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This chapter explores how hybrid organizations navigate the challenges (and opportunities) associated with advancing unconventional logic combinations. It draws from a study of the 180-year history of sheltered workshops in the United States. Sheltered workshops are hybrids that combine social and commercial logics to provide gainful employment to individuals with disabilities. This chapter theorizes a connection between the governance system – that is, country-based social norms and regulatory settlements – framing hybrids and the agency that allows them the discretion required to advance unconventional combinations. It introduces the term hybrid agency to describe this connection and identifies four types: upstream, midstream, downstream, and crosscurrent. Upstream agency draws from the entrepreneurial vision of charismatic founders. It allows hybrids the discretion to advance unconventional logic combinations in unsupportive times, but it also requires them to observe certain dominant cultural norms. Midstream agency draws from hybrids’ adaptation and advocacy skills and resources in periods of historical change. It allows access to resources and legitimacy for unconventional combinations. Downstream agency draws from organizational slack possible in supportive times. Slack eases tensions and tradeoffs between conflicting logics but may also fuel mission drift. Finally, crosscurrent agency also draws from hybrids’ adaptation and advocacy skills and resources. It provides hybrids with the opportunity to grapple with challenges in periods of contestation.

As libraries evolve, they accommodate and refine their services to support the varied institutional, student and faculty, and course needs, including developing workshops tailored to course requirements or that provide students and faculty with additional skills that promote their academic pursuits. Some services provided by academic libraries reflect strategic choices that promote the increased alignment of the users’ needs with the institution’s needs. Some needs anticipated and observed by many research-intensive institutions are data literacy, research, and software skills. This chapter describes the case of the academic library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), an R1 research institution, which offered the Data Workshop Series (DWS) to help prepare students, faculty, and staff to clean, manipulate, analyze, and visualize research data. This applied, student-centered technical workshop series was guided by authentic assessment, specifically performance tasks, which were employed to ensure the participants’ engagement and comprehension of the applied techniques presented. The performance tasks also helped participants gain confidence in their data skills. From them, the participants learned that they can use the software and solve questions on their own. When reflecting on what they learned in the DWS, participants stated that they could develop their skills on their own with additional practice and that they plan on integrating the software into their academic work. By offering the DWS, UNLV Libraries has taken a step toward being part of the life of the user, a partner in more than information findings, but in knowledge creation.

Bangladesh’s urban poor face numerous obstacles, especially during times of disastrous natural events. The effects of global warming will pose new threats for them as frequencies and magnitudes of natural hazards are likely to increase. Thus, current and formerly successful coping and adaptation strategies will be challenged in the future. The urban poor need to be informed and empowered so that they can develop their own strategies in response to the expected local effects of climate change. Our research aims at grassroot workshops as a means of communication with slum dwellers in Dhaka which not only convey possible climate change impact on livelihoods but also create relevance for the individuals and options for action. More than 20 workshops including men, women, and children have been conducted and analysed. The final workshop design incorporates a mix of participatory and input-oriented elements in order to overcome the problem of psychological distance.

Openness is critical to long-term cleanup and stewardship of former nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities. Openness is especially challenging in such facilities because a culture of secrecy has dominated them since the earliest days of nuclear weapons development. This paper describes a multi-year effort at the Hanford Site called the Hanford Openness Workshops. The Workshops were convened to address and resolve issues impeding the availability and understanding of information important to public health, the environment, and decision–making. Lessons from the workshops can improve dialogue about nuclear waste cleanup and long-term stewardship among regulators, decision makers, stakeholders, and Tribes.

We discuss the implementation of workshops for faculty search committees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A central focus of the workshops is to introduce faculty to research on the influence of unconscious bias on the evaluation of job candidates and to recommend evidence-based strategies for minimizing this bias. The workshops aim to help universities achieve their goals of recruiting excellent and diverse faculty.

