Navigating Cross-Cultural Complexities In Change Management: A Case Study Of A Professional Development Project

Author(s):

Janinka Greenwood(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

32. Organizational Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

32 SES 12, Professionalization in Organizational Education

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-25

09:00-10:30

Room:

K3.18

Chair:

Line Revsbæk

Contribution

This paper reports aspects of a case study of a project in which successive groups of senior educational administrators and teacher educators from a developing country took part in professional development courses in a New Zealand University.

The developing country has an extensive agenda of increasing access to education and of improving its quality. Its policy (Ministry of Education, 2010) and its development projects acknowledge the prevalence and the limitations of authoritarian teacher-centred and reductive approaches to teaching as well as the dominance of an examination that rewards rote-learning (Alam 2016; Salahuddin 2016; UNESCO 2011). The officials and teacher educators who come to the courses, while charged with implementing policy that encourages group work, creativity and constructivism, are nevertheless products of the traditional and still enduring education system. Within this system, in most schools, students spontaneously take their seat in the classroom according to their rank in examination passes, the highest mark leading the front, and they rote learn, from commercial guide books and private coaching, answers to the questions that will occur in the high stakes public examinations that will determine their access to further education and desirable careers. The dominance of reductive examinations is not limited to schooling; it also controls entry into public service.

Change is never a simple issue, and in a developing country, the impact of large population, severely limited resources and the continuing influence of profit-making global monetarism create significant pressures. Thus forces that largely control learning expectations and learning behaviour within the country have also shaped, to some extent, the prevailing attitudes and behaviours of its senior officials and its teacher educators.

Repeatedly course participants acknowledge that policy in education is outrunning implementation. They come with strong knowledge of the dictums of educational policy and of its aspirations towards student-centred, practically relevant and creative teaching practices. What is seen to be missing is detailed understanding of how policy could be transformed into strategic planning for and resourcing of change and how policy ideals can be translated into practice.

The paper examines:

differing expectations of course participants and course teachers, particularly in terms of approaches to control and interpersonal interactions,
cultural contexts in which the attitudes and behaviours of both groups were shaped,
effect of the participants’ professional roles, (particularly of their perceptions of accountability and power ) on their roles as learners,
complex, continuing and yet shifting, interplays of role and power and the impact of these on the evolution of the courses and the understanding that develop
ways these interplays may impact on the usefulness, or not, of such intercultural projects,
ways these interplays may determine the future development of teacher education within the developing country.

The paper looks at change management in this context as a complex and multifaceted educational process. To some extent all the participants in the project see themselves as change agents. Those from the developing country are positioned within that country as professionals mandated with responsibility for improving educational access, practices and outcomes, be it as administrative officials or teacher educators. Within the professional development courses they variously navigate between the role of learners and their original role as implementers of national policy. The university teachers in the course also navigate between their contextually assumed role of experts in the fields of curriculum context, pedagogy and change management and the role of learner challenged by exploring the problems and possible solutions of a national context that is foreign to them. Both groups play out their navigation of roles within the constraints of external policy, resourcing and expectation. The constraints exist at institutional, national and supranational levels.

Method

The case studied here takes place in 2016-17 and involves a series of training courses in a New Zealand university in which groups of senior educators, from several different sectors of education in a developing country, exploring different aspects of change management to improve secondary education. The author was the academic leader of the university training project. Case study is an investigative approach that focuses on the particularities of a particular contextually bounded situation with the intention of developing intensive, rich and detailed understanding of the complexities and developmental factors involved (Flyvberg 2011; Stake, 2008). As Flyvberg (2011) points out, context-situated case knowledge is valuable because it offers insights into human interactions in ways that avoid unjustifiable universals yet allows more speculative processes of context-variable generalisation. Thus the approach in this account is that of a critically reflective narrative that seeks to examine the case of the professional development courses as an complex event in change management, with focus on the evolving understandings of course participants and the ways that those understandings and the course goals were impacted by, and to some extent talked back to, policy making, various financial interests, and individual educational aspirations. The narrative inquiry draws on observations of interactions, critical reflections of practice, extended dialogues with sample groups of course participants, material artefacts produced within the courses and the policy documents of the developing country. An initial process of analysis is embedded in the process of inquiry, as the shape of the courses developed to meet evolving needs and understandings, Further levels of analysis take place as the raw experiences of the projects and participants’ reflections are read against the policies, educational practices and practical imperatives of both the developing country and the university. These dynamics becomes the lens of further critical reflection. The participants consisted of administrative officials and teacher educators from the developing country, the university’s teaching team in the programme, and a group of doctoral students from the same developing country who acted as teaching assistants. In the background there are other significant players, including the international consultants in charge of the overseas training, the management team of the wider teaching improvement project within the developing country, the ministry of education whose approval of each of the participants was required, and the development bank who, as conditions of aid, established the terms of professional development, and the university’s directional leaders and policy managers.

Expected Outcomes

The project is still in progress and therefore outcomes and the conclusions drawn from them are still at an emergent stage. Nevertheless some themes are already becoming evident and these will have been further analysed by the time of the conference. There are a range of important outcomes in terms of participants’ acquisition of knowledge and shifts in awareness and understanding. Some of these out comes have the potential to be translated into changes of practice in the home context. There is also less quantifiable learning that comes through sustained and committed cross-cultural negotiation. Both parties learned more about each other’s backgrounds, constraints and expectations and about each other’s aspirations and potentialities. Through that learning a basis develops for useful further collaboration There are also research outcomes that involve deeper understandings of the processes of managing change, and its relationship to a complex interplay of contextual pressures, constraints and affordances. These build on and extend my earlier work examining the concept of fair academic trade in teacher education (Greenwood et al, 2016; 20140. Case studies are by nature non-iterative since they are situated within and reflective of a particular context. Nevertheless a case study highlights patterns of interaction that allow tentative theorisation and consideration of implications for other cross-cultural education development projects. This project takes place outside the geographical confines of Europe. Its discussion is relevant to this conference not only because the project of educational partnerships between developed countries and developing ones has become a global one, but also because as the countries within Europe do not all meet in equal relationships and that compete for European Union funding, it may find themselves in cross-national partnerships where there are completing agendas, and where needs and expectations need to be carefully articulated and negotiated if they are to be met.

References

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Author Information

Janinka Greenwood (presenting / submitting)

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

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