Micro-Innovations as "Boundary Objects" for Sharing Educators' Expertise

• In Event: Representation, Access, and Engagement: Exploring Problems of Knowledge/Use in Practice and Research

Abstract

1. Purpose and Theoretical Framework
This project aims to facilitate the sharing of expertise to strengthen student-teacher relationships among a network of public school educators in New York City. Key questions include:

1. How can we enable teachers to articulate the tacit expertise and share the practices and structures they have developed to strengthen student-teacher relationships?

2. How can we represent and share that expertise so that others can build on it in their own contexts?

To address these questions, we explored the ways in which educators describe “micro-innovations” and created related representations (blogs and tweets) shared with colleagues via social media. Micro-innovations are adaptations and inventions new to the contexts in which they are developed (Author, 2021). By asking educators to identify the micro-innovations they have made, we hope to create representations that make their tacit expertise explicit (Nonaka, 1994) and can serve as “boundary objects” that can carry information and ideas across contexts (Czarniawska & Sevon, 1996; Wenger, 1998). This situated perspective on knowledge mobilization highlights the “affordances” that shape what can and cannot be done with specific objects and in particular contexts (Gibson, 1979).

3. Methods/Data Sources
Based on nominations from leaders of the network, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 educators from 6 schools that had evidence that they were making progress in strengthening student-teacher relationships. Questions and analysis focused on identifying how the conditions and affordances for developing and sustaining relationships changed in each context, comparing those deemed most effective for different groups of students, and then developing social media posts that we shared with the educators and network leaders for their feedback.

4. Findings
Educators were easily able to point to specific changes that they referred to as micro-innovations in structures and practices. However, both the educator’s descriptions and their feedback raised a number of “challenges of representations” including:

1) Challenge of grain size. Micro-innovations can be described at many levels of specificity. However, if educators’ descriptions and representations are too specific, then others might not consider them applicable to other contexts; but if descriptions/representations are too general, they may not provide sufficient guidance for adaptation to different contexts.
2) Challenge of “spin-offs.” Educators noted a series of related changes they felt needed to be made. However, capturing and representing these “spin-off’s” results in more complicated and longer representations that can be harder to comprehend.
3) The challenge of context. The micro-innovations described did not stand on their own. They went hand-in-hand with changes in culture and mindsets, and an overall strengthening of relationships that educators also highlighted.

5. Significance
This work suggests that these challenges of representation should be approached as dilemmas rather than problems to be solved. Each challenge involves trade-offs that suggest that we need to become adept at developing representations of micro-innovations of different grain-sizes, different lengths, different formats, and different levels of complexity. Furthermore, we need to develop pathways that enable others to access the representations they need at particular times for particular contexts.

Authors

• Thomas C. Hatch, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Jefferson Pestronk, New Visions for Public Schools
  Presenting Author

• Bianca Licata, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Angel Zheng, New Visions for Public Schools
  Presenting Author