Habits that Change Talk Challenges: attitudes, models, and institutional situations Patricia Sullivan

Purdue University http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~psulliva this talk at: http://peterfadde.com/sullivan.html Today, I consider how the change talk fostered by C+W positions us as change chasers in institutions that want to control (and sometimes avoid) change. How do our habits of change talk impact how others in our institutions might perceive us? After a quick gloss of how published C+W discussions talk of change, I look at institutional attitudes toward change and approaches to managing it. I contend that people and institutions habitually are conditioned against change and strive to plan it, manage it, or at least tidy up after it. I use an example from another field (state mandated high stakes video review of teaching performance) to examine typical roles groups might claim in a technology-enabled institutional change situation, and then circle back to an issue central to C+W (the hiring of young faculty) in order to discuss how those of us in C+W might be wise to examine how our habits of talking about technologies and change might be perceived by institutional others.

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