The Production of Power Through Facilitators' Inscription of Commitments Into a Driver Diagram in a Networked Improvement Community

• In Event: Examining Facilitation in Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Objective: I seek to unveil how facilitators’ practices produce power in a networked improvement community in ways that foregrounds some perspectives while peripheralizing others. I do this by examining a case in which the facilitator inscribed practitioners’ commitments into a driver diagram.

Theoretical Framework: I conceptualize practice and power using practice theory and process philosophy (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Langley et al., 2013). Practice and process theorists view social life as performed through constantly evolving situated action. As part of this framing, power is conceptualized as produced through action rather than something that can be held or distributed (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Hardy & Thomas, 2016; Watson, 2017). Central to this conceptualization is how practices shape practices elsewhere, and how people are differentially positioned to engage in practices that shape others’ practices. I use this conceptualization of power, practice, and process to examine power dynamics in an improvement network.

Research Context & Data: I locate this study inside an improvement network (Bryk et al., 2015) of eight teacher preparation programs. Data come from recordings of a two-day convening, two monthly network-wide meetings, four recordings of one-on-one feedback meetings with individual teacher educators, and five recorded debrief and planning meetings among facilitators. Data also include improvement artifacts, namely fishbone and driver diagrams (Bryk et al., 2015).

Analysis: Using practice and process theory, I examined facilitators’ practices as they sought to generate a driver diagram that became adopted by network members. I centered my analysis on teacher educators’ spoken contributions and how facilitators did and did not take them up in driver diagram drafts. I also used a narrative as a tool (Langley, 1999) to attend to how action and talk evolved over time.

Findings: Analysis revealed that the facilitators were systematically and advantageously positioned to inscribe relations into iterations of the driver diagram. I found that the facilitators engaged in the practice of inscription by facilitating conversations that solicited teacher educators’ thoughts on what the network should focus on and how it ought to achieve its aim (focused on improving candidates’ capacity to build on multilingual students’ strengths), and then, drawing on these conversations, created and revised iterations of the driver diagram in attempts to incorporate what teacher educators had said during meetings. Drawing on Latour (1986), I found the facilitators used the driver diagram to make teacher educators’ contributions durable. However, some contributions from teacher educators were not taken up and included in driver diagram drafts, thus making them ephemeral. The driver diagram that the network came to settle on shaped what the network came to be “known” as (Hardy & Thomas, 2016) and thus constrained and enabled participation in this network in particular ways. If accepted, our presentation will offer evidence for these claims.

Significance

Our findings highlight how power comes to be lived in the practice of improvement. We make visible power dynamics in an improvement effort to begin a conversation about how these dynamics come to shape the nature of the work and how attending to them can promote equity.

Author

• Carlos Sandoval, WestEd