With basic descriptive statistics and a simple logistic regression analysis, we utilize several datasets to examine participants’ responses to the workshop and assess changes in the percentage of women who receive offers and accept positions.

Faculty members are becoming aware of the role bias can play in evaluating faculty applicants and are learning strategies for minimizing bias. In departments where women are underrepresented, workshop participation is associated with a significant increase in the odds of making a job offer to a woman candidate, and with a non-significant increase in the odds of hiring a woman.

This study is limited by our inability to assess the diversity of the applicant pools our faculty search committees recruit and by lack of control over the myriad other factors that influence hiring. Data are from a single institution and therefore these results may not generalize to other universities.

Educating faculty search committees about the role of unconscious bias and presenting them with evidence-based strategies for minimizing its influence promotes changes that contribute to increasing representation of women faculty.

This chapter describes the Bornlearning ^® Academy (BLA), a school-based family engagement program predicated on the notion that families come to the table with knowledge and skills and can support children’s learning by building on what they are already doing. It takes place in a school building within the families’ school district, and it is a six-workshop series that utilizes materials available for free at bornlearning.org, a United Way Worldwide public engagement campaign. The goal of the BLA is to increase parents’/caregivers’ understanding of their role in the education process of their children and to facilitate familiarization and establishment of positive experiences with the school personnel and the school district for the children and their families. Survey data demonstrated that parents/caregivers from a range of backgrounds enjoyed and learned from various BLA workshops. Gains on content questions indicated the BLA attendees learned, and responses indicated that attendees both intended to use what they learned at the workshops in their own interactions with their children and actually followed through on those intentions.

The European Forum for Enhanced Collaboration in Teaching (EFFECT, 2015–2019) (EFFECT, 2019), a project co-financed by the European Commission, through its Erasmus+ programme, has been exploring effective methods for university teachers’ development at the European level, including pedagogical staff development “modules” to support inclusivity and citizenship in teaching and learning practice. Throughout the project and in this chapter, the authors have taken “inclusivity” to convey an attitude and appreciation for principles which inform “inclusion” as a practice – in the context of reflective and reflexive practice the words become largely interchangeable.

The way academic staff teach is of critical importance in any reform designed to enhance inclusion and citizenship in higher education. Conveying these values-related topics in an academic context hardly lends itself to a traditional pedagogical training model. Promoting inclusion means stimulating discussion, challenging stereotypes and unconscious biases, as well as improving educational and social frameworks. The Change Laboratory methodology (Engeström, 2001) was chosen for the pedagogical staff development workshops under EFFECT, with a view to engaging teaching staff in a deeper reflection about the topics and about their teaching practice. Change Laboratory is an intervention-research methodology that aims at reconceptualizing activity: it intends to provoke authentic reactions, responses and disagreements among the participants and provides opportunity for them to work together to reimagine their activities and to identify “concrete” solutions that address persisting issues in their practice. The theory takes a broad conceptualization of “activity” and “practice,” which is not specific to the education sector or the “classroom.” The Change Laboratory is a methodology designed to support the “expansive learning cycle” described by Engeström and as such can be understood as a theory of change which the EFFECT project team applied to a pan-European higher education learning and teaching context.

In 2017, the project team designed and implemented four physical, face-to-face pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills based on this methodology, attended by over 100 participants from across Europe. In 2018, the workshop model was adapted to a virtual learning environment and three online sessions on inclusivity and citizenship skills for higher education teaching staff were offered.

The pedagogical staff development workshops enabled participants to use open reflective questions to provoke discussion about the challenges faced in their own learning and teaching contexts, think about their pedagogical practices and identify their unconscious biases. Most of the participants rated the workshops as very good and innovative, and considered the methodology an effective vehicle for promoting meaningful open discussion.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on the design, implementation and lessons learnt from the pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills. The authors propose a set of recommendations for individual teaching staff and institutional leadership to consider when addressing continuous professional development for inclusivity and citizenship.