Conference Agenda

The negotiation of diversity can be seen as a fundamental dynamic and structural feature of social orders. In the meantime, diversity has also become an integral part of organizational pedagogical debates (see, among others, Göhlich et al. 2012; Engel 2014). In most cases, diversity is simultaneously understood as a challenge and an opportunity for organizational learning processes. Following this difference-theoretical approach, different concepts of diversity management have been established and diversity is understood as a fundamental dynamic of organizational processes. For example, Göhlich (2012) emphasizes that from an organizational pedagogical perspective, "the further development of organizations related to cultural difference as an organizational learning process, but also, conversely, the participation of organizations in the design of dealing with cultural difference" is of interest. However, the resulting importance of organizations in societies characterized by diversity and their almost natural self-evidence in the co-creation of social reality (cf. Maack and Truschkat) remains to some extent unnoticed. In this context, the emergence of organizations and their constant change can be traced back to social transformation processes and, connected to this, the materialization and reproduction of certain social (problematization) practices. Following this understanding, diversity can than not only be seen as a dynamic in organizational learning and ordering processes, but organizational practices can also be understood as reproducers of difference.

This paper argues for the need of an educational infrastructure to strengthen the teaching profession and its leaders. We understand infrastructure as interlinked resources that support school development, such as a knowledge base with data, research and validated experience, administrative, physical, and technological support structures, feedback mechanisms and professional learning communities (Børte et al, 2020, Lillejord & Børte, 2020). The 1983 report A Nation at Risk, ignited a global discourse of mistrust in education and resulted in accountability reforms that ignored the complexity of education (Lillejord, 2020). As these reforms are currently waning, we need knowledge about how to strengthen the teaching profession’s research-informed, knowledge-building, professional learning processes (Lillejord, 2023) and how leaders can facilitate the co-construction and synthesizing of knowledge from various sources.

Researchers have argued that school leaders are, next to classroom teaching, the most important factor for students’ learning (Leithwood, Harris & Hopkins, 2008). There is, however, little research on what school leaders do to accomplish this (Leithwood, Harris & Hopkins, 2020), little research on school leaders’ workplace learning (Veelen, Sleegers, & Endedijk 2017) and little research on support structures for learning at organizational level. In schools, argued Weick (1976), two ‘systems' worked separately. One consisted of teachers, parents, students and curriculum, another of the principal and middle leaders. While the two systems are somehow attached, there is little transfer of knowledge. We draw on Shirell & Spillane (2020) who described education as a complex, learning-intensive enterprise, requiring educators to work together to improve practice and Gurr, Longmuir and Reed (2021) who suggested that a context view of schools helps us understand how school leaders influence various contextual factors to develop schools.

Due to educational institutions’ inherent complexity, leading and organizing schools for learning and development is challenging, partly because decades of neoliberal policies fixated the idea that the knowledge needed for school development and improvement was to be found outside school. External experts and consultancy firms supposedly knew more about how schools should improve than teachers and school leaders. When efforts to get this external knowledge into schools failed, teachers were often blamed (Sarason, 1998). Schools’ internal knowledge is diverse and includes how students experience teaching and learning, what teachers discuss and agree on in their professional learning communities and how school leaders organize for learning.

An Expert Group (Lillejord et al., 2021) on schools’ contribution to students’ learning found that in schools with a substantial contribution to students’ learning, school leaders systematically used the schools’ internal knowledge to improve practices. Student participation was systemic, and teachers used their professional learning communities to discuss how they could use student feedback to improve practice. While these school leaders took for granted that the knowledge needed to improve practice was in the school, leaders in low performing schools were oriented outwards, to external, knowledgeable experts. Based on these findings, an important first step in the development of an educational infrastructure is to understand how school leaders perceive and develop educational knowledge (Brezinka, 1992). Teachers and leaders must understand the schools’ internal knowledge processes and develop a meta-perspective on their knowledge work (Lillejord, 2023).

Norwegian policy documents (Ministry of Education, 2017; 2019) and evaluations of reform initiatives in schools, claim that school leaders lack analytical competence and that schools lack a support structure for development efforts. As this can be considered barriers for learning at organizational level, we will present data that allow us to explore how school leaders understand such key concepts. Our research question is:

How do school leaders understand “analytical competence” and “support structure” in relation to an infrastructure for school development?

This paper reports on the findings from a four-year research project that evaluated the organisational re-orientation of a major science centre in Scotland, Glasgow Science Centre (GSC), to develop its culture and systems to use science engagement as a platform to promote equity, inclusion and diversity and learning and skills in local communities.

The GSC is recognised as a leading science centre in the UK and beyond. In 2018, it set out an ambitious organisational change plan in its Connect programme. This encompassed improving its physical spaces, facilities, comprehensive staff development and learning, revised recruitment strategies, widening access and developing its community-based learning programme and outreach work. The Connect programme quickly evolved to influence a wider and holistic organisational change strategy which aimed to,

• Inspire and empower people of all ages, abilities, and social backgrounds to develop the skills, attitudes, and confidence to fully participate in a society.
• Connect people and communities with industry, academia, and policy makers; becoming a highly visible and trusted hub of activity; facilitating discussion, fostering understanding and participation.
• Create a diverse, inclusive, and supportive organisational culture.
• Create a financially stable and sustainable organisation.

This strategy was designed to enable GSC to play a key role within the local region and wider science learning sector, including aligning with various national social, educational, economic and wellbeing strategies.

A programme of organisational change underpinned the Connect programme. This included creating policies and practices that embed inclusion, diversity and equity within the organisation’s business planning and management processes and strengthen its learning programmes. Part of this organisational transformation involved promotion of organisational values and a culture that embraces equity of opportunity both within and outwith the Centre. In addition, the Connect programme included expanding and enhancing the GSC’s Community Learning and Development Team to build science capital within communities to promote their wellbeing, educational and economic development. Particular focus was placed on working with groups and communities who were,

• socially and economically disadvantaged, and/or
• marginalised cultural populations.

This paper provides important insights on how organisations embark on change using professional learning, technology, physical space, and partnership working to enhance their relevance to the wider community and achieve their development objectives. This often takes place in the context of a shifting policy landscape and developing social priorities, revised values, and ethical responsibilities as well as demographic change. Such organisational transformation and the learning processes involved drew on a range of knowledge and resources and, in the case of the example in this paper, the Glasgow Science Centre (GSC), benefited from co-constructed research and evaluation to inform and assess change.

The paper contributes to the European and international field of organisational education and change and to the debate within the EERA Network on Organisational Education. Our example of the GSC reflects the challenges facing science centers and similar organisations across Europe as they work to empower citizens to make a difference regarding global challenges including the climate and biodiversity crisis, misinformation, and trust in science, 21st century skills, inclusion and equity and health and wellbeing. Such challenges underpin the work of the European Network Science Centres and Museums (Ecsite) network of over 320 organisations, of which the GSC is a member. Ecsite highlights the need for such centres to contribute to European society to empower citizens to engage and participate in all aspects of science to benefit them and their communities.

The paper further reflects on the strategy underpinning the organisational change pursued by GSC and the unforeseen challenges affecting the process of change to inform concepts of organisational change and learning.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how an interorganizational network of professional learning communities (PLCs) can be conceptualized as an ecology. In the recent 30 years PLCs have become a certain way of organizing professional collaboration in educational institutions worldwide (Albrechtsen et al., 2022). Beginning in North America in the 1990’s and building on theories of the learning organization and organizational learning, the research primarily focused on school-based teacher collaboration. Since, the practice of and research on PLCs has expanded to also include other participants, like the whole school, the whole school district, research-practice partnerships and generally – collaboration across educational organizations (Stoll & Louis, 2007; Marzano et al., 2016: Admiraal et al. 2019). The interorganizational collaboration is also conceptualized as ‘professional learning networks’ (PLN) (Brown & Poortman, 2018; Schnellert, 2020); Handscomb & Brown, 2022). However, there is still a need for developing theoretical models of how PLCs are connected in such networks. In this paper we propose to understand multiple PLCs interacting with each other with the metaphor of an ecology. We are especially interested in understanding how it is possible for professional knowledge created in one PLC to flow to another PLC (as ‘nutrients’), how it will enhance the capacity building or growth of the participants and in what ways the diversity of the participants play a role in this regard. The background of the paper is a 4-year longitudinal study (2022-2025) of an emerging interorganization network of PLC’s in the field of science teacher education in Denmark called Naturfagsakademiet (NAFA) (English translation: Danish Academy of Natural Sciences). For a short English introduction see the homepage: About NAFA - NAFA. NAFA is a national program supported by Novo Nordisk Fonden and VILLUM FONDEN with more than 25 million Euros in the period from 1^st August 2021 to summer 2028. The main objective of NAFA is to enhance knowledge sharing and knowledge creation among science teaching professionals at different educational levels, both teacher education and primary and lower secondary schools. A central part of this is the organizing of national and local PLCs at all the teacher education institutions. In this first phase of the study, we work on developing a theoretical frame for investigating NAFA as a knowledge ecology. Therefore, the research question we want to explore in this paper is:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the ecology metaphor applied to the understanding of the circulation of knowledge in an interorganizational network of professional learning communities in science teacher education?

In our paper we address aesthetic and art-based research and mediation approaches to diversity in the context of organised learning. In doing so, we will present image- and art-based approaches developed in the field of teacher education, with which shifts in relation to diversity in educational organisations become visible. The global crisis situation, which causes economic, ecological and social transformations, demands from pedagogy new forms of dealing with diversity. These transformations and the associated debates are often transported via the media. These debates often revolve around certain images that evoke emotional reactions. Against this backdrop, images continue to gain massive social significance. Therefore, the background of our research is the question of how diversity in educational organisations is negotiated visually or can be negotiated by trying out aesthetic approaches. From an organisational pedagogical perspective (Göhlich et al. 2018), we focus in particular on how the relationship between diversity, pedagogical professionalisation and educational organisations is expressed in images and can be dealt with. How is the relationship between one's own situatedness and positioning in relation to socially prefigured images dealt with in pedagogical professionalisation processes and how do these relationships become visible?

The theoretical background is provided by academic debates on diversity and organisation, whereby we start with approaches to diversity based on difference theory (Mecheril 2016; Czejkowska 2018). Pedagogical ways of dealing with difference move in a "trilemmatic" relationship of empowerment, normalisation and deconstruction (Boger 2019). We classify the aesthetic treatment of these relations as an aspect of pedagogical professionalisation, which emphasises the social conditionality of education as a critical approach (Messerschmidt 2020; Heidrich et al. 2021). In addition, the view of conditions that manifest themselves as dependencies on others - humans and non-human others as well as nature and technology - changes in the light of posthumanist omens. In view of the "posthumanist situation" (Braidotti 2013), the constitution of the self can be understood as situated. Not only human diversity plays a role in this, but also the diversity of species and the interconnectedness with the manifold technical conditions that help shape the human self-understanding and its numerous ways of interconnectedness with the world.

