Community, Collaboration, and Change: A Network Improvement Community in Action

• In Event: Investigating the Promise of Network Improvement Communities to Improve Teacher Preparation Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
In the field of Education, educators are expected to work collaboratively in the service of students (Vangrieken et al., 2017). However, in practice, educators and educational leaders often operate in silos, diminishing the power to create collective change (Hadar & Brody, 2010). We illustrate how our participation in the Network Improvement Community, a project dedicated to the advocacy of multilingual youth, created pivotal moments that led to pedagogical and curricular reforms. We attribute our ability to implement our “change idea” to our diverse team consisting of intergenerational clinical and senate faculty with diverse skill sets. The success of the project illustrates that institutional change rarely occurs in isolation.

Theoretical Framework
The authors examined the data sources through a cultural-historical activity theoretical (CHAT) approach (Engestrom, 2001; Roth & Lee, 2007). We use CHAT as a lens to understand our interactions as a process mediated by unbundling our own perspectives and experiences, analyzing our various data sources within the context of our implicit and explicit cultural histories (Cliff et al., 2020, p. 3). Aligned with Stetsenko (2020), we address the urgency of agency within CHAT. We too challenged the assumptions about agency as autonomous achievements of isolated individuals and instead, engaged in this work as being “about persons mattering in the world that is existentially and profoundly... to its very core social and communal” (p. 5).

Methods
We employ collaborative recall (Barnier & Suttin, 2008) to construct our collective memory (Stepinski, 2012) of the events that led our group to develop its identity as equity advocates. Collaborative recall involves remembering together and is dynamically constructed during group conversational processes (Harris, Patterson & Kemp, 2008). Through this process we identified the pivotal moments, significant artifacts and on-going activities that constituted our improvement efforts. When people collaborate to remember, they provide one another with details to fill in memory gaps and correct one another’s errors (Barber, Rajaram, & Fox, 2012). Remembering together provides the group an opportunity to interpret the significance of various events for the group’s identity, yielding narratives that have been co-constructed.

Data Sources
We used documents to stimulate memories of our shared experiences, including notes from meetings, agendas, personal calendars, and records of student work. We used these documents to consider how our participation in the multi-campus MLS NIC led to sustaining our collaboration at our site despite the traditional forces that lead educators to operate in isolation.

Results
Within our specific site, collaboration provided an opportunity to enhance a specific anchor project with accompanying pedagogical and curriculum reforms. More importantly, our collaboration had a cascading effect across the program which included both multiple subject and single subject credential students. Teacher educators developed a multilingual student mindset which significantly impacted their work with preservice teachers.

Significance
Significant implications include providing a roadmap for how a NIC set into motion a multi-campus collaboration in service of multilingual youth. The system-wide effort across various UC campuses serves as a leadership model for institutions committed to cultivating equitable education systems at local and national levels.

Authors

• Orlando Leonel Carreon, University of California - Davis

• Rebecca Ambrose, University of California - Davis

• Leslie C. Banes, Sacramento State University

• Margarita Jimenez-Silva, University of California Davis