Theorizing Capacity-Building in Educational Improvement as Discourse Displacement and Emergence

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Logics & Learning: Organizational Theory as a Tool for Improvement and Reform

Abstract

A recent wave of educational improvement approaches express clear concern with the work of building systems capacity for improving schools, schooling, and learning environments. However, capacity-building has largely been underconceptualized. This empirical study aims to generate a conceptualization of capacity-building as temporally-situated discursive displacement and emergence. Drawing on process organization studies, I illustrate how a strong process ontology helps build a nuanced and complex understanding of how capacity-building work unfolds. Taking up this frame, I found that capacity-building work is centrally about the relations of past, present, and future; namely that past ways of improving education come to bear on present capacity-building efforts in order to support enactment of new forms of educational improvement.

Author

• Carlos Sandoval, Clemson University