Organization Development and Knowledge Management

ODKM Looks Toward 30th Anniversary, Adds New Faculty Member

Andrew J Schappert — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:47:15 +0000

ODKM Looks Toward 30th Anniversary, Adds New Faculty Member Andrew J Schappert Fri, 09/27/2024 - 10:47

The Schar School of Policy and Government’s Organization Development and Knowledge Management (ODKM) master’s program is preparing to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year, when it welcomes its 30th cohort to the program. To mark the milestone, the program is launching an ambitious #30in30 campaign, aiming to recruit 30 students for Cohort 30. (The average cohort is 20.)

Program Director Tojo Thatchenkery: The goal was to ‘create a truly interdisciplinary department which would be one of the first of its kind anywhere.’

“ODKM is the best kept secret at ��AV, and we don’t want to be a secret any longer,” said program director Tojo Thatchenkery. “It’s a unique program that is preparing working adults for the complex business environment so many are experiencing in this postpandemic reality.”

After three decades of developing leaders in a variety of for-profit and nonprofit industries, “we are focusing a lot of energy on recruitment while celebrating 30 years of this program that has turned out so many influential changemakers over the years,” he said.

New core faculty member Stacey Guenther is up for the challenge. She joins after serving as an adjunct faculty member of the program and is herself a 2004 alumna of ODKM, cohort number seven.

“ODKM is near and dear to my heart. It was deeply transformative for me, and my life changed radically after I entered the program,” Guenther said.

Stacey Guenther: ‘It was deeply transformative for me, and my life changed radically after I entered the program.’

Guenther has been closely connected to George Mason since graduating 20 years ago. She was one of the founding staff members of the university’s Center for Consciousness and Transformation (now known as the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being), worked as a corporate facilitator at George Mason’s team development and experiential learning facility the EDGE, and for five years served as adjunct faculty for the School of Integrative Studies.

In addition to teaching in the program, Guenther will spearhead ODKM’s #30in30 campaign, which will involve a social media push, the development of an advisory board, alumni relations efforts, and relationship-building with local and regional organizations.

“I’m looking forward to telling the ODKM story,” she said. “It is the only program of its kind in the immediate region, and there is no better academic program for leaders and helping professionals in the area.”

In mid-September, the current cohort of ODKM students hosted a daylong learning community in which they became instructors to those from many walks of life and at varying stages of their own careers. The capstone event is traditional in the program as the Schar School students practice what they have learned in the course. This learning community’s theme was styles of conflict and titled “The Art of the Ordeal: Conflict Tools and Techniques.”

ODKM was founded by Thatchenkery as he was completing his PhD dissertation at Case Western University in April 1993.

“I was looking for a job in a business school, but what I was working on—postmodernism and hermeneutics—wasn’t particularly attractive to them,” he said with a laugh.

As it happened, George Mason was beginning a new academic department called Program on Social Organizational Learning (PSOL), with a tenure-track position for researching and teaching hermeneutics. “Within an hour I had sent my application,” he said.

The cohort-based ODKM program features a “learning community” capstone, where students take over as teachers. Photo by Bryan Regalado.

The founders of the program, economics professors Don Lavoie and Jack High, “wanted to create a truly interdisciplinary department which would be one of the first of its kind anywhere,” Thatchenkery said. “As we all know, academic departments have disciplinary boundaries. Economics departments have economists and psychology departments have psychologists. But how about a department with faculty from different disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, computer sciences, literature, management, and economics?”

That was, he said, “a revolutionary idea at that time and I was sold on it. A few weeks later I would get a job offer from Don Lavoie and my first day on the job was mid-August 1993.”

It wasn’t long after that Thatchenkery was pitching a master’s program in organization learning (OL), which would be the first such program anywhere, he said. After much internal maneuvering around various disciplines and hard-earned approval by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the PSOL degree program launched in fall 1996 with its first 23 students, cohort number one.

The program was rebranded ODKM in fall 2009 and continues to teach mid-career students leadership, creative problem-solving, and analytical skills invaluable to their organization, work, and lives.

For more information about George Mason’s Organization Development and Knowledge Management program, see the program’s website.

