Carlos Sandoval
Doctoral Candidate in Teaching, Learning, and Educational Improvement
University of California, Irvine | School of Education
Dissertation Abstract
The current dissertation offers an examination into the enactment of a networked improvement community in order to understand how networked improvement methodologies are implemented and how this implementation is and is not equitable and for whom. In this three-study dissertation, I use data collected from a University of California-wide teacher preparation networked improvement community focused on improving the preparation of teacher candidates to build on multilingual students’ strengths. Data were collected during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years. These data consist of video recordings of in-person and remote meetings as well as small-group and individual interviews with teacher educators involved in the network. To understand how the network came to be enacted, I used a social practice theoretical lens to examine the discourses, conversations, and interactions that occurred in the unfolding of the network. Social practice theory is characterized by the following theoretical moves: social life is comprised of situated actions; transcending dualisms in favor of dualities; and conceptualizing relations as mutually constitutive. Conceptualizing enactment and implementation as constituted by dualities, situated action, and mutually constitutive relations affords an examination into the relational dynamics and practices that produce networked improvement communities.
The first study of this dissertation examines how teacher educators engaged with and settled tensions that emerged from establishing a shared aim for the network. In examining interactions and conversations that surfaced and engaged this tension, this study found that a central tension emerged between centering language acquisition and centering multilingualism. Additionally, it found that teacher educators’ conversations and contributions came to peripheralize language acquisition while foregrounding multilingualism. Lastly, this peripheralization and foregrounding came to be inscribed into an improvement science tool, a driver diagram, to allow commitments to multilingualism and aversion to language acquisition to endure. This study illuminated the complex relational dynamics and discourses that constitute the process of establishing an aim statement, a key process in initiating a network.
The second study of this dissertation examines the power relations that constitute the construction of a driver diagram, which represents a network’s shared theory of action for addressing a shared problem. This study builds on the first by highlighting how multilingualism emerged as a dominant discourse that displaced language acquisition. It extends this by highlighting how the facilitator was systematically and advantageously positioned within the network to inscribe this discourse in the driver diagram. Finally, this study illuminates how the driver diagram, and the network broadly, came to be recognizable in ways that constrained and enabled how teacher educators participated, valorizing the participation of teacher educators who had commitments to multilingualism while pushing out those who centered language acquisition in their work as teacher educators.
Finally, the third study, which is in progress, focuses on the process of designing a set of practical, improvement-focused measures aimed at providing teacher education practitioners with data to inform their practice. Preliminary analysis has revealed the extent to which practical measures aimed at improvement come to codify, make durable, and scale assessment practices derived from the professional judgment of teacher educators.