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20 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.
VIJAYA SHERRY CHAND 21 Here we specifically use the theoretical model linking innovation, knowledge and networks, developed by Swan et al. (2003), to examine how the EI Bank can be adopted and implemented by educational administrators working at a regional or national level. Swan et al. conceptualize innovation as a set of “episodic” processes, which cover the three stages of design and development or the “invention episode”, the spread or the “diffusion episode” and the adoption of new ideas by others, the “implementation episode”. These three episodes are not structured linearly or sequentially; rather, they are to be seen as iterative and recursive processes. The key insight that Swan et al. provide is that specific types of networks and network activities are required during particular episodes. Innovation, thus, is “reciprocally and systematically intertwined” with the creation and maintenance of networks. Such a processual view of networks sees innovation as flows and combinations of knowledge and information, which are open to reshaping. Networking involves “the active search and development of ideas, knowledge and information through the creation and articulation of informal relationships within a context of more formal intraand inter-organizational structural arrangements” (ibid.: 681). Thus, networking processes can span different structures (hierarchies as well as more loosely-structured units). In summary, roles of networks vary across episodes; knowledge transformation (construction, communication and exchange) is one of the roles of such networks; the processual dimensions of networks should not be ignored; personal sense-making and trust-building change as networks evolve; and different kinds of knowledge have different implications for the specific roles of networks. From more local and intra-organizational networking during the invention episode, the focus shifts to wider networks for knowledge objectification in the diffusion episode and then returns to more local networks in new contexts so that knowledge appropriation or implementation becomes possible in these new contexts. During the invention episode, social construction of knowledge, free and extensive exchange of ideas interpersonally, and loose interpersonal structures which crystallize ideas, are important. Rogers (1995) also stresses the importance of the “communicated experience” of the immediate peer circle; the implication is that teachers who are networked in an invention episode will have more faith in their partners who have generated the idea. In the EI Bank initiative, the early stages of teacher identification and networking, subjecting innovations to peer scrutiny and the screening procedures used, served the purpose of the social construction of ‘solution knowledge’. The conferences and fellowships that were built into the project also helped in the creation of loose interpersonal structures—evidence is provided by some of the teachers using the fellowships they received to try out things their peers in the face-to-face network had evolved. In the diffusion episode, commoditization—making tacit knowledge explicit—is more important. Diffusion ceases to be dependent on the tacit knowledge of its creators. The network’s role is thus legitimation and communication of objectified and “commodified” knowledge using best practice methodologies. Networks that communicate also validate or legitimate. Boundary spanning individuals or “honest brokers” play an important role at this stage, and there is a reliance on surrogate indices of the validity of the knowledge being diffused. This is the rationale for processing the practices into printed cases, yearbooks of innovations, and a searchable database, so that other stakeholders can access such knowledge through “user-friendly” formats. The prior informed consents of the teachers and the role of outside experts in validation also served to legitimize the knowledge that was converted into products. Such “network communications” screen the identified innovations on the basis of merit and “actors of poor character and judgment, as well as poorly conceived ideas, are quickly identified and discredited” (Mintrom and Vergari 1998: 128). The implementation episode deals with the appropriation of objectified ideas and adaptation of these to new local contexts in which the implementation happens—in other words, the objectified ideas need to be blended with the tacit knowledge that exists in the new contexts. The networking processes at this stage are purposeful and intentional, and the focus is on exchange of information and resources. The nature of knowledge transformation at this stage is best characterized as unpacking knowledge and recombining it with the local knowledge that exists in new contexts. This third episode needs to be visualized carefully since local knowledge evolved in contexts of socioeducational deprivation by the creator-teachers has to be “unpacked” and re-contextualized in new contexts, and blended with the tacit knowledge that userteachers in the new contexts possess. The network relevant to this episode includes a wider cross-section of stakeholders, including administrators who are hopefully sensitized to the value of an approach that ‘builds on the strengths within’. Though the EI Bank has tried out a curriculum module and demonstration of model to educational administrators, as mechanisms to communicate this third episode, it may be more useful, during this episode, to stress the concept of “policy entrepreneurs”. Educational administrators usually visualize innovation in terms of the two broad strategies of educa-
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