This paper focuses on collaborative research undertaken in partnership with Fig Leaf (pseudonym) - a charitable organisation based in a historical allotment site, in an area of urban social deprivation. Fig Leaf manages four community projects, uniquely based on the same allotment site, and attracting four, distinct user groups.

The projects are as follows: The Community Garden, offering fun and educational activity for local families; The Growth Space, providing social and learning opportunities for the local community; City Green, a wildlife and conservation project; and The History Plot, a site of historical architectural and horticulture interest. The projects incorporate opportunities for volunteering, activities for local groups, and coordinate outreach into the local community.

The research centres on developing methodologies that can effectively generate data to gather the experiences of this diverse range of participant groups, including ‘at risk’ adults and young people, with a particular focus on exploring the benefits of participation to wellbeing.

The concept of wellbeing was identified by Fig Leaf as the focus of the study, based on their own analysis of in-house project evaluations. There is not scope here to discuss the multifarious interpretations of the term in these evaluations. However, a review of funding applications and reporting revealed the repeated reference to the ‘therapeutic benefits’ of participation, without further qualification, and the commitment to green social prescribing (Leavell et al., 2019; Fixsen and Barrett, 2022) by providing opportunities for engagement that would be of emotional, social, or physical benefit to participants.

The research aimed to address the following overarching question:

How can researchers and community garden project professionals co-construct methodologies to generate and interpret participant experience data?

And sub-questions:

What methodologies generate rich, experiential data from different groups participating in the Fig Leaf projects?

What are the ‘therapeutic benefits’ of participating in activities at Fig Leaf?

Why does this matter?

Community environmental initiatives can provide rich learning opportunities, and have the potential to positively impact communities and contribute to education for global sustainability (Christie and Waller, 2019; Flachs, 2010; Smith and Sobel, 2014)

Green social prescribing is much discussed across the charitable sector but there is limited evidence to demonstrate its efficacy or outcomes, since Social Prescribing is still a developing practice (Brandling and House, 2009; Chesterman and Bray, 2018).

However, robust methodologies that can underpin claims about the participant experience are limited and therefore the ‘impact’ of the prescription (e.g. University of York, 2015).

Urban agriculture organisations, such as Fig Leaf, are vulnerable. They exist with precarious and short-term funding (St. Clair et al., 2020), threat from development in the drive for housing and infrastructure (Fletcher and Collins, 2020), and lack sufficient expertise or time for effective project evaluation that comprises rich participant voice data (Houlden et al., 2018)

Fig Leaf is the oldest and largest allotment site in Europe. It has over 25 years’ experience of working with individuals and groups in the local community and, through externally funded project activity, has built significant expertise in working with a diverse range of users, some with significant and complex emotional, social, and learning needs.

This research into the unique site of Fig Leaf enables development of robust methodologies that can be packaged as a ‘toolkit’ for sharing across the UK and wider, international community of urban agriculture projects (Houlden et al., 2018).

These methodologies capture often marginalised voices, through participatory methods that have the capacity to empower, and to ‘decolonise’ experiential data by moving the site of the research out of the academy and into the community, both physically and intellectually (Elder and Odoyo, 2017; Igwe et al., 2022).

The WHO (2020) assumes that in Europe at least every third to fifth child at primary level is affected by family violence experiences in the narrow sense. For Germany, the ninth family report notes an "increase in psychological maltreatment, physical abuse and neglect" (BMFSFJ 2021, 291f.) of children, while the values for identified sexual abuse seem to remain comparatively stable. With the report, domestic violence and high-conflict cases in separation and divorce proceedings are also classified as child welfare risks for the first time. For Europe, we must therefore assume a significantly higher proportion of children affected by violence that we encounter every day in the education system. In addition, the number of unreported cases that are exposed to violent attacks and hurtful behavior by adults in institutionalised public contexts (e.g. religious communities, clubs, day-care-centres, schools) must be added. The range of forms of adult violence to which children can be exposed is structurally multiplied, since gender relations, social conditions of inequality and culturalisation in the sense of "doing difference" (West & Fenstermaker 1995) influence risks.

However, child protection is not only an extremely diverse field of pedagogical work on the side of the addressees, but is also determined by organizational diversity. In the school context, actors from different pedagogical professions and habits come together and are expected to work more or less closely with the organizations of social work in interorganizational cooperation. However, although the European discourse assigns schools an "important role in protecting children from violence" (Dimitrova-Stull 2014, 7), German teachers only rarely have legal and action security in dealing with child welfare risks or knowledge of counselling options in interorganizational cooperation with the youth welfare system (e.g. Zimmermann 2019). Contrary to the high number of cases and unreported figures, primary education is only involved in the provision of help in approx. 10% of cases, despite comprehensive contact with all children of primary school age (Federal Statistical Office 2022), but with 5% - 20% tolerates violating actions of professional, semi-professional and voluntary actors in lessons and everyday school life (Wysujack 2021): Which (counterproductive) pedagogical perspectives and practice patterns justify the neglect of child protection in school organizations?

While every day-care-centres in Germany have been legally obliged to follow a child protection concept since 2021, the perception of children's experiences of violence becomes an organizational grey area and at the same time a "risk for academic failure" when they enter primary school (UBKSM 2022). Despite the legal norms for active cooperation of school actors with the help system, which have been valid in Germany since 2012 and which would allow primary schools as organizational network partners a central position for the design of communal protection concepts (Retzar 2011), school organizational identities do not seem to perceive the structural mandate for participation in child protection as an "intermediary practice" (Evers & Ewert 2010, 117). The organizational heterogeneity of child protection ranges from interventions in individual cases, to structural cooperation concepts, to design options of teaching units, assessment practices and design of programmatic elements of everyday school life (Spies 2022). As multipliers of teacher education, schools also pass on the conceptual gaps of child protection to future generations: We present here interim findings of a qualitative research project on knowledge levels and practices of school actors, which are passed on to future teachers as organizational intervention and prevention perspectives on child protection. We pursue the question, which organizational perspectives and practices do school actors represent when they explain their action and organizational maxims in child protection in the context of their training mandate?

The educational transition from Primary Education to Compulsory Secondary Education is one of the most relevant transformations processes that take place within the educational system. Some studies show that these processes, in some cases, appear as coherent and, in others, as discontinuous ones. In any case, researchers agree on the change perspective of this educational transition. Gimeno Sacristán (2007) defines this process as

[…] a critical moment, valid, because it is an expression of social diversity and of different organizational models and differentiated professional styles, and also a potentially problematic puzzle for subjects who have to move between different schools or territories (p. 19).

In Spain, researchers (Bharara, 2019; Gimeno Sacristán, 1996; Monarca et al., 2013; Tarabini, 2020) focussed more on the discontinuity than the continuity between institutional cultures, that is, more focused on the barriers than on the elements that favour them. In any case, the researchers agree about educational transitions as essential in the trajectories of students since they influence their personal, family and social development. The discontinuities of these transition processes are constituted as a selection process (Gimeno Sacristán, 1996; Monarca et al., 2013), associated or in convergence with the processes of dropping out and school failure, thus increasing the risk of social exclusion among adolescents and young people (Tarabini, 2020).

The educational transition should be a gradual, flexible and reflective process, as multiple psychological, sociological and pedagogical factors are involved in (Santana-Vega, 2015; Hargreaves, 1996; Evangelou et al., 2008; West et al., 2008; Jindal -Snape, et al., 2020). For Sacristán (1996), the educational transition must be understood as a continuous process with 2 dimesions: a horizontal or transversal continuity (between teachers, areas and subjects in a course) and another vertical and temporal connection of didactic elements during the school time. The author also states that most of the discontinuities and inconsistencies that hinder the transit processes affect occur in different dimensions such as in the relationships that are established within the educational community, the curriculum, the climate, the spaces for participation, the evaluation, the distribution of school and family time and the school organization in general. Some studies confirm these elements, and add others associated with the coexistence such as: the compliance with the rules, or the role of teachers, the pedagogy or the number of teachers among others (Ávila Francés et. Al., 2022; González Lorente and González Morga, 2015; González-Rodríguez, 2019).

Nevertheless, there are few studies on some proposals for improvement: the construction of a common pedagogical culture (Carbonell, 2002) and the coordination of all the pedagogical dimensions that intervene in the educational processes in public schools, such as the construction of a common inclusive curriculum (Payá, 2019).

This proposal is part of the research project, approved by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, called The Transition to Compulsory Secondary Education. Pedagogical Impact and Consequences whose general objective is to explore the process of transition to Compulsory Secondary Education and identify the conditioning factors involved in process. Delving into the elements that can generate social exclusion, and highlighting those that may be favouring the transition, allows us to suggest possible ways for improvement.

One of the major tasks of primary education is to cope with social inequalities on the one hand and to embrace diversity on the other. Research shows, that in particular in Germany – but also other European countries with highly selective school-systems – the social background has a string impact on educational trajectories (PISA etc.). Many approaches have been discussed to interrupt this relation, but these were merely located either as additive measures like school-social work or (social-) pedagogical initiatives besides schooling. Approaches that aim at organisational aspects of schooling with an emphasis on pedagogies are rarely discussed in the fields of primary education in Germany. However, there have been historical prototypes of successful social-space oriented primary education with reference to ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner 1981), that can be used as functional prototypes (Spies/Wischmann 2023) to reconstruct the role of organisational-pedagogy positions/reflections in school-development-processes supported by science and municipality. Our assumption is that a social space-oriented approach to primary schooling has organisational impact in terms of the recognition and valuing of diversity as a basic characteristic of primary education under unequal social conditions.

With the help of historical documents and retrospective explanations of the social space-oriented development of primary schools, we will reconstruct the relevance of the municipality as a networking agency in relation to the function of teaching and the relevance of community participation. In doing so, we will discuss the demand for coherence in organisational and multiprofessional pedagogical action for cooperation within the school and community networked educational relationship that made the "opening of school" possible. Therefore, we will present a project around the Wartburg Primary School in Muenster, which was both a model project of practice and a research project (Benner/Ramseger 1981, 1984).

