Learning Together: Building Networks for Transformation

• In Event: 60.081 - Unpacking Systems Capacity Through SWIFT Schools: Building Coherence

Abstract

In SWIFT, we conceptualized transformative systems as coordinated capacity building and reflexive professional development. Through data, we informed organizational frameworks, developed their knowledge bases, and re-mediated practice through discourse and action. We supported this work with tools designed to help modulate how people understand the landscape in which they work and define their problem spaces in ways that recognize and organize complexity (Engeström, 1999). Mapping state resources helped state leaders understand the full extent of their states’ capacities to coalesce strengths in pursuit of equity building and social justice. Transformative equity work is institutionalized and scaled up through a distributive model of organizational change in which effective practices are systematically disseminated through transformation networks across sites (Kozleski & Huber, 2010).
Critical ethnography demands that scholar/practitioners examine how power and privilege is exercised within settings (Cannella & Lincoln, 2009). We described our transformative work as organized around five key transformative mediating structures: (a) re-mediating understandings of thorny issues; (b) disrupting the view from above; (c) forging new spaces; (d) engaging inquiry, reflection, and action cycles; and (e) building on opportunities and assets (Kozleski & Artiles, 2012). Unexamined everyday practices reify historical patterns of interaction in which some groups benefit because of the existing informal or unspoken rules of conduct that marginalize other perspectives and frames of reference. The tension between technical solutions that is, what should be done and in what detail, and a critical analysis of the power and privilege dynamics that maintain certain structures was continuously present in our discussions. Threading critical ethnography methodologies in our work helped SWIFT to be both integral to and removed from the process so that a constant critical examination of the power dynamics happened simultaneously.
Two kinds of social space design were instrumental to our work. First, we designed social spaces for labor-intensive meetings with state Department of Education personnel. Second, we designed learning networks among states. These two strategies allowed us to infuse explicitly an introspective dimension through activities that promoted a “double move” (Hedegaard, 1998) in which participation structures compelled personnel to shift from personal/professional experiences to theoretical sense-making, based on a new vocabulary offered in these meetings. Simultaneously, the everyday experiences of the personnel offered a way into sense-making that was grounded in local state department problem spaces. These two processes constituted the double move in which the SWIFT team created a platform for understanding while the government personnel brought their everyday conundrums into the space. Shifting problematizing to engagement helps participants to learn more about how they systematically categorize and organize their students in order to perform schooling rather than how they organize to support their students. Exposing hidden assumptions about the roles that schools adopt and their public purposes is key to the work. This paper chronicles this journey, revealing how our approach reveals perceived identities as well as prescribed roles that interact to afford certain kinds of responses while constraining others. Building networks that foreground capacity building results from this careful approach to sustained learning in community.

Author

• Elizabeth B. Kozleski, The University of Kansas