A Consultative Framework for General Education Reform: Change Management and the Power of Storytelling

ABSTRACT

This article offers a step-by-step, consultative guide to successful general education reform using three different institutions as case studies to provide readers with tools and strategies they may adapt and implement on their own campuses. Public liberal arts institutions may draw from Eastern Connecticut State University’s recent work to reform their Liberal Arts Core. Public research institutions may find a suitable corollary in how Michigan Technological University reimagined education for the twenty-first century and created Essential Education. Private liberal arts colleges may find North Central College’s reform of their new Cardinal Directions curriculum instructive. We draw on theory from multiple disciplines, including sociology, management, political science, and psychology, to develop a consultative framework for managing large-scale change. We focus on specific conditions and attributes that higher education institutions need to manage intentionally. Therefore, we integrate Kotter’s (1996, 2007) framework for managing the change process with Ganz’s ideas about public narrative (Ganz et al. 2023) and with political process theory (Caren 2007) about mobilizing existing structures to develop actionable tools. The result is a series of practical steps whether the change is top down, faculty-driven, or both.