The focus lies on the coherent interactions and relations of the stakeholders and bodies involved, we will look at the levels/contexts of the municipality, the classroom (teaching and learning) and community participation. To capture the socio-ecological interrelations and the interplay of social and school pedagogical action premises and bodies of knowledge, we interpret selected passages from the expert discussion authorised by Dietrich Benner (2023) and the specific historical and political contexts of the interaction between municipal steering interests and processes with the pedagogical implications in the interplay between school and social pedagogical approaches in the ecological systems oriented sense of community education (White 2014) that are thematised there. The educational theoretical perspectives are hermeneutically interpreted by selected anchor sequences from the project reporting and a later text on the political educational responsibility of the municipality (Janssen 1995) in order to draw conclusions on desiderata based on educational theory for the current design of organisational pedagogy issues of school-development of the primary sector in educational landscapes.

Purpose of the Study

Organizational behavior research in educational settings has long shown that employee working conditions significantly influence employees’ productivity, and work attitudes such as sense of belonging and organizational identification (Bluedorn, 1982; Darling-Hammond, 2003; Ingersoll, 2001; Kalleberg & Mastekaasa, 1998; Mueller & Price, 1990; Price & Mobley, 1983). Poor organizational and working conditions such as work overload, lack of school administrative support contributed to poor teacher well-being and high teacher turnover (Hascher & Waber, 2021). Recent pandemic has also diminished the quality of working conditions at schools and increased the organizational stressors for the educational workforce worldwide (Kraft, Simon, & Lyon, 2020; OECD, 2020).

Diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds of teachers and the degree of conflict within the school further complicated working conditions and created management issues for educational leaders (D’Netto & Sohal, 1999; Hurst et al., 2012). Workforce diversity can generate both advantages and disadvantages for organizations in the same organizational system. Research on diverse work environments shows that such diversity creates better decision-making processes in organizations, greater creativity and innovation, and increased global competitiveness (Jauhari & Singh, 2013). However, it may also lead to increased conflict, communication breakdown, less productivity, low cohesion, reduced organizational commitment, and high turnover (Duyar et al., 2015).

United Arab Emirates is one of the most multicultural environments in the world. Schools in the United Arab Emirates embrace principals and teachers who come from diverse ethnic, citizenship and cultural backgrounds and bring different work attitudes and behaviors to the schools where they work (Malik & Singh, 2017). Effective management of a diverse workforce in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) presents a peculiar importance as two-thirds of residents are expatriates, who have diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. There is a need for studies that examine how educational leaders manage diversity and whether their CQ have any influence on teachers’ organizational identification. The purpose of this study was to comparatively examine the direct and indirect influence of principals’ CQ on teachers’ organizational identification with diverse national backgrounds.

Research Questions

The study attempted to address the following research questions:

1. Does teachers’ citizenship status pose a differentiating factor of their organizational identification?
2. Does principals’ citizenship status pose a differentiating factor of their cultural intelligence?
3. Holding teacher, principal, and school level demographic attributes constant, does principals’ cultural intelligence significantly influence teachers’ organizational identification?

Theoretical Framework

The Social Identity Theory (SIT) and the Cultural intelligence Theory (CINT) guided this study. The social identity theory is part of an individual’s self-concept that comes from his/her knowledge of belonging to a group or groups (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Knippenberg and Schie asserted that emotional significance accompanies this type of membership which leads to the notion of social identification (2000). The perception of oneness as a group member is the essence of the perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral effects of group membership (Knippenberg & Schie, 2000). Moreover, the more one envisions himself or herself in terms of the membership of a group, the more one identifies with that group, the more one’s attitudes and behaviors are ruled by that group (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Knippenberg & Schie, 2000).

The cultural intelligence theory is emerged as a novel perspective in response to the realities of globalization and the increased diversity in today’s organizations (Collins et al., 2016). This theory is a viable entrée from which global business leaders can “see beyond surface-level cultural differences” (Earley & Ang, 2003, p. 29). Cultural intelligence is defined as “an individual’s capability to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse settings (Earley & Ang, 2003, p. 336).

Educational research has traditionally focused on trying to answer two basic questions: 1) which educational policies improve children's participation in the educational process and 2) which educational policies improve the quality of education offered to children.

Recent developments, changes and reforms in European education systems dictate the necessity of new approaches to investigating factors that significantly influence the process of school improvement. Undoubtedly, school culture has been at the heart of a variety of educational researches considered as a systemic factor of school improvement and school’s self-development. Until recently, educational research has tended to identify it as positive/non-toxic, negative/toxic and categorise it according to a variety of criteria, formulating this way different models of school culture. The systems approach defines it as an emergent phenomenon shaped by the decision-making processes and the decision-making premises which contribute to the absorption of uncertainty in every system’s structure but not in every function of the system.

The systems approach adopted in this research focuses on the definition and the specification of decision and non-decision premises in three domains, in the area of programmatic decisions, communication channels and personnel. It treats school culture as a phenomenon that is influenced and therefore shaped by these factors but at the same time feeds back on them, making it specific, unique and different in each school unit. It is argued, that school culture is utilized as a means of the autopoietic process of the system, the process of change, evolution and improvement of an educational organization developing at the same time double contingency relationships.

The autopoietic nature of the organisation differentiates the internal dimension of culture that emerges within the system, from another possible dimension of culture which may 'communicate' with and influence the external environment of the organisational system.

The complexity in the structure of an educational organisation does not allow the development of a homogeneous order of meaning. The presence of different groups shapes a dynamic that in turn develops complex 'patterns' and combinations of subcultures. This characteristic of school organisations intensifies the need for a systems approach, while the qualitative and complex dimension of school culture dictates the need for school culture itself to be explored as an emerging and evolving phenomenon.

The need to investigate school culture based on systems theory dictated the development of a qualitative research methodology that focuses on exploring the three factors influencing and shaping the emerging phenomenon of school culture and particularly that which is developed by the teacher and school management.

The purpose of this paper is to study the validity and reliability of a research tool which aims at qualitatively observing and investigating teacher’s school culture through conditions of system decisions and therefore influencing the self-evaluation and self-improvement process.

The disconnect between research and practice is a global phenomenon. Research-practice partnerships (RPP) are a relatively new type of collaboration between educators and researchers that are seen as a possible solution to this problem. The diversity of the team composition should support the emergence of new ideas and solutions to existing problems. In RPPs, researchers and educators create meaningful, trusting partnerships to address urgent problems of practice: “These partnerships are intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work” (Farrell et al., 2021, p. iv).

As RPPs deliberately bring together people with varied expertise, communication is a critical issue (Farrell et al., 2021). As Brown and Allen (2021) state, “Practitioners and researchers live in different professional worlds, each with its own institutional language and norms, hierarchies, incentive systems, and approaches to solving problems” (p. 21). Partners often need to navigate different timelines, communication tools, and ways of describing their work (Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2015). Learning can occur in part through generative dialogue within RPP space. However, we have little information on how discourse unfolds in RPPs.

There are discourse characteristics likely to be common in generative discourse in education: (1) revealing problems from teaching practice, (2) providing evidence or reasoning, (3) making connections to general principles, (4) building on others’ ideas so members may have a shared frame of reference, and (5) offering different perspectives to be able to understand a problem in a new way (Lefstein et al., 2020, pp. 8–10). It is useful to examine whether these and other characteristics of generative discourse are present in RPPs.

The RPP in this study is embedded in a project “Participative School Improvement - Improve Instruction with students” using a design-based research approach (Fishman & Penuel, 2018). The aim of the project is to develop, implement, and routinize participatory settings where students can express their needs and form the learning context of their school. The project aims to change school practices based upon student participation. Our approach is based on practice theory where “bundles of practices and arrangements are the central unit of conceptuality and analysis of social life and social phenomena” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 27). The implication of this theoretical approach is that to better understand school improvement and changes in schools, we need to study everyday practice in situ (Little, 2012; Maag Merki & Werner, 2013; Spillane, 2012) as they are carried out in everyday life.

Team meetings are an important part of everyday practice in schools and in RPPs. Since the RPP is new for both educators and researchers, new routines for collaboration must be established. Most studies analyzing collaborative discourse understand learning as a social process and emphasize a strong interdependence between learning and discourse (Lefstein et al., 2020). RPPs are strongly associated with the expectation that learning takes place on both sides - researchers and educators. This study is especially interested in identifying generative discourse sequences during RPP meetings.

The main topic of this paper is building knowledge within the RPP setting: How can discourse within RPP meetings be described, and what are the generative discourse sequences? How do they arise?

Failure in upper secondary education, high dropout rates, especially in vocational education and training, and other phenomena endangering youth education and life pathways success, draw the attention of researchers worldwide (Battin-Pearson et al., 2000; Bowers & Sprott, 2012). Contemporary research on the role of various risk factors, including typically family background, personal resources, and school experience, provides us with robust knowledge of the power of multiple risk factors and their interconnectedness. Focused on the school experience, when trying to refine this knowledge further, researchers come across weak evidence on various structural aspects of school organisation (conf. Alexander, Entwistle & Kabbani, 2001). In quantitative research, the search for a suitable construct representing the school experience and considering not only individual but also collective experience continues. For example, the construct of the culture of academic futility seems promising (see Straková, Simonová & Soukup, 2021). There is considerable scope to interpret the school experience of struggling students in qualitative research. Students’ narratives can bring valuable insights into the operation of the schools. Their perspective has rarely been used to interpret the complex phenomena of failure at the organisational level.
The objectives
The paper aims to identify students’ reflections on the school experience that uncover organisational processes that amplify or even generate risk factors of failure in the Matura exam. Such reflections may provide insights into school processes that have the potential to inform school and policy development initiatives.
The context
Failure to upper-secondary education graduation exam is a growing problem in the Czech Republic. The introduction of the common part of the Matura exam in 2013 deepened the problem. Since then, the net failure rate in examination has oscillated around one-fifth for the first attempt and more than one-half for corrective attempts (CZVV, 2020). The unsuccessful examinee can repeat the part of the graduation exam in which s/he failed at most twice within five years from the first attempt. However, unsuccessful graduates lose nearly all institutional support, and all responsibility for preparation for further attempts is past on to them.
The Matura exam in the Czech Republic now includes the common and the specific school parts. The school part developed on the tradition of decentralised Matura. It is rooted mainly in an outcomes-based paradigm (conf. Baird and Opposs, 2018). On the other hand, the common part tends to follow the psychometric paradigm and measures generic competencies. Therefore, when a student considers how to prepare for the graduation exam, s/he receives a mixed signal from the system; s/he should be proven competent by teachers (school part) and by uniform testing instruments (common part). If the examinee does not pass the Matura, s/he does not obtain a degree and has no proof of finishing secondary education. It means that after four years of study plus repeated attempts to succeed in the exam, s/he formally remains at the initial (basic) level of education without any vocational or professional certificate. It indicates an obstacle in his/her future life path and limits the possibilities of further employment, education or training.
For these reasons - and many others – the Matura exam is the subject of constant, mainly political discussions. A need for school-based intervention is growing in the Czech Republic (Czech school inspectorate, 2022) and globally (Larsen, 2021).

