Since 2015, a modular school subject for media education and informatics (M&I) is being implemented in the context of a major curriculum reform in 21 German-speaking cantons (federal states) in Switzerland. To date, media education and informatics were either non-existent or located in grades 7 to 9. As a novelty, M&I is supposed to be mandatory part of the curriculum from kindergarten to grade 9. The cantonal authorities were commissioned to adapt the curriculum to their local conditions and school schedules. Moreover, the involvement of different school-external organizations and actors led to 21 different solutions of teaching practice, training and further education of teachers.

This study visualizes and analyses six regional networks of education authorities, teacher education institutions, municipalities, commercial service providers and other interest groups. These actors and organizations help to shape reforms from an administrative level resulting in change of educational practices at the level of schools and classrooms. Analysing how those actors are connected helps to gain insight into the transformation process and identifies patterns of governance on different levels in six different cases (Sørensen & Torfing, 2009).

Governance as a research perspective considers public schools to be a multileveled system in which actors are capable of interacting with each other (Rürup & Bormann, 2013). The system encompasses all actors and organizations that serve a purpose, provide or demand a service to or from the system (Junemann, Ball & Santori, 2016). Based on the principle-agent theory (Bovens, Goodin, Schillemans & Gailmard, 2014; Ferris, 1992), we assume that individual actors and groups have their own motivations, interests and dependencies that influence their behaviour as agents in the policymaking and implementation process. Tools and approaches developed by Social Network Analysis (SNA) (Carolan, 2014; Froehlich, van Waes & Schäfer, 2020), allow to study the relationships and structural features of the six cantonal networks and their interconnection on different levels, visualize the influence of different actors and draw conclusions for further development in general.

This study answers the following questions: Which kind of actors play a central role in the cantons?  Which actors are active in more than one network? How are these actors connected to each other and how is the quality of these connections described by our interview partners? Do certain forms of networks and certain kinds of connections between actors show patterns that can be used to develop a typification? The goal of the study is to generate and generalize knowledge from the six different implementation practices so policymakers can draw conclusions for planning and carrying out further educational reforms or enhance and develop ongoing implementation efforts further.

We identified actors on a cantonal and national level by interviewing about 30 experts (Niederberger, 2015) from cantonal authorities, teacher educators, municipal leaders and commercial service providers and about their role in the implementation process. We interviewed at least four representatives from each canton who participated as experts and/or decision-makers in the development or implementation of the modular school subject. We asked them about their role in the development of the curriculum and/or implementation process, the current state of the implementation process and to name important actors and organizations in the field of media education and informatics. To structure the answers, we generated a code system with MaxQDA where we isolated the actors and their relations. We then generated ego-centered network maps for each actor using the network visualizing and analysis tool Gephi (Bastian, Heymann & Jacomy, 2017). The pool of actors in a canton was depleted when no new major actor was named in the interviews. Together with insights from the document research, the interviews and maps were joined for each canton and analysed using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014).

The experts reported their connections to a wide range of groups and individual actors on several system levels and dimensions: national, cantonal and communal authorities, universities of teacher education, school principals, teachers, school-external organizations and inter-cantonal projects, teaching material publishers, renowned experts, philanthropic organizations and commercial service and hardware providers. While describing their role in the implementation process, interlocutors addressed phenomena they encountered and which actors or groups are involved in these occurrences. The networks of all six cantons show – besides pronounced differences – a common pattern of types of relations that can be described as implementation drivers. In some cantons the authorities themselves promote further education of teachers and provide resources in collaboration with the universities of teacher education, often in relation to their understanding of governance. In a second group, further education of teachers is promoted in a smaller extent or not is not mandatory at all. As common feature in all cantons, the acquisition of infrastructure is the responsibility of the municipal authorities.

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