In This Story

Tojo Thatchenkery

Stacey K. Guenther

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To Help Fellow Police Officers Deal with Trauma, She Needed Knowledge. Now She’s a Master’s Student at the Schar School

Andrew J Schappert — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 18:08:44 +0000

To Help Fellow Police Officers Deal with Trauma, She Needed Knowledge. Now She’s a Master’s Student at the Schar School Andrew J Schappert Mon, 04/17/2023 - 14:08

In This Story

Tojo Thatchenkery

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Corinne Dopp stands at the doorway of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Schar School student, a police officer in North Carolina, is spending a semester abroad studying master’s-level curriculum designed specifically for police.

“If you have turned on the television in the last few years, or even the last few days, you are very aware the relationship between police officers and their communities is suffering,” said Corinne Dopp, reflecting on the seemingly daily news stories involving violence between law enforcement officers and the public they are sworn to protect.

While many in the public-at-large see police as antagonists, even calling on officials to “defund the police,” Dopp sees things from a different angle. She serves as a police officer in the Town of Glen Alpine Police Department, in Morganton, North Carolina, and as such, she’s aware of the trauma—induced by hypervigilance, violence, and working shifts in hazardous environments—that law enforcement officers suffer as a result of daily interactions with domestic turmoil, mental health issues, and criminal activity.

In March 2021, she cofounded a business, with colleague Gregory Snider, to assist police officers address with mental health struggles—Navigating Pathways Home—but the 2021 public health graduate from Appalachian State University realized she needed more knowledge and skills in order to achieve her goal of helping police in jurisdictions other than her own.

To accomplish this mission, Dopp enrolled in the Organization Development and Knowledge Management (ODKM) master’s program at ��AV’s Schar School of Policy and Government. ODKM is a cohort-based, integrated learning experience that deviates from higher education pedagogies: Students act as a team to learn and apply essential leadership proficiencies, creative problem-solving, and advanced analytical skills to a range of professional fields. Many come to the program to advance their careers; others, such as Dopp, learn methodologies not available in traditional degree programs that they immediately apply to their own organizational concepts.

In Dopp’s case, “I have found the answer for how it is possible to build a system that will address the problem [of police mental health issues] in a preventative way from within each police department,” she said. She said she has a plan for an “internal wellness framework” for every police force, at no cost.

That advanced learning does not come without sacrifice. Dopp enrolled in the Schar School’s ODKM program knowing it would mean leaving her three children—ages 13,11, and 4—at home 400 miles away, with her Army active-duty husband Joshua, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, for the 12-hour round-trip drive for weekly in-person classes at Mason Square in Arlington.

But it also afforded her an unexpected opportunity: Late last year she was accepted into Mason’s Global Education Office’s semester abroad at the U.K.’s University of Oxford, where she is being exposed to that country’s master’s-level curriculum designed specifically for police. She’s also been a guest lecturer at Cambridge’s Anglia Ruskin University.

“The 12-hours-plus round-trip is the longest we’ve had in the ODKM program,” said professor and program founding director Tojo Thatchenkery. The drive, he suggested, “was also her opportunity for reflection about the changes she wanted to create for the mental health of her own law enforcement community. She understands the emotional turmoil that comes with law enforcement and wants to think outside the box to enhance the well-being of fellow officers.

“With that determination, she is now learning from the best practices of officers around the world in a program at Oxford. Corrine’s indefatigable efforts are one of the best examples of the positive changes ODKM students have been making for social justice and well-being.”

Dopp’s service to her fellow police—helping process trauma, building resiliency, and underscoring community—is important, she said, because as of now, “the way we are treating police officers is ineffective, and we can see this in their average number of pension withdrawals.” She cites World Health Organization figures that show the average citizen experiences one to two “critical incidents” in their lives, outside of normal loss and grief. “A career police officer experiences 600 to 800,” she said.

“This has a health cost. Most officers don’t last five years in the profession, and those who make it to retirement meet that accomplishment at the highest risk of death within their first two years.

“The average life expectancy of a citizen in the United States is 74 years. The average life expectancy of a law enforcement officer is 53 years.”

Additional reporting by Anduela Nika Johnson.