This presentation engages with the ageing workforce global debate and the occurrence of discrimination on the grounds of age in the workplace. It identifies current issues which are associated with ageism, highlighting potential solutions to address ageist structures, attitudes and practices in th workplace. Conducted over a seven month period, this research consists of a systematic literature review of 108 selected studies in the realm of older workers. This encompassed macro level and organisational level educational and other workplace contexts which were inclusive of policy and practice of older workers. This included recruitment, training, promotional opportunities, intergeneratioal organisational initiatives, heath and well-being and experiences of ageism. The analysis of the selected studies generated a series of recommendations on how to effectively address ageism and promote an intergenerational workplace which has benefits for both older and younger workers. While this research has implications, in particualr at a global level, it has many implications for the ageing workforce across Europe. This is in particular because of the new phenomenon of people living longer, opportunites to avail of good health care systems across Europe and the growing inerest of an ageing population across Europe to continue to remain cognitvely and physically active in the workplace and in their communities.

The increasing institutional concern with active ageing in western industrialised nations appears as a positive shift towards the recognition of older people's human rights and productive capabilities. However, older workers are frequently precludied from availing of opportuntiies to be active in the workplace or to reach their full potential . Opportuntiies for them to continue to work can be limited with precarious employment possibilities. Moreover the lack of reasonable salary scales and the limited recruitment pathways into new employment are normalised for many older workers across Europe. After the age of 50, older workers can frequently find themselves at risk of unemployment. This is given the increasing higher retirement age in Europe as well as the new required skills to engage with technological advancements.

Factors such as good health, the perception that older people's work is of value, flexibility and choice, and the need for an ongoing conversation across the lifecourse facilitate working life extension. On the other hand, poor health, negative impacts of work, not feeling valued, feeling lonely in the workplace, ageism and ageist attitudes can make older workers feel that they need to leave the workplace. Other factors such as a lack of respect feeling invisible,can leave older workers feeling like that despite their wanting to remain in the workplace, they are required to leave. This is further impounded by lack of organisational support and the perceived barriers to encourage older workers to remain in the workplace.

Research has demonstrated that health does not change significantly for those who formally retire because of choice, but worsens considerably for those who leave the labour market for other reasons. This has a significant impact on older people when they retire in terms of their overall health and well-being. This is contributed to when they experience feelings and attitudes associated with ageing. as a negative time in their lives. This is particulary if they leave the work place with a sense of feeling not valued, invisible, no purpose, or not belonging to a community of people and place.

The findings of this study highlight that when organisations and academia come together through research, policy and practice,ageism in the workplace can be addressed and eradicated. This begins with an inclusive partnership approach. Organisational Educational leadership leads in this important area of health and well-being. This is in educational practices promoting positive ageing policy aacross Europe.

Teacher attrition has become an increasingly serious issue in Israel during the past few decades (Arviv Elyashiv & Navon, 2021; Yinon & Orland-Barak, 2017). A report from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS, 2022) revealed that in 2019 there was a 27% increase in the number of teachers who decided to leave the teaching profession, while the recruitment rate declined sharply (around 7%). This crisis has become more severe among novice teachers, with 30% quitting the profession within the first three years (Arviv Elyashiv & Zimmerman, 2015). The cost of the high level of attrition in the Israeli education system is seen in the alarming shortage of teachers (Donitsa-Schmich & Zuzovsky, 2020). Similar concerns were echoed in other Europe, (e.g. Brok et al., 2017; Toropova et al., 2021), as well as in the U.S (Ingersoll et al., 2012). Empirical evidence shows that teacher attrition diminishes when teachers feel satisfied and content with their job (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011).

Job satisfaction refers to employees’ attitudes toward their working conditions and profession (Wang et al., 2020). Job satisfaction within the teaching profession represents positive emotional attitudes toward the teaching role (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011). Extensive research has recognized the contribution of job satisfaction to enhancing positive work-related behaviors, such as retention, attendance, organizational commitment, professional obligation, quality teaching, and accountability (Klassen & Chiu, 2011; Olsen & Huang, 2019; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011). Many studies have investigated the factors predicting teachers' job satisfaction. They have identified student characteristics, teacher backgrounds, teachers' working conditions, and school composition. The current study builds on this literature while elaborating on the school organizational mechanisms that encourage job satisfaction. Previous research has recognized some of the school factors, which ensure quality of teachers’ work: adequate resources, feasible workload, collegial cooperation, opportunities for professional development and leadership support. This study further discussed how such factors contribute to teachers' job satisfaction, while adding to the discussion other main organizational components: organizational autonomy, decision-making opportunities, promotional prospects, and school project involvement openings. The study aimed to explore how teachers' perceptions of school organizational mechanisms with respect to their job routine operates as a determinant of their job satisfaction. The Israeli case is intriguing in this regard. The TALIS 2018 survey indicated that Israeli teachers feel content and satisfied (RAMA, 2019). According to the survey results, most teachers (around 90%) enjoyed their work and ranked their school as highly recommended. At the same time, they experienced high levels of stress, burnout, and attrition (Arviv Elyashiv & Zimmerman, 2015; Shorosh & Berkovich, 2022). Moreover, the Israeli education system is centralized, while teaching offers only a moderate level of autonomy and participation in decision-making (Arviv Elyashiv & Zimmerman, 2015) and the available paths to promotion are limited (Avidov-Ungar & Arviv Elyashiv, 2018). Moreover, teachers work under rigorous regulations, constant supervision, intense parental involvement, and regular examinations of student performance through a high-stakes testing regime (Feniger et al., 2016). In this situation, the TALIS results were quite surprising. Therefore, the study intends to explore the contribution of organizational mechanisms in predicting teachers' job satisfaction in the Israeli education system.

Research questions:

1. How do teachers perceive school organizational mechanisms which are related to their work routine?
2. To what extant do teachers' perception regarding school organizational mechanisms predict their job satisfaction?

As Tierney (2019) has pointed out, natural hazards are becoming increasingly frequent, devastating occurrences across the globe. Educational researchers have engaged with the risk and effects of hazards including floods, earthquakes and fires by focusing on the physical vulnerability of educational institutions and their hazard protection infrastructure (e.g. Ochola, Eitel and Olago 2010, Schulze et al. 2020), emergency preparedness in terms of risk perception and awareness, contingency plans and checklists (e.g. Momani and Salmi 2012, Marincioni and Fraboni 2011, Soffer et al. 2009), the effects of disasters on academic achievement (e.g. Doyle, Lockwood, Comiskey 2017), students’ psychological and physical health (e.g. Tapsell and Tunstall 2008), and curriculum provision in terms of delivering planned educational content (e.g. Convery, Carroll and Balogh 2014). This presentation will contribute to a missing link in the reviewed disasters and education research landscape: how disasters affect schools as organisations and what enhances their resilience. In doing so, the presentation will reflect on the concept of organisational resilience, which has been used by scholars to conceptualise the ability of organizations to anticipate disasters, productively cope with them and learn and grow from the experience. The concept of organizational resilience is not without its critics, and has been portrayed as ambiguous and “fuzzy” (Hillman and Guenther, 2021), akin to the more general concept of “resilience”. Contributing to this fuzziness, according to Hillman and Guenther (2021), are its multiple definitions, its relation to different context-specific phenomena, its single and yet also multi-level nature, and its heterogeneity across organizations. Against this background, and drawing on the work of Vakilzadeh and Haase (2021), Orru et al. (2021), and Ball’s (2012) discussion of the “micro-politics of the school”, the presentation will forward a critically-informed sociological concept of organisational resilience as an analytical tool for exploring the empirically neglected internal politics and dynamics of schools, as well as the external framework conditions shaping them ahead of, during and following states of “rupture”. Organisational resilience encapsulates interwoven aspects of formal and informal school life that can be subsumed under the categories of organizational structure and procedures, school infrastructure, equipment, and the skills required for benefitting from it, school finances, school organizational culture with an emphasis on values, social relations among staff, social relations between staff and external collaborators, leadership, and external political, social and economic dynamics. In terms of the latter, as Ball (2012) notes, a question needs to be raised about “the extent to which the internal dynamics of an organization are independent of, conditioned or determined by, outside forces” (2012, pp. 247). Accordingly, the objective of the presentation is to provide insight into the foci of existing research on education and disasters (largely conducted outside Europe, in the USA and countries of the Global South), and to reflect on the concept of organisational resilience in an educational setting by drawing on findings from a multiple-case study approach which explored how schools in Croatia coped with the effects of disasters. Study insights will be compared and contrasted with similar research studies in Europe and beyond.

The role of organizations in societal development has been a significant topic area since Max Weber's (1922) work regarding the connection between bureaucratization and societal rationalization. At the same time, the question of the role of societal developments for organizations (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), such as the increasing importance of diversity (Gardenswartz & Rowe, 1998; Dietz, 2007) in modern societies, plays an equally relevant role for organizational education research, which is interested in organizational learning, learning processes in, of, and between organizations (Göhlich et al., 2018). The presentations within the symposium are about questions like how diversity is understood in various organizations, how it can be encountered, and to what extent educational processes can be connected to or evoked by experiences of diversity. The symposium will focus on comparative, didactic, and methodological discussions regarding educational organizations such as schools, universities, and the temporary organization of Innovation Labs.

The first contribution presents a study focusing on a type of alternative education in China, i.e., Innovative Schools, that parents have chosen for their children as a substitute for the mainstream education the state provides. Diversity is addressed here in the sense that these schools provide an individualized education for children from middle-class families, thus offering an alternative to mainstream schools and their overwhelming emphasis on mechanical learning, discipline, and competition. However, the pursuit of diversity does not indicate a total separation from the mainstream script but rather connotes multiple (dis)connections between the alternative education space and mainstream schools. In that sense, the diversity of organizations (Tacke & Drepper, 2018) — here, the diversity of schools — is carefully negotiated in the Chinese context.

The second contribution also addresses the organizational space of schools (Rosenbusch & Huber, 2017). It focuses on learning processes within and between organizations. Diversity becomes relevant in the sense that the learning diversity of students, which has been affected by Corona, becomes the starting point, or at least the desiderata, for organizational educational learning processes. The presentation addresses learning processes within multi-professional teams and the importance of organizational-educational knowledge to address questions like staff diversity and how to prevent diversity approaches from turning into discrimination.

