Our programs and resources
are targeted for higher education audiences, with emphasis on
UO campus departments, colleges, and units, as well as individual
faculty and graduate students. CoDaC organizes, supports, and
offers its own resources and programming in the following areas:
Peter Senge's book The
Fifth Discipline (1990) popularized the concept of the "learning
organization" as a pragmatic theory of organizational development.
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Seeks to create its
own future.
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Assumes learning is
an ongoing and creative process for its members.
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Develops, adapts, and
transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations
of people, both inside and outside itself.
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Allows people at all
levels, individually and collectively, to increase their capacity
to produce results about which they care.
In situations of rapid change,
only organizations that are adaptive, flexible, and productive
will thrive. In order to do so, organizations must not only continually
expand their capacity to create the future they seek; they must
also "discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity
to learn at all levels." (The Fifth Discipline, 4).
For Senge, learning is
at the heart of what it is to be human. All people have the capacity
to learn. Similarly, all people have the capacity to become change
agents - that is, to act upon the structures and systems of which
we are a part.
Yet these structures and
systems are often not conducive to allowing engagement and reflection
- this applies to both individuals and organizations. Furthermore,
people and organizations may lack tools and guiding ideas to make
sense of the complex situations they face.
Senge distinguishes between
"adaptive learning" and "generative learning."
Adaptive learning is necessary to individual or organizational
survival. "Generative learning" is the style of "learning
that enhances our capacity to create" - indeed, to act as
change agents within thriving organizations. (The Fifth Discipline,
14).
The mastery of certain basic
disciplines or "component technologies" distinguishes
learning organizations from more traditional organizations. For
Senge, the following five "component technologies" converge
to innovate learning organizations. They are:
| Systems
Thinking |
Personal
Mastery |
Mental
Models |
Building
Shared Vision |
Team
Learning |
As converging
disciplines, the component technologies are "concerned
with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from
seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active
participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the
present to creating the future." (The Fifth Discipline,
69).
For more on the concept
of learning organizations, please see Argyris and Schon, Organizational
Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice (1996), Argyris,
"Teaching Smart People How To Learn." Harvard Business
Review 69 (3): 99 (1991), and Schon, The Reflective Practitioner
(1983). See also:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/klarsen/learnorg/
http://www.stanford.edu/group/SLOW/
http://www.albany.edu/sph/Hoff_learning/hpm_tim_learnorg.htm
http://www.moyak.com/researcher/resume/papers/var21mkm.html
CoDaC is the result of research,
planning, resources and energies contributed by a large and diverse
group of faculty, students, administrators, staff and community
members.
The idea for CoDaC originally
emerged in 1999. The UO
President's Office hired a group of 10 summer interns
to produce a report
on how the university could increase and enhance its diversity
campus-wide. That report included an initial
proposal for a new diversity research center at UO.
CoDaC was officially created
in Fall 2001, based on the proposal
developed by a formal
planning committee convened by President
David Frohnmayer. Please follow these links to read
more about CoDaC's
history and founding.
Today, CoDaC reports to
Vice
President of Research and Graduate Studies Rich Linton
and to Vice
Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Charles Martinez.
