related paper - Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE, CULTURE AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT, VOLUME 6
for which their pre-service training does not usually
prepare them.
These roles, which focus on extra-school and
community-related activities, constitute a “socioeducational
entrepreneurial” identity which the
teachers create for themselves. Chand and Amin-
Choudhury (2006, forthcoming) examine how this
process of redefining a formal professional role to
include extra-school roles and behaviours takes
place. 2 Such identity formation is accompanied by
the development of local, teacher-initiated, community
networks. These in turn communicate community
expectations to the teachers, who usually respond
by working out a broader vision of educational
development. The teachers then command the respect
of the local community and develop a certain ‘moral
authority’ which helps them improve educational
performance.
What has been noted above summarizes the personal
development process that the teachers who are
contributors to the EI Bank have gone through. The
contributors to the EI Bank should be termed “expert”
teachers, who may or may not be “experienced”
(Day 1999). Day’s distinction between expertise and
experience is relevant because some users of the EI
Bank may have reached an advanced stage in their
careers and may benefit from reflecting on the fit
between what they have experienced themselves and
practices learned from elsewhere. Thus, the innovations
of the selected teachers should highlight the
interplay between the teachers’ life histories, their
own development, their classroom settings and the
broader social and political contexts in which they
work—leading to an understanding of how such
teachers have constructed their personal and professional
identities in order to develop educational
knowledge. The teacher users of the products of the
EI Bank have highlighted this dimension as helpful
in promoting their own reflective practice.
The process of bringing together teachers who
have used their ‘solution knowledge’ for problem
solving is itself critical, from the point of view of
integrating the three forms of teacher learning—natural/evolutionary,
opportunistic, and planned or accelerated—recommended
by Day (1999). This integration
is possible only when a “learner-focused perspective”
(in contrast to a training-focused perspective)
is adopted. In other words, teachers learn from
their own educational experiences (when their life
histories evolve) and by solving problems through
a trial-and-error process (opportunistic learning).
These experiences are of value when a community
of teachers is forced to accelerate its learning. The
valorisation of teachers’ knowledge and reflective
learning implied by this perspective also supports
recent emphasis on self-driven, lifelong learning
approaches to teacher development. The first task
for educational administrators is, therefore, developing
an appreciation of this perspective of ‘learning
from the grassroots’, so that they are able to promote
a more bottom-up culture in their training bureaucracies.
An associated impact of ‘organizing’ teachers who
have used their ‘solution knowledge’ has been the
extension of local teacher-driven networks into a
broader network that includes fellow professionals.
Chand and Amin-Choudhury (2005) discuss how
individual innovation has been usually confined to
the “closed individual cycle” of teacher development,
with the knowledge that the teachers have gained
remaining “embodied” (Huberman 2001: 144) in the
individual. Extending this to the “open collective
cycle” identified by Huberman (2001: 149-156) as
an alternative teacher development network, is especially
important in a societal culture that does not
provide teachers with enough opportunity to share
their successes, failures and approaches, or their
struggles at work in geographical isolation, as the
case has been with almost all the contributors to the
EI Bank. Many of them had already moved into the
“open individual cycle” (in which the teacher reaches
outside the classroom) by the time they were identified.
But it is essential to build on this rudimentary
networking experience to shift into the closed collective
cycle (in which the search for solutions is “closer
to a collective enterprise, but one without resources
from outside the group”), and then to the open collective
cycle that relies on networking with more
fluid borders (with the participation of outsider experts),
for the diffusion of local innovations. Participation
of other network stakeholders—non-governmental
actors perhaps—in this open cycle helps legitimise
teacher experiences in a network space
(Goodson 2000). The main facilitators of the shift
(Huberman 2001) are: conceptual inputs, experience
sharing, didactic leads provided by outsiders, pedagogical
analysis, and exchanges. The EI Bank shortens
the cycle by condensing the stage of generating inputs
and experience sharing, and facilitating exchanges
and analysis through workshops and through
the participation of outside experts.
The extension of the knowledge and innovations
of teachers into the “open collective cycle”, as illustrated
by the processing and dissemination stages of
the EI Bank approach described earlier, is the second
key task for administrators. Innovation as a reason
for developing network forms, and the role of networks
in promoting innovations, are well known.
2 Analogous to these behaviours is organizational citizenship performance by individuals (Organ et al. 2006; Van Dyne et al. 1995), through
which individuals exhibit behaviours that are not likely to be formally rewarded or forced upon them, but which ultimately benefit a collective—in
this case, the rural communities which the teachers serve.