After the symposium addressed the diversity of and within schools, the third contribution addresses the need for creating a space for students within teacher education to explore their existential questions, which can facilitate inner transformation and ultimately lead to system transformation. This requires a different, more indirect pedagogy (Ristiniemi et al., 2018; Saeverot, 2013) and teachers' willingness to be vulnerable and disclose themselves. The study, which will be presented, used a reflective, interactive design research framework to co-create design principles and teacher manuals for facilitating this exploration in a way that considers the diversity of teachers. It was essential to focus on giving teachers room for their interpretation in creating this space. In that sense, this contribution addresses organizational space for diversity.

The fourth contribution deals with innovation labs as a space for diversity and education through diversity. A program is presented in which innovation labs have been conducted with regional stakeholders to promote sustainable development. The diversity of participants is recognized as a crucial aspect of an ‘innovative learning’ (Heidelmann et al., 2023/forthcoming) and innovation process and as an initial impulse for transformative educational processes (Koller, 2012). The article presents findings of a longitudinal study, which shows that regional stakeholders deal with the difference between contradictory positions and discourses in a dialogical way, thereby creating a unique experience. Here, innovation labs offer the potential to be a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 2003) in which contradictionary discourses (Lyotard, 1994) can be articulated and brought together.

According to Sliwka (2008), alternative education refers to approaches of teaching and learning that are different from state-provided mainstream education. Recently, some discontent Chinese parents have opted for alternative types of education for their children, which include homeschooling, Classics Reading schools, and underground Christian schools (Xu & Spruyt, 2022). As a niche choice outside of mainstream education, providers of alternative education constantly face the challenge of attracting enough participating families. This requires them to prove their capability to cater to the specific needs of prospective families (Maguire et al., 1999). This is especially relevant in the Chinese context, which is characterized by high-stake exams, fierce educational competition (Howlett, 2021), and authoritarian educational governance (Schulte, 2018). This also raises the question of how these alternative schools present themselves to the public and position themselves in the Chinese educational system. In this research, we study one special type of alternative education, i.e., parent-innovative schools in China. We adopted the (dis)connection framework put forward by Kraftl (2013). According to Kraftl (2013), alternative learning space is a negotiated process that incorporates multiple forms of connections and disconnections with different mainstream institutions. School websites, brochures, and promotional materials are widely used by researchers as important sources to study how schools advertise themselves and argue for their legitimacy (Wilson & Carlsen, 2016). In this research, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis based on the online promotional materials provided by five innovative schools in Beijing. Our analysis revealed the paradoxical efforts of the Innovative schools in negotiating their ‘alternavity’. By advocating for ‘individualized education for every child’, they seem to challenge the mainstream logic that focuses on competition and success. However, they are responding to the new educational demands of the urban middle class and winning themselves a survival niche in another way. While these schools highlight their humanistic educational beliefs in opposition of the utilitarian and exam-oriented mainstream schools, they also adopt some mainstream criteria unconsciously to argue for their legitimacy. More interestingly, while these innovative schools try to align themselves with the national educational agenda, their rhetoric also indicates the potential noncompliance of social elites. Through such negotiation, these schools manage to gain certain autonomy in an authoritarian context, and this phenomenon also sheds light on the struggle between control and autonomy for middle-class parents in post-socialist China.

Howlett, Z. M. (2021). Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China. Cornell University Press. Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People. Chicago Policy Press. Maguire, M., Ball, S., & Macrae, S. (1999). Promotion, Persuasion, and Class-taste: Marketing in the UK Post-compulsory Sector. British Journal of Sociology of Education 20(3), 291-308. Schulte, B. (2018). Allies and competitors: Private Schools and the State in China. In G. Steiner-Khamsi, & A. Draxler (Eds.), The State, Business and Education: Public-private Partnerships Revisited (pp. 68–84). Edward Elgar Publishing. Sliwka, A. (2008). The Contribution of Alternative Education. In Organisation of Economic and Cultural Development (Eds.) Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate, (pp. 93–112). OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/innovatingtolearnlearningtoinnovate.html. Wilson, T. S., & Carlsen, R.L. (2016). School Marketing as a Sorting Mechanism: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Charter School Websites. Peabody Journal of Education 91(1), 24-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2016.1119564 Xu, W., & Spruyt, B. (2022). 'The Road Less Travelled': Towards a Typology of Alternative Education in China. Comparative Education, 58(4), 434–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2022.2108615

With the funding program “Aufholen nach Corona”, the German federal and state governments are supporting various measures to reduce pandemic-related learning deficits among children and young people between 2021 and 2023 (BMFSFJ, 2022). In addition to support offers in core subjects and language support offers, the program includes other measures like class formation and violence prevention. The realization of these offers provides oganizational educational challenges for diversity-sensitive teaching in multiprofessional teams in the inclusive classroom in the highly differentiated German educational system (Rosenbusch, 2005). It traditionally consists of various school types and adapts only gradually to the demands of incluive teaching guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006; Werning et al., 2008). Teaching in multiprofessional teams in the German inclusive classroom has so far largely been understood as cooperation between subject teachers, special education teachers, and social workers, financed by the state (Widmer-Wolf, 2018). As a rule, they are supported by specialists in school social work and participation assistants, who are financed by independent providers (Weimann-Sandig, 2022). The responsibilities and sponsorships in multiprofessional teams have been further differentiated with the program “Aufholen nach Corona”. The question of diversity thus extends to the staff in inclusive education (Loreman et al., 2005). Against this background, a clear definition of roles in the team, mutual acceptance, and working at eye level appear to be central prerequisites for teamwork in diversity-sensitive inclusive teaching (Heinrich et al., 2014). In addition to the fixed personnel and time resources that should frame joint work in inclusive teaching, there is a need of general and organizational information on diversity and inclusion. Otherwise, diversity in this context quickly turns into discrimination (Göhlich, 2012). These findings were outlined in a study on institutional discrimination using the example of school organization (Radtke & Gomolla, 2002). According to the study, simply raising the awareness of individual teachers regarding diversity can achieve little in view of the discriminatory interplay of political framework conditions and organizational routines; instead, concerted action would have to be taken at different levels of school organization (Gomolla, 2005). Regarding the organizational educational perspectives on diversity and cooperation in multi-professional teams in the inclusive classroom, these hypotheses should be put forward in the symposium with a wider audience.

BMFSFJ – Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (2022). Aktionsprogramm "Aufholen nach Corona für Kinder und Jugendliche". https://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/themen/corona-pandemie/aktionsprogramm-aufholen-nach-corona-fuer-kinder-und-jugendliche--178422 Göhlich, M. (2012). Organisation und kulturelle Differenz. In M. Göhlich, S. M. Weber, H. Öztürk, & N. Engel (Eds.), Organisation und kulturelle Differenz (pp. 1–23). Springer. Gomolla, M. (2005). Schulentwicklung in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Waxmann. Heinrich, M., Arndt, A. K. & Werning, R. (2014). Von "Fördertanten" und "Gymnasialempfehlungskindern". ZISU, 58. Loreman, T., Deppeler, J., & Harvey, D. (2005). Inclusive education: A practical guide to supporting diversity in the classroom. Psychology Press. Radtke, F. O., & Gomolla, M. (2002). Institutionelle Diskriminierung. Die Herstellung ethnischer Differenz in der Schule. Leske & Budrich. Rosenbusch, H. S. (2005). Organisationspädagogik der Schule: Grundlagen pädagogischen Führungshandelns. Luchterhand. UN – United Nations (2006). A Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-2.html Weimann-Sandig, N. (Ed.) (2022).. Multiprofessionelle Teamarbeit in Sozialen Dienstleistungsberufen. Springer. Werning, R., Löser, J. M., & Urban, M. (2008). Cultural and social diversity: An analysis of minority groups in German schools. The Journal of Special Education, 42(1), 47–54. Widmer-Wolf, P. (2018). "Kooperation in multiprofessionellen Teams an inklusiven Schulen". In T. Sturm & M. Wagner-Willi (Eds.), Handbuch schulische Inklusion (pp. 299–314). Budrich.

The need to approach the current climate crisis from our inner worlds is becoming increasingly urgent, as inner transformation is a condition for system transformation (Ives et al., 2019), especially in education where young people are suffering from the pressure of our performance society. Creating space in higher education for students to live their existential questions is still a rare phenomenon though, and requires teachers to adopt a very different, more indirect pedagogy (Ristiniemi et al., 2018; Saeverot, 2013). This rareness becomes more evident, when taken the societal context into account. We live in a society, where it is taboo to explore discomfort, that coincides with exploring existential questions. Instead, we pass students with mental problems on to the healthcare system, which becomes overloaded (Denys, 2020). On top of that, being a teachers means that you work with yourself, your own purpose and identity matters (Kelchtermans, 2009; Palmer, 2017). Creating this safe space for existential questions of students means also that you are willing as a teacher to be vulnerable and disclose yourself (Jebbour & Mouaid, 2019). In this paradox of unique differences among teachers we asked ourselves what teachers need to create space for students to live their existential questions? The research took place at the Bachelor Interdisciplinary Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. As this is a system transformation from "within the heart of the regime" (Grin, 2020, p. 1) of higher education, we choose to base our research on a reflective interactive design research framework, which is aimed at system change (Bos & Grin, 2012). This methodology is based on two types of reflection, first the reflection on the current educational system, and second, the reflection on needs and preconceptions that arise in the design process. This was done by actively creating this space together with teachers, thereby inviting the different perspectives on the topic. First by co-creating design principles for creating this space for existential questions of students. Second, by developing teacher manuals for tutor meetings and instructions for students. What became apparent in this mutual learning process, was that the principle in our change approach, to give teachers room for their own interpretation in creating space for existential questions, was essential. As well in the design phase, as in the action phase. We needed to take the diversity among the teachers seriously.

Bos, A. P., & Grin, J. (2012). Reflexive interactive design as an instrument for dual track governance. In M. Barbier & B. E. Elzen (Eds.), System Innovations, Knowledge Regimes, and Design Practices towards Transitions for Sustainable Agriculture. (pp. 132-153). INRA. https://edepot.wur.nl/242654 Denys, D. (2020). Het tekort van het teveel, de paradox van de mentale zorg. Nijgh & van Ditmar. Grin, J. (2020). 'Doing' system innovations from within the heart of the regime. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 22(5), 682-694. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2020.1776099 Ives, C. D., Freeth, R., & Fischer, J. (2019). Inside-out sustainability: The neglect of inner worlds. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01187-w Jebbour, M., & Mouaid, F. (2019). The Impact of Teacher Self-Disclosure on Student Participation in the University English Language Classroom. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 31(3), 424–436. Kelchtermans, G. (2009). Who I am in how I teach is the message: self‐understanding, vulnerability and reflection. Teachers and Teaching, 15(2), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600902875332 Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach. John Wiley & Sons. Ristiniemi, J., Skeie, G., & Sporre, K. (2018). Challenging life: Existential questions as a resource for education. Waxmann. Saeverot, H. (2013). Indirect Pedagogy: Some Lessons in Existential Education. Sense Publishers.

