Session Information
26 SES 04 A, International Perspectives on the Improvement of Schools Facing Challenging Circumstances
Symposium
Contribution
The crisis caused by COVID-19 disrupted education worldwide and intensified the difficulties faced by schools in challenging contexts. In Chile, teachers and leaders had to react quickly to school closures and the transition to remote education, in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity in governmental guidelines (González et al. 2020). In this scenario, difficulties historically faced by schools located in contexts of social and economic disadvantage were intensified and resulted in more pronounced gaps in the educational opportunities of their students. Promoting improvement in this type of schools is not an easy task, as the problems they face are often multidimensional and intertwined (Hochbein 2012). However, it is possible to consider schools in challenging contexts as complex systems that require an adaptive approach (O’Day 2002). This calls to reflect on how school leaders can introduce innovative solutions that coherently combine pedagogical, managerial, and social justice logics to develop capacities for whole-school improvement (Woulfin and Wiener, 2019). This conceptualisation is useful for understanding both the potential and limitations of educational leadership in challenging contexts by emphasising the dynamics of learning and adaptability (Koh and Askell‐Williams 2021). The ability of an organisation to learn from its ecosystem, that is, to identify, assimilate, and take advantage of information from the environment to apply it in processes of innovation in its routines, policies and practices, is called absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). This paper presents a qualitative case study of six Chilean schools in challenging contexts, exploring how they developed adaptations to ensure educational continuity, employing the perspective of absorptive capacity. 12 school leaders and six ministry advisors were interviewed twice between 2020 and 2021, for a total of 36 interviews, and data were analysed through a Qualitative Content Analysis strategy. Findings show that school leaders faced complex problems related with the challenging circumstances of their communities during the pandemic, and their proposed solutions to these problems were mediated by their internal organisational conditions, the characteristics of advisors and their interaction. When external advisors established a contextualised and flexible relationship with school actors, schools fostered organisational learning that led to the development of improvement actions. The study shows that it is relevant to continue researching the role of educational leadership in this type of schools from an organisational learning perspective, to understand to what extent principals can promote educational improvement in challenging circumstances.
References
References Cohen, Wesley M, and Daniel A Levinthal. 1990. “Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation.” Administrative Science Quarterly 35 (1): 128–152. González, Álvaro, María Beatriz Fernández, Mauricio Pino-Yancovic, and Romina Madrid. 2020. “Teaching in the Pandemic: Reconceptualizing Chilean Educators’ Professionalism Now and for the Future.” Journal of Professional Capital and Community 5 (3/4): 265–272. Hochbein, Craig. 2012. “Relegation and Reversion: Longitudinal Analysis of School Turnaround and Decline.” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR) 17 (1–2): 92–107. Koh, Gloria A., and Helen Askell‐Williams. 2021. “Sustainable School‐improvement in Complex Adaptive Systems: A Scoping Review.” Review of Education 9 (1): 281–314. O’Day, Jennifer. 2002. “Complexity, Accountability and School Improvement.” Harvard Educational Review 72 (3): 293–329. Woulfin, Sarah L., and Jennie Weiner. 2019. “Triggering Change: An Investigation of the Logics of Turnaround Leadership.” Education and Urban Society 51 (2): 222–246.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.