An Ecosystem Inspired Change Strategy to Rejuvenate Technical Support Service for Twenty-First Century Teacher Education

Abstract

Higher education has experienced a lot of changes over the past several decades, expedited by globalisation and escalating pressures on research performance. While the pressures and mechanisms of change at the institutional level, including the tenure and promotion system, are generally high on academic and top level administrative staff in universities, technical and support staff are not subjected to the same forces. Yet the latter plays an important role in supporting the process of change in higher education. This paper describes how a faculty of education applied an ecological model of change to rejuvenate its technical team progressively by building in self-organizing mechanisms to ensure that the success can be sustainable.