An organizational education program will be presented, where Innovation Labs with the goal of regional innovation for sustainable development have been conducted with the participation of regional stakeholders (Heidelmann et al., 2023/forthcoming). The diversity of the participants can be seen on the level of the subject, in the sense of attributes like organizational background, knowledge, class, 'race', and gender. Coming from a Foucauldian (1972) perspective, the paper addresses diversity as a 'discourse diversity’ in the sense that diversity is not so much a question of identity, but a question of (contradictory) discourses (Lyotard, 1994; Koller, 2012). The participating regional Stakeholders, in that sense, are seen as ‘discourse agents’ (Weber et al., 2019). The experience of diversity as experiencing another contradictory discourse to one's own provides the opportunity for learning processes, where the given order (or a world- and self-relation) is questioned through situations of foreignness and the necessity of educational processes arises. Foreignness can thus become the initial impulse for transformational educational processes in learning spaces characterized by diversity and plurality. In the context of Innovation Labs, where a multitude of actors work together in a problem-oriented way and where diversity is the norm, not the exception, this principle becomes the decisive occasion for plural educational processes (Heidelmann, 2023). The paper will present the theoretical foundations of a possible connection between diversity and experiences of foreignness and empirical findings from a longitudinal study conducted in the context of the program. Regarding this findings of a discourse-oriented analysis (Karl, 2007) of biographical interviews with participating stakeholders, it becomes clear that regional stakeholders emphasize the dialogical handling of the difference between contradictory positions and, therefore, discourses within Innovation Labs, which thus become a unique experience (Heidelmann & Klös, 2023/forthcoming). As a result, Innovation Labs can provide a 'Third Space' (Bhabha, 2003), a creative space 'in between' (Buchanan, 2010), and for the articulation and cohesion of contradictory discourses as an iterative 'place of understanding' (Hörster et al., 2004; Weber & Heidelmann, 2021).

Bhabha, H. K. (2003). The location of culture. Routledge. Buchanan, I. (2010). Third Space. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919-e-707 Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. Pantheon Books. Heidelmann, M.-A. (2023). Organisationen und Netzwerke beraten lernen. Springer. Heidelmann, M.-A. & Klös, T. (2023/forthcoming). Optimierung des regionalen Wirtschaftskreislaufs. In Weber, S.M.; Fahrenwald, C. & Schröer, A. (Eds.) Organisationen optimieren – Optimierung organisieren? Springer. Heidelmann, M.-A., Weber, S.M. & Klös, T. (2023/forthcoming). Collective Leadership for Sustainability Innovations: An Organizational Education Professionalization Approach. In W. Leal Filho, A.L. Salvia, B. Coathe, E. Pallant, & K. Pearce (Eds.), Educating the Sustainability Leaders of the Future. Springer. Hörster, R., Küster, E.-U., & Wolff, S. (2004). Orte der Verständigung. Beiträge zum sozialpädagogischen Argumentieren. Lambertus. Karl, U. (2007). Metaphern als Spuren von Diskursen in biografischen Texten. Forum. Koller, H.-C. (2012). Bildung anders denken. Kohlhammer. Lyotard, J.-F. (1994). Das postmoderne Wissen. Passagen. Weber, S.M., Heidelmann, M.-A. & Klös. T. (2019). Zukunfts-Wissen im Diskurs. Higher Education Development, 14(4), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.3217/zfhe-14-04/02 Weber, S.M., & Heidelmann, M.-A. (2021). Im Dispositiv ‚Diskursiver Gestaltung‘. In A. Schröer, S. Köngeter, S. Manhart, C. Schröder, & T. Wendt (Eds.), Organisation über Grenzen (pp. 77–91). Springer.

Over nearly two decades, the field of organizational education has emerged (Göhlich et al 2018) and international debates on organizational learning have been widened and discussed from an educational perspective. Organizational education perspectives are interested in learning in, of, and between organizations (Weber 2020). Within these debates, critical research perspectives have established (Weber & Wieners 2018). Following a poststructuralist Foucauldian perspective, organizations are not neutral or simply functional. Instead, they act according to sets of knowledge, which are related to power. From a discourse-analytic organizational-education perspective, organizations (and their representatives) are seen as epistemic terrains through which discursive bodies of knowledge ‘flow’. Understood as discursive practices, business, social science, and organizational education rationalizations of change are practices “that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1981, p. 74). Organizations in this sense are constantly actualizing discourses in their discursive practice (Marshak & Grant 2008). Institutional knowledge orders are to be understood as orders of collective seeing, sensing, and thinking. Historical and spatially situated epistemic practices imply specific “visibilities and speakabilities” of and within organizing.

The present multiple crisis like Covid, the climate crisis, the Ukraine War and the global inequality crisis lead to question the ‘normal’ ways of organizing. Taking a closer look, present critiques of modern institutions like the school address not only its main goal of individualization (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022:12). They challenge its´ existing inherent epistemes of education, still belonging to an ‘industrial age’ and claim to move ‘beyond’ such dysfunctional rationalities. Against an individualistic onto-epistemology, against enclosed education in an institutionalized setting and against disciplinary and hierarchical points of depart schools are criticized as non-place education, as decontextualized education which is oriented towards normalization and follows market-bureaucracy logics.

In an alternative episteme for education, Diversity becomes a tenet and commoning education not only a different type of education, but a potential for organizational education, too. The symposium discusses the dimensions of an onto-epistemological shift, which is needed to transform our given institutions (like schools) towards the Common Good. Commoning then connects to self-formation and to the tenet of diversity in alternative patterns of organizing.

The symposium addresses the challenge and the potential of “co-producing and commoning a different episteme” (Collet-Sabé & Ball 2022) not only for education in general, but for organizational education. It discusses the framework of three alternative horizons (Sharpe & Hodgson 2019) and its´ institutional realization within a university and a program on transformation and inclusion (Koenig 2022). It refers to heterotopic organizing in discursive counter-imaginaries against given normative orders. As an alternative imaginary that encompasses societal, democratic, and economic notions, Commoning and Commoning Education can be seen as a “heterotopia” (Foucault 2005), which suspends, neutralizes, and inverts the given onto-epistemology. Through heterotopic imaginaries, strategies, and practices, organizing can contribute to transforming collective images and practices.

In the communication we both argue against the current episteme of modern mass schools and its organization, and for a new episteme oriented from and for the common good and diversity. In the first part, from a Foucauldian perspective, we reject the modern episteme for education and education organization (Ball and Collet, 2021), and we propose to open up to alternative education organization using his concepts of positive and productive power and heterotopia. In the second part, we propose to join the Foucauldian proposal of an ethical and political education (organization) based on the care of the self, others and environment with an approach to education as a commoning activity (Collet and Ball, 2022). Both the critical and the proposal parts could help education organizations to question its current truth, forms of government and what kind of subjectivities and relationship they produce and to be engaged with alternative proposals based on diversity and oriented from and for the common good.

Ball, S. (2017): Foucault as educator. Cham. Springer. Ball, S.; Collet- Sabé, J. (2021): Against school: an epistemological critique. Discourse. 10.1080/01596306.2021.1947780 Collet-Sabé, J. & Ball, S. J. (2022): Beyond School. The challenge of co-producing and commoning a different episteme for education. In: Journal of Education Policy.

For individuals and collectives alike, the task to fully embrace an alternative episteme in which Diversity becomes truly a tenet and communing education a vehicle for the how and where of organizational education has to be seen as demanding in various ways. Currently, still, both the mainstream (university-based) education and (educational) practices in organizations are happening within dominant neoliberal, individualistic, ableist, extractivist, and meritocratic frames, which are deeply interwoven not only in the fabric and make up of our societal institutions but also embodied by its social actors whose legitimate peripheral participation (Giddens, 1984; Wenger, 1998;) serve to reify the conditions and structures under which this participation occurs. How people learn and behave in the present moment is likely to be a projection of how people will learn and behave in the Future. This paper argues that both organizational as well as higher education can profit from a framework and process that is theoretically grounded and practically applicable and which has the potential to support the development of Future Consciousness among (groups of) people from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews – Future Consciousness understood here as a heightened awareness of the future potential of the present moment (Sharpe, 2013). The practice of Three Horizons (Sharpe et al., 2016) and its accompanying theoretical concept of the Anticipatory Present Moment (Sharpe & Hodgson, 2019) can be used to both guide people into such a new onto-epistemological terrain and understand how people make sense and act towards maintaining or transforming the Future in the present moment. The presentation will introduce the aforementioned practice and theoretical concept and portray how it has been used in the design of a new Master Program on Inclusion and Transformation in Organizations and how it is being used as a cohering didactical principle to support educational practitioners from diverse fields and organizational contexts to anticipate and co-create new ways of organizing for more diverse and inclusive futures (Koenig, 2022).

Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Wiley. Koenig, O. (2022). Inklusion und Transformation in Organisationen. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. Sharpe, B. (2013). Three horizons: patterning of hope. Triarchy Press. Sharpe, B., Hodgson, A., Leicester, G., Lyon, A. & Fazey, I. (2016). Three horizons: a pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society 21(2), 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08388-210247 Sharpe, B. & Hodgson, A. (2019). Anticipation in Three Horizons. In R. Poli (Ed.). Handbook of anticipation: Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making (pp. 1071-1088). Springer.

