives broaden the scope of investigations and ensure that new technologies can meet the needs of a wider pool of potential users.

Thus, ensuring that all people participate in academic and professional environments is crucial for organisations. This is because ideas arising from multiple perspectives pave the way for innovation, necessary for all to prosper. Effective institutions should ensure that all groups are adequately represented, and individuals are given opportunities to share their perspectives and to collaborate on work with meaningful, societally significant outcomes – relevant to all kinds of communities.

The WVU ADVANCE Center

Since the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded several initiatives and projects aimed at reducing barriers impeding the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-related fields through the ADVANCE program. The ADVANCE program emphasises the success of women from all groups in the United States.

The WVU ADVANCE Center, founded in 2010 with the receipt of NSF’s ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) award, conducts research and practical interventions that broaden participation in academic settings, with an emphasis on department or work unit climate. The WVU ADVANCE Team includes researchers specialised in varied disciplines, such as sociology, social psychology, women’s and gender studies, education, leadership, and public administration. Since the WVU ADVANCE Center’s establishment in 2010, the WVU ADVANCE Team has developed a theory of change and a collection of interventions, documented in a book published in 2023.

Creating Equitable and Diverse Higher Education Environments

Theory-driven, the WVU ADVANCE Team’s practical interventions are assets-based and exemplify a growth mindset. The goal is a positive action for collective change within institutions. Academic institutions must change their practices before they can effectively support all faculty and students. This means that new ways of doing things must take hold in institutions as they are currently configured. Universities and academic organisations have been operating in the same way for some time, and the perspectives needed to support groups of students and faculty that are mostly absent differ from the current culture – otherwise, all groups would already be present.

Most broadening participation projects focus on institution-level levers (e.g., policies and practices, data collection) and on training for individuals to foster positive interactions. By focusing on the groups, where individuals collectively engage in much of the work of the institution, the WVU ADVANCE Team’s theory of change provides a needed addition to the suite of current evidence-based best practices.

A Group-Level Theory of Change

The WVU ADVANCE Team’s approach emphasises daily work group processes and practices. They posit that democratic and consensus-based decision-making, action-oriented meetings, and transparent and collectively designed policies ultimately sustain a sense of belonging among all members of a group.

While many existing strategies promoting change are designed to influence individuals within groups, the WVU ADVANCE Team focuses on group dynamics and on the collective processes that bring about sustainable change. To enact group-level change, individuals within the group should understand the impacts of their processes and practices, become more skilled at implementing change in their day-to-day lives, and cultivate a questioning outlook that promotes their engagement in transformative action. The collective atmosphere of the group, to which each individual contributes and by which all individuals are shaped, is a critical component which frames everyone’s experience.

The WVU ADVANCE Team proposes that individual academic departments or other institutional work units collectively fuel organisational change. Their theory identifies three interconnected processes that can drive group-level change within organisations – cognition, skill development and psycho-emotional dynamics (PED).

Cognition involves the attainment of knowledge, and the increasing capacity to think and reflect critically on familiar and unfamiliar concepts. Skill development involves the intentional cultivation of the competencies needed to effect change. PED comes from the expectations group members have of each other and those in authority. These expectations may or may not be realistic. However, when the members meet or fail to meet these expectations, a social atmosphere is created. The atmosphere affects everyone in the group and provides the context from which transformation becomes possible or is stalled. Thus, PED involves the ways in which certain experiences and/or observations can provoke the desire to take action that affects change.

The WVU ADVANCE Team proposes that PED is well-suited to catalyse a liberatory consciousness – grounded in liberty, justice and freedom for all – within groups. This is because a positive PED promotes connections among individuals in a group, as well as a sense of community and empathy, all of which can promote openness towards the views of others and cultivate a sense of belonging among all group members. The WVU ADVANCE group-level theory of change highlights the critical role of PED in fostering deep commitments to change. The two interventions developed at the Center to enhance group PED are the Dialogues^© process and the Change Agent Course.

The Dialogues^© Process

Dialogues^© uses a series of structured and collaborative work sessions to reduce dependency on administrative or informal leaders while also promoting the engagement of all group members, the productive resolution of conflicts, and the development of collective efficacy beliefs. Research has found that when a group over-relies on the views of a single individual or a few members of the group, the perspectives of others tend to be silenced, lost, or ignored, reducing people’s sense of belonging and weakening the group’s collective identity. It also limits what they can create.

The Dialogues^© process is designed to create a positive affective atmosphere in which all group members feel heard, thus generating positive emotions, strengthening a sense of belonging, and encouraging continued participation. The process has four key stages: connect, visualise, prioritise, and act. During all stages, groups complete a cyclical process – reflecting individually, sharing with small groups, and coming to a full group consensus. First, group members are asked to connect with one another. For example, they select visual symbols that represent their motivations, feelings, and values, and share them with each other. Second, they are asked to share their vision of what an ideal group outcome would look and feel like. Third, they generate a list of actions needed to reach the ideal. Finally, the group is asked to develop and commit to clearly defined and time-bound next steps, assigned to specific people.

The Dialogues^© process is based on a dual agenda approach. Dual agenda processes typically highlight the benefits that broadening participation can have for organisations’ ability to attain other goals. The WVU ADVANCE Team has used the Dialogues^© intervention to improve the group dynamics of various academic departments, colleges, and other units at WVU and other US higher education institutions. The team works in close collaboration with the groups, adapting the interventions based on their unique needs and characteristics. For example, in the original Dialogues^© intervention, recruiting, retaining and promoting women faculty were linked to the development of a department-level strategic plan, a task that units were required to do.

The Change Agent Course

Dual agenda approaches have been critiqued because broadening participation goals can be neglected while other organisational goals move forward. Dual agenda approaches do not necessarily require faculty to reflect and develop approaches to the challenges of broadening participation projects. In response, the WVU ADVANCE Team developed The Change Agent Course. A foremost objective of the course is to provide the time and space necessary for academics to reflect on the connection between organisational values and practices.

This process is grounded in the tenets of Liberatory Consciousness described by Barbara Love. The Change Agent Course is designed to guide thinking and action that is centred on transforming change from a purely individual to an intentionally collective or group-level process. The course is designed to increase the sense of collective agency among change agents – which inevitably fosters change agent identity – while increasing participants’ collective capacity to identify, analyse, and build consensus around problem-solving approaches and strategic action. In this way, the course complements the Dialogues^© intervention by facilitating group-level conversations and constructing strategic group-level experiences that lead to group-level action.

The intent of the Course is to develop academic change agents who are equipped to lead transformative broadening participation initiatives, especially related to sustaining a welcoming and supportive climate to retain all faculty, including those from groups whose presence on the campus does not reflect their presence in the overall population.

During the course, change agents identify their own social location, consider how systems that exclude some groups from full participation are maintained and also dismantled, identify how to do both formal and informal work as part of a group, map the strengths and weaknesses of the activities in which they engage, and consider how to engage in constructive critique and maintain group accountability to sustain the thriving of all members of the group and to welcome members of groups who are not currently served by the institution. Overall, the emphasis is on reflection in the context of taking collective action.

Fuelling Group-Level Change and Institutional Transformation

The WVU ADVANCE Center develops effective interventions to facilitate positive institutional transformations, ensuring that individuals from a multitude of backgrounds are welcomed and included in academic settings. Combined, the Dialogues^© process and Change Agent Course help institutions facilitate a shift towards a culture that prioritises freedom to learn, to live and to prosper by all groups present in society. These interventions have been implemented by other institutions across the US and beyond. The WVU ADVANCE Team finds that the best results are achieved by attending to variability within groups and in the specific institutional contexts in which they reside.

The work of the WVU ADVANCE Center provides a valuable example of how group-level dynamics can be usefully leveraged to develop interventions aimed at broadening participation in the academy.