The Complexity of Mobilizing Knowledge: Putting What We Know into Action
Date
2015-09-11
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Governments have increasingly been embarking on substantial waves of educational reform in an attempt to develop more effective school systems and raise levels of student learning and achievement. Some jurisdictions appear to be more successful than others at shifting their professional learning focus onto research-informed practice to create and apply new knowledge and expand teachers’ repertoires of instructional practices within their complex knowledge-producing and knowledge-disseminating systems. The following study, an exploratory multi-case study of four high-performing Alberta school divisions, as determined by provincial accountability pillars, offers insight into how leaders mobilize knowledge to align research and learning practice within their complex social systems. The findings lend credence to the notion that a systems or complexity approach can play a role in understanding the unpredictability of organizational change and thereby enhance the mobilization of knowledge regarding the alignment of research and learning practice. Through a grounded theory approach, a conceptual framework emerged, built upon the complex interplay of three facets: (1) enhancing student learning, (2) ensuring best practice and research, and (3) establishing relational trust. These three facets are brought to fruition through a focus on five key dimensions: (1) efficaciously decentralizing: attending to both redundancy and diversity, (2) explicitly focusing: identifying sites of redundancy, (3) enacting expectations: implementing strategies for redundancy, (4) engaging expertise: identifying sites of diversity, and (5) ensuring efficacy: implementing strategies for diversity. The framework, while not definitive, contributed to the emerging picture of knowledge mobilization and the role that complexity theory can play in understanding and enhancing knowledge mobilization, a complex emergence phenomenon, with regard to aligning research and practice within self-organizing, self-maintaining, adaptive, learning systems such as school jurisdictions. By attending to both redundancy and diversity, leaders are able to prompt the emergence of a social collective intelligence within distinguishable but intimately intertwined networks and displace the individual as the sole site of learning, and intelligence creativity.
Description
Keywords
Education, Education--Administration, Education
Citation
Tymensen, W. (2015). The Complexity of Mobilizing Knowledge: Putting What We Know into Action (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28032