Helfrich and Bollier (2020) argued that autonomy and democracy are learned in relationships because they can be experienced and lived. According to the architect Christopher Alexander, patterns can be understood as tools that promote life. They can be used in many ways and are needed to shape a free, fair, and sustainable world. Since patterns contain proven experiential knowledge, they describe the essence of successful solutions to problems that may occur in comparable contexts. The complex interplay between context, problem, and solution is critical; thus, these three elements are never isolated from each other and are found in all 33 patterns that comprise PLC. The PLC card deck condensed the experiences of more than 400 interviewees from SMOs into 33 patterns, which aim to support sociality, cooperation, and co-production. PLC aims to transform collective imaginaries and support a prosocial, cooperative and democratic praxis in and of organizing. The card deck aims to re-imagine and support individual and collective reflexivity. It addresses the social, political, and economic life from an ontological perspective and based on an integral understanding of sustainability and inclusion. This deck of 33 reflection and orientation cards (Helfrich & Bollier 2020) encompasses illustrations, problem questions, short descriptions, examples, and connection patterns based on visual-linguistic illustrations of success-critical “process patterns” in the fields of Social togetherness, Self-organization through peers and Caring and self-determined management. As an aesthetic artifact, PLC promotes a new frame of reference “among people and between people and the world” (Helfrich & Bollier, 2020, 78). It targets sustainability innovation, collective understanding, and developing an ethical attitude of the common good (cf. Helfrich & Petzold 2021). It aims to facilitate patterns of problem solving (cf. Leitner 2015, 33) to promote ethical and process- and relationship-oriented attitudes and stances. As the patterns suggest a “best practice” to use, the patterns have a hypothetical character (cf. Alexander & Ishikawa 1995). This hypothetical character supports their empirical and (research) methodical application. As a new praxis of organizing, PLC may support transformational strategies toward the integral inclusion of the social, political, and economic spheres. As an organizing pattern, it may transform the quality of conversations and self-organization. It may not only ‘re-invent’ existing organizations (Laloux 2015). From a Foucauldian perspective, it may be understood as an ‘epistemic boundary object’ towards not only the tenet of diversity, but towards the onto-epistemological shift toward commoning education – and toward a commoning organizational education (Weber 2022).

Alexander, C.; Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksfahl-King, I.; Angel, S. (1995): Eine Muster-Sprache. A Pattern Language. Städte, Gebäude, Konstruktion. Wien: Löcker Verlag. Helfrich, S. &. Bollier, D. (2020): Frei, Fair & Lebendig. Bielefeld: transcript. Helfrich, S. &. Petzold, J. (2021): Commoning oder wie Transformation gelingt. Auftakt einer Mustersprache. Neudenau/Eberswalde. Koenig, O. (2022) (Hrsg.). Inklusion und Transformation in Organisationen. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Laloux, F. (2015): Reinventing Organizations. München: Vahlen Verlag. Marshak, Robert J.; Grant, David (2008): Organizational Discourse and New Organization Development Practices. In: British Journal of Management 19, 7–19. Leitner, H. (2015): Mit Mustern arbeiten. In: S. Helfrich, D. Bollier & Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Eds.): Die Welt der Commons. Bielefeld: transcript, 27-35. Sharpe, B., Hodgson, A., Leicester, G., Lyon, A. & Fazey, I. (2016). Three horizons: a pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society 21(2), 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08388-210247 Weber, Susanne Maria (2022): A new Audacity of Imagination. Envisioning Sustainable Inclusion - Transforming toward new Patterns - Practicing Heterotopic Organizing. In: König, Oliver (Hrsg.): Inklusion und Transformation in Organisationen. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn, S. 199 - 217

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

Educational research as well es its (institutional) organisation, methods, technologies, approaches and practices are highly diverse. The workshop invites reflection on the academic treatment of central education-related thematic fields, objects and concepts from a perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS; Bammé 2009; Felt et al 2014). Research on educational research is part of academic as well as disciplinary self-observation. Overall, there is a lot of (tacit) knowledge about epistemic traditions, histories, representatives, communication platforms (journals, congresses, associations, universities), methods, approaches, responsibilities, topics and issues at national and European level and also knowledge about national evaluation systems that have an impact on knowledge production on education (Whitty & Furlong 2017; Keiner & Hofbauer 2014; Oancea 2013, Wyrne 2020; Elven 2022). The workshop will aim in two directions: On the one hand, we are striving to strengthen research networks. It is striking that most of the studies come from the northern and western regions and that, despite a large amount of research on the status of the respective “sciences of education”, this research is not yet well connected.

On the other hand, we want to address the reciprocal relationship between educational research, its topics and STS. The aim is to explore the theoretical means of STS with regard to the educational research 'inside' and 'outside' relationship to social, political, pedagogical or even technological developments and hence, social responsibility of educational research. This includes, for example, research methods and organisation, practices of reception and citation, but also translations and the resulting shifts in meaning in international communication and circulation of ideas (Bourdieu, 2002). Equally interesting is the use of actor-network theory within educational research (e.g. Fenwick & Edwars 2011) and the consideration of technologies as equal actors in knowledge production. The reception of feminist philosophy of science (Haraway 1988) or postcolonial STS (Verran 2002) in educational research can be just as interesting as the feminist-inspired as well as postcolonial, power-critical view of one's own history or practices of science (e.g. Chilisa 2005, Lather 1992). Last but not least, sociomaterial and -cultural practices and technologies of educational knowledge production can be illuminated, which themselves were used as aisles of translation (Latour 1999; Collins, Evans & Gorman 2007). The STS emphasises the practical fabrication, ambiguity and contingency of 'education', 'upbringing', 'learning' etc. when comparing different conceptualisations and science-based organisation as well as when considering their circulation and historical development, which is particularly challenging in international communication.

Since STS have shown that scientific methods, as well as the circulation and transmission of knowledge, “make social realities and social worlds” (Law & Urry 2004, p. 390), light must also be shed on the loci of production. In addition to the laboratory as the classic subject of STS (Latour & Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981), educational research and STS are also be particularly interested in organisations where research and education are intertwined: Universities in particular are contexts where practices of knowledge production, mediation and education, transmission and implementation, and recently also public communication, overlap and interpenetrate. Educational research needs to take on the reflection and analysis of the organisation of this interplay from a science-cultural perspective, because it is not only ideas of the future or technological and predictive knowledge that is generated here, but also schemes of interpretation, orders of justification and practical responsibilities (Wagner 1999; Elven 2021). Beyond the university, however, the focus must be broadened to the interconnections of the entire diverse educational system – not only because it is a central infrastructure for the dissemination and "everydayisation" of knowledge, but also because thinking about and doing research is co-produced here (from school experiments to the mode of using scientifically based arguments.

Our symposium intends to interrogate the capacity of Organizational Education and Organizational Education Research to address the complexity of the challenges that are encountered in dealing with diversity in contemporary Europe and beyond. In times of nationalism, populism and a general tendency in reinforcing the closure of systemic boundaries, we want to discuss the organizational responsibility for fostering counter discourses like new approaches of Democratic Education (e.g., Civic Engagement Education, Service Learning, and Collaborative Learning) aimed at supporting multilevel inter-organizational cooperation, crossing boundaries, and generate resources to imagine new solutions to fractures in organizations and societies. In this regards, organizational education must be able to provide useful interpretations of modern megatrends, support critical thinking within organizational experts and practitioners’ communities, co-develop pragmatic tools to navigate through troubled water and contribute to the building of a ‘democratic and social Europe’. Our era is asking organizations to move beyond the monoculture of revenues, productivity and performance, to tune with compelling collective needs.

Following this line or reasoning, during our symposium we will discuss different aspects that invest organizations in facing the challenges posed by such a transition. Within the framework of three different national and cultural perspectives we will ask: Can organizations acquire and enact more fully the role of responsible agent to promote democratic education? What can educational research do in order to investigate and promote ethical and democratic values and attitudes within and through organizations and communities? What is the role of multi-professional teams in organizations? How to support new forms of and civic engagement and ethical responsibility within and between organizations for the promotion of a more just, diverse and better world? How to promote collaborations and openness while sharing ideas about education and teaching?

The three presentations use a mixed methods design with quantitative and qualitative approaches for collecting data and analysis, e.g., policies and official documents, school projects, evaluation reports, and curricular projects as well as interviews and quantitative survey. Results from the studies are presented within specific theoretical frameworks, as indicated below, in order to highlight relevant organizational aspects. Throughout three different presentations, we will enquire about the following topics: The first presentation introduces the impact of the project "Inclusion Didactic Teaching Modules" (!DL) to teacher´s value education and aims to make a significant contribution to the democratic citizenship education. The project is characterized by multi-professional cooperation (teachers, academics, and school cooperations) and interdisciplinary cooperation (special needs education, subject didactics, primary school education and didactics). In workshops, both student teachers and teachers reflect on their own values and develop it into a democratic attitude. The second presentation points out the changing role of schools against the background of societal trends and fractures. In the context of civic engagement education, they can operate as social innovation agents, not only within schools themselves but in wider social and professional networks. By re-connecting different types of organizations schools initiate ‘horizontal‘ change, that can be investigated as (inter)organizational learning. The third presentation presents a new model of mentoring for beginning teachers, based on the collaborative approach. This model was developed based on social theories and democratic values and encouraged principles of collaborative transformation and construction of professional knowledge through mutual learning, empowerment practices and empathic dialogue. This process provides the opportunity to discuss education goals in an organizational, democratic, critical, and open environment.

Special attention will be given to the commonalities and differences between these three approaches as well as to the transferability of the findings within a European context and in a global world.

Coherence understood as a meaningful linking of structures, contents and phases of teacher education (Hellmann, 2019, p. 9), represents one of the central structural principles in the project "Inclusion Didactic Teaching Modules" (!DL). The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF). In the project, school inclusion is not understood as the task of a single discipline and the associated profession but as an interdisciplinary and multi-professional collaborative task. In line with this approach, the project is characterized by multi-professional cooperation (teachers, academics, and school) and interdisciplinary cooperation (special needs education, subject didactics, primary school education). The result is a learning platform for teacher training that provides films, audio and related teaching and learning materials on questions of school inclusion for all phases of teacher training. In the context of the presentation, four concrete examples (general project structure, cooperative teaching events and their further utilization, cross-sectional topics, and use of the learning platform in the form of workshops) illustrate how coherence as a structural principle shapes the project. A justified location in the Model of Coherence in Teacher Education (Hellmann, 2019) is presented for each example. The workshop on a case of a pupil with Asperger's autism, aims, on the one hand, to negotiate special needs education, democratic education and subject didactic issues (horizontally and vertically coherent in terms of content) and, on the other hand, to deal with one's own and group-specific values, which decisively shape pedagogical action as (prospective) teachers (effect of the professionalization process). A particular focus is placed on the value formation of teachers. But not only with regard to the development of one´s own values, but also of shared values as a team at a school or learning group in the first and second phase of teacher training. In the sense of organizational education this makes a significant contribution to the processual and cultural constitution of the teaching staff/learning group. The workshop is used in all phases of teacher education (vertically structurally coherent) and is carried out by a multi-professional team (horizontally personnel coherent). The training in reflective competence is shown based on participant observation and qualitative interviews with workshop participants. The presentation concludes with a summary of central experiences that were gathered during the project concerning challenges and success factors of a coherent, value-based, inclusion-oriented teacher education.

Hellmann, K. (2019): Kohärenz in der Lehrerbildung – Theoretische Konzeptualisierung. In: K. Hellmann, J. Kreutz, M. Schwichow, and K. Zaki (Eds.). Kohärenz in der Lehrerbildung. Wiesbaden: 9-30.

