Societal trends such as increased accountability, teacher shortages, and flexibility in learning paths affect the work of teacher educators. This study explores the collective agency of Dutch geography teacher educators as they enact the subject pedagogy curriculum within this rapidly changing context. Whilst teacher agency has been widely studied, research on teacher educators—particularly from a collective perspective—remains scarce. Drawing on Priestley et al.'s ecological approach, this study aims to disentangle teacher educators' collective spaces of agency by means of cultural, structural, and material resources. Using focus group interviews with three teams of geography teacher educators, we identified three key challenges that define their collective spaces of agency: (1) accommodating students' developmental phases, (2) gaining insight into students' internship learning, and (3) the growing divide between subject-specific and general teacher education. Thematic analysis revealed that teams of educators experience a different sense of agency in each of these spaces, depending on their ability to draw on the available resources. Our findings show that teams of educators draw on strong subject teacher identities (cultural resources) and experience collective agency when enacting subject pedagogy at the course level (structural resources). Their sense of agency is weak at the institutional level, particularly in relation to curricular change. This study contributes to a more profound understanding of teacher educators' collective spaces of agency. Disentangling these spaces can help teams of teacher educators to identify the necessary resources to restore their sense of agency in difficult times.
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Insider ethnographic analysis is used to analyze change processes in an engineering department. Distributed leadership theory is used as conceptual framework.
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Western societies are quickly becoming less coherent (Giddens, 1991). As a result it is increasingly unclear how individuals should act in a range of situations or how they may understand themselves. To a certain extent this development towards more diverse perspectives and a broader range of ways to act is a positive one, as cultures can only develop as they are confronted with different perspectives. A uniform culture would simply reach a standstill. That said, current society now demands of its citizens that they become increasingly self-reliant and by extension develop a capacity to be self-governing. On the labour market self-reliance and self-determination have been considered par for the course even longer. It is no surprise then that terms like self-direction, self-governing teams, employability and resilience are considered part of the standard repertoire of politicians and employers (Van der Heijden & De Vos, 2017). Within the social sciences, an ability to be self-governing and self-reliant are terms that are associated with the concept “agency”. However, the latter is a fairly vague, multidimensional concept (Arthur, 2014) that refers to the ‘scope of action’ an individual has in a fluid society (Bauman, 2000). In this article we would like to explore the concept of ‘agency’ further whereby we focus on the role of imagination in enacting it. https://doi.org/10.1177/1038416218777832 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/
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This article provides a nano (hyperlocal) view of climate change mitigation by viewing regenerative organizing through the eyes (as well as bodies and senses, etc.) of the households engaged in community-based energy projects. By showing what humans make up for in the largely absent relationship between nature and technology in these projects, we envision an incremental extension of the literature on community-based energy. The radically different contribution we aim to make is a tripartite imbrication that brings in natural agency alongside the human and the technical but specifies precisely how nano (smaller than micro) embodied practices afford mis- and realignments. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619886841 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Symposium ESWRA - ECSWR 2016: empirical ethics in social work. Objective: ethical aspects of social work (esp. at home) Structure: cooperation of the research group of UAS Utrecht Netherlands with six regional welfare organizations Method: practice based ethics research Focus on professional practice: learning from moral experiences in frontline practice (cf. Van Doorn, 2008) Hybrid approach: combining theoretical resources and professional practice (cf. Banks & Gallagher, 2009) Mixed methods: desk research, interviews, best practice units (BPU), development of ethical tools
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The adoption of new technologies requires people to work differently and adopt new ways of thinking. This, however, is complicated because social conventions in professional disciplines are deeply rooted and have a long history. An extreme case as an exemplar was studied to investigate social change in a maintenance network. With concepts from stewardship theory and entrepreneurship literature, the case study is used to develop a preliminary model for managing social change in maintenance networks. The model presented is a first attempt to link stewardship theory to the practice of maintenance management. It will be refined and validated in future research and can complement other theories, such as agency theory and transaction cost economics, in explaining socio-technical phenomena in construction management. The practical contribution of this research to the construction management field is that it deepens our understanding of the clients’ leadership role.
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Climate change is now considered more than just an environmental issue, with far-reaching effects for society at large. While the exact implications of climate change for policing practice are still unknown, over the past two decades criminologists have anticipated that climate change will have a number of effects that will result in compromised safety and security. This article is informed by the outcome of a co-creation workshop with 16 practitioners and scholars of diverse backgrounds based in The Netherlands, who sought to conceptualize and systematize the existing knowledge on how climate change will most likely impact the professional practice of the Dutch (or any other) police. These challenges, with varying degrees of intensity, are observable at three main levels: the societal, organizational, and individual level. These levels cannot be separated neatly in practice but we use them as a structuring device, and to illustrate how dynamics on one level impact the others. This article aims to establish the precepts necessary to consider when exploring the intersection between climate change and policing. We conclude that much still needs to be done to ensure that the implications of climate change and the subject of policing are better aligned, and that climate change is recognized as an immediate challenge experienced on the ground and not treated as a distant, intangible phenomenon with possible future impacts. This starts with creating awareness about the possible ways in which it is already impacting the functioning of policing organizations, as well as their longer-term repercussions.
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In this article, we describe a study on the impact of an ethics program aimed at strengthening the ethical agency of 15 social workers of three welfare organizations. The goal of the study was to make an inventory of the impact of the program, and to evaluate the relevance of this impact with the help of several stakeholders. The most significant change (MSC) approach was used as a research strategy, though some changes to the approach were made with a view to our research goal. We explain the MSC approach and how we used it in our study design. Further, we describe the research process, answering the question whether our adaptation of the MSC was helpful to inventory the impact of our ethics program and the evaluation of its relevance. The implications of MSC's focus on "most significant" changes and the need for a thorough feedback of the results of the evaluation process in the participating organizations are discussed.
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We developed and piloted a course, called Changemakers, that supported interdisciplinary student-led action groups to identify social and environmental sustainability challenges and influence systemic change. By exposing students to dynamic and complex issues from multiple stakeholder perspectives, Changemakers aimed to empower students to find and use their voice and agency to make a difference in society. Students need knowledge and skills to navigate societal challenges, address SDGs and build confidence and creativity to change the status quo (Lozano, 2017; Raelin, 2009). Changemakers provided a playful and safe learning environment to explore societal challenges, form inclusive and sensitive judgments, and enact interventions for change. Students developed self-efficacy (Bandura, 2001) that were encouraged to be autonomous and self-directed in their learning (Morris, 2019). Through learning-by-doing, students gained a set of leadership and change management skills that can be applied to a variety of professional settings in local and global contexts.
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The authors of this article offered training aimed at strengthening the ethical agency of 15 social workers of three Dutch welfare organisations. At the same time, we conducted research into the ethical impact of the training, making use of an adaptation of the Most Significant Change approach (MSC). The participants wrote stories about the most significant change they experienced as a result of the training which we subsequently discussed with care recipients, care providers, and operational care managers. The MSC-stories revealed that the training was significant for the participants, especially to (re)connect with themselves, and with others, as well as to slow down and engage in collective ethics work. At the same time, the learning processes and the learning outcomes diverged, due to individual differences in professional motivation and working conditions. Most MSC-stories show that the training was significant because it helped the social workers to deal ethically with a specific working condition that they experienced somehow as problematic, mostly because it was at odds with their professional motivation. The stakeholders preferred MSC-stories that focus on the impact on professionals as employees, on their relation with service users or on the actual delivered care.
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