Representation and the Proliferation of Resources: Finding a Balance Between Generality and Specificity

• In Event: What Does It Take to Build on Educators’ Expertise? Exploring Critical Problems of Representation, Relationships, and Scalability

Abstract

Objectives
This ongoing project seeks to facilitate the sharing of expertise among high school educators engaged in a network focused on strengthening student-teacher relationships. The project focuses on two key questions:

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?

Theoretical Background
Our work to help educators articulate and share their tacit expertise grows out of a situated perspective highlighting that learning is shaped by the affordances of the representations and the settings within which those representations are used (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1988; Greeno, 1997). Affordances refer to the specific functions that can be carried out given the properties of a representation (or object or setting) and the characteristics of the people who use that representation including their racial and ethnic backgrounds and their knowledge and familiarity with the representations and their content (Gibson, 1979; Yadav & Koehler, 2007).

Methods
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 educators and coaches working in 6 public high schools. Purposive sampling was used to select schools and interviewees that constituted a racially diverse group. Analysis for this presentation focused on questions asking participants to describe which representations they found most useful and why, how they might use those representations, and what additional information/representations would help them to further strengthen student-teacher relationships.

Findings
In the interviews, participants reported that they found the representations helpful, but frequently asked for more specific representations that were a closer match to the contexts in which they were working. They asked particularly for representations from contexts that had similar theories of change and that were developing similar approaches to developing their advisory programs. These concerns created what we termed a “challenge of proliferation”: Viewing representations generally created a desire for more representations, however, the more representations we created the more difficult it was for users to find those that matched their needs. In response, we took on the role of “resource architects” (Author, 2023), responsible for both creating new resources for the network and for working closely with the educators and coaches to help them navigate the many resources related to advisories and other relevant topics already created within network and by other groups.

Significance
This work 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. Although interviewees did not raise concerns about a “match” between the racial or ethnic background of the students reflected in the representations and their own students, further work needs to examine how to create representations that meet the needs of educators who work with students from many different racial and ethnic groups without making those representations so specific that other educators think they are not useful for their own student populations and without making those representations so generic that they are “colorblind.”

Authors

• Thomas C. Hatch, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Bianca Licata, San Francisco State University

• Angel Zheng, New Visions for Public Schools