Schools, as the central educational organizations, exist against the backdrop of current cultural and social changes and must always respond to new societal challenges. In this context, democratic school development by implementing innovative democratic education approaches has become increasingly important in many European countries during the past several years. The emphasis is here especially on new networks (Berkemeyer and Järvinen 2011) emerging between different educational organizations like schools and community partners. Networks and other partnerships between those actors are understood as a strategy for social innovation in the field of school development (Brühlmann and Rolff 2015). As a consequence, new forms of communication and collaboration between different individual, collective and organizational actors among different types of organizations including a diversity of types of knowledge as well as organizational culture(s) have emerged. This paper first discusses current democratic education approaches by drawing on current literature on the subject and then, second, presents a case study from an emerging network of schools in Upper Austria that are in the initial stages of implementing such new approaches of democratic education into their organizations. Because they require the effective collaboration of diverse actors like administrators, teachers, students, and community partners, they can have significant impacts on school cultures. Already established international literature clearly points on the primarily positive and innovative effect that integrating new approaches of Democratic Education can have on organizational development, because these new approaches of Democratic Education can help to break down traditional barriers in and between educational organizations and the surrounding communities (Fahrenwald & Feyerer 2020). In our research, supported by a Community Foundation in Vienna, we use a mixed methods design: In addition to a document analysis, that examines the outlines of engagement projects submitted in a local newspaper’s competition in Upper Austria during the last five years, expert interviews were conducted. In this presentation we will discuss the results from the interviews carried out with school leaders and project coordinators of 6 schools (primary schools, high schools and grammar school), which agreed to work with us on implementing civic engagement education systematically as a means of school development. The overall goal of the paper is to analyze the learning experiences and the learning challenges within these new forms of partnership and collaboration between different organizations for to understand better the needs for diversity sensitive training offers for individual, collective and organizational actors.

Berkemeyer, Niels and Hanna Järvinen (2011): Lernen in Netzwerken. Journal für Schulentwicklung (3): 4-7. Brühlmann, Jürg and Hans-Günter Rolff (2015): Horizontale Schulentwicklung, Journal für Schulentwicklung (1): 4-7. Fahrenwald, Claudia und Jakob Feyerer (2020): Zivilgesellschaftliche Öffnung der Bildungsorganisation Schule. In: Andreas Schröer, Nicolas Engel, Claudia Fahrenwald, Michael Göhlich, Christian Schröder und Susanne M. Weber (Hrsg.): Organisation und Zivilgesellschaft. Beiträge der Kommission Organisationspädagogik, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, S. 65-74.

Mentoring is a significant component in the socialization process of beginning teachers (Dominguez & Hager, 2013). The conservative approach of socialization seeks to adjust the novice teachers to the prevailing circumstances of school organizations. In this situation, mentoring process is based on the hierarchical paradigm of knowledge transfer in a dyadic, one-to-one encounter in which there are clear relations of authority, where the mentor is perceived as the transmitter of professional knowledge and the mentee is perceived as a passive actor (Darwin, 2000). Recently, new approaches were developed based on social theories and democratic values. Whitin this theoretical framework, new models of mentoring based on collaborative assumptions were formulated. The collaborative model is based on the principles of collaborative transformation and construction of professional knowledge through mutual learning, empowerment practices and empathic dialogue (Canipe & Gunckel, 2020; Pennanen et al., 2018). The paper presents a new model of mentoring for beginning teachers, based on the collaborative work, namely, Multi-Player Induction Teams (MITs). This model was initiated in the Israeli education system and was developed in collaboration with European and Israeli institutions for teacher education in a joint Erasmus+ project, named Proteach (2016-2019). The MITs are conducted in the format of a learning community, and take place at the educational field, mostly at the schools organizations. They are characterized by cooperation between the mentors, school leaders, school administrators, educational policy stakeholders, teacher education advisers and the novice teachers (Arviv Elyashiv & Levi-Keren, 2022). These partners share professional insights, dilemmas and ideas relevant to the socialization period of beginning teachers and to the wider educational perspective, while rethinking, transforming and recreating the culture of their professional community. This process provides the opportunity to discuss education goals in an organizational, democratic, critical, and open environment, and to construct organizational knowledge and learning methods. The study was conducted in the Israeli education system, using a mixed methods design. It aimed to explore the learning experiences, learning challenges and benefits of the MITs in generating a democratic collaborative model for the socialization process of beginning teachers as well as for the establishment of a community of practice at school context for knowledge exchange, knowledge construction, development of competencies and growing identities (Love & Wenger, 1991).

Arviv Elyashiv, R. & Levi-Keren, M. (2022). The incubator: an innovative approach to professional development for beginning teachers and mentors. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-04-2022-0023 Canipe, M. M., & Gunckel, K. L. (2020), Imagination, brokers, and boundary objects: Interrupting the mentor-preservice teacher hierarchy when negotiating meanings, Journal of Teacher Education, 71(1), 80-93. Darwin, A. (2000), Critical reflections on mentoring in work settings, Adult Education Quarterly, 50(3), 197-211. Dominguez, N., & Hager, M. (2013), Mentoring frameworks: Synthesis and critique, International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2(3), 171-188. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

The symposium focuses on the relationship between organization, diversity, and digitization. This reveals a tension between the different concepts. Organizations are situated in and equally confronted with heterogeneous social conditions (Wilz 2002). This results in different, often interlocking approaches that indicate the necessity of negotiating diversity in and of the organization. Heterogeneity as a challenging condition starts with the productive need to process different perspectives and individuals. Approaches such as "diversity management" or "managing diversity" see diversity as a resource that needs to be managed for the benefit of the organization. For example, diversity has a productive effect in the context of innovation labs, where the variety of perspectives fosters the generation of new solutions (Schröer 2021). In this way, organizations can realize heterotopic places (Adler/Weber 2018) in order to temporarily suspend the contradictory logics of action inscribed in them. Other approaches address the organization in its interweaving with social power relations, which make the organizations themselves actors in the reproduction of social inequalities. Following the socially institutionalized norm that relations of inequality are illegitimate (Pasero 2003), here concepts of equity and inclusion that adopt a power- and structure-reflexive perspective on organizations become relevant.

Organizations operate in a field of tension between very different logics of action, which is also evident in the ongoing digital transformation. The widely funded interdisciplinary research in the field of digitization, for example, focuses primarily on the introduction of digital technology in production and management processes and the need for digital skills. The focus is on how digitality is changing work and organizational processes (Büchner 2018). Although the importance of organizations for digitization is repeatedly emphasized digitization is mostly neither tied back to the organization's own logic (Wendt 2021) nor sufficiently related to societal demands and the associated paradoxes.

Digitization and diversity also have a tense relationship. While the spread of the internet was initially associated with the hope that new technical possibilities would enable democratic forms of deliberative interaction, this optimism has since been empirically corrected. This is illustrated not only by the debate about digital divide, the self-referentiality of echo chambers or the spread of hate speech, but above all by the criticism that algorithms regularly stabilize relations of inequality and thus counteract claims to diversity (Bender et al. 2021). The increasing spread of artificial intelligence, in particular, is leading to the demand that the use of digital technology must comply with ethical principles and reveals new forms of learning (Truschkat/Bormann i.E.)

An organizational educational perspective therefore draws attention to the fact that advancing digitization not only creates new needs for knowledge generation and use, but also necessitates the negotiation of new organizational orders. An organizational educational approach offers the possibility to bring organization, diversity, and digitization into a relationship and to discuss related practices of action. The symposium will bring together current contributions that deal with the tense relationship between digital transformation and diversity in organizations and will discuss further organizational education theory and research perspectives in this topic area.

Organizations are increasingly using digital structure-building tools to systematize and coordinate actions in the context of digital transformation. As a result, the notion of management and control, the relationship between formality and informality, or the way in which decisions are made are changing. Regarding organizational education, learning in, from, and between organizations takes place under changed conditions. The consequences of digitization for organizations are discussed and classified using three examples: Filing (1), Decision Making (2), and Algorithmization of knowledge-based work (3). The use of case software such as ICT (1) in social pedagogical case processing leads to the fact that digital processing logic puts professional action knowledge under pressure. Big Data-based risk assessment tools in early intervention and child protection (2) put the importance of personal experience into perspective. In the application of large language models (LLM) or diffusion models in artificial intelligence (3), organizations become independent of individual microdiversity in the production of alternatives. With this background, the contribution explores the question of whether the use of software realizes the old dream of rationalizing work processes or enables a qualitatively different form of coordinating procedures that are based on the division of labor.

Benanav, A. (2021). Automatisierung und die Zukunft der Arbeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Büchner, S./Dosdall, H. (2021). Organisation und Algorithmus. Wie algorithmische Kategorien, Vergleiche und Bewertungen durch Organisationen relevant gemacht werden. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie KZfSS, 73, S. 333–357. Kelkar, S. (2018). Engineering a platform: The construction of interfaces, users, organizational roles, and the division of labor. In: new media & society, (20) 7, S. 2629-2646. Manhart, S., Wendt, T. (2022): Soziale Systeme? Systemtheorie digitaler Organisation. In: Soziale Systeme. Zeitschrift für soziologische Theorie 26 (1/2), im Druck. Wendt, T. (2021): Organized Futures. On the Ambiguity of the Digital Absorption of Uncertainty. In: Frontiers in Education 6:554336. Wendt, T., Manhart, S. (2020): Digital Decision Making als Entscheidung, nicht zu entscheiden. Zur Zukunft des Entscheidens in der Digitalisierung. In: Arbeit. Zeitschrift für Arbeitsforschung, Arbeitsgestaltung und Arbeitspolitik 29 (2), S. 143-160.

The discourse on the digitalization of (work)organizations is predominantly characterized by a technology-deterministic perspective that focuses primarily on the (everyday) consequences and possibilities of digitalization (cf. Nassehi 2019). Also, from a gender-political perspective, mainly the potentials and risks of technology usage for gender relations in organizations are discussed, which arise, for example, through changed possibilities of flexibility or the phenomenon of biased algorithms. In this sense, technologies are often already recognized in their socio-technical construction, whereas organizations tend to be addressed as neutral frameworks of digitization (cf. Carstensen/ Prietl 2021; BMFSFJ 2021). From an organizational theoretical perspective, however, questions are becoming increasingly virulent that focus on a more active role of organizations in digitalization and the emergence of new cultural forms based on digital infrastructures. In particular, the concept of digitality (Stalder 2016) raises a perspective that emphasizes the cultural significance of digitalization for organizations. In this sense, organizations and their actors are no longer exclusively confronted with the introduction of technologies, but rather are actively involved in the production of a new culture of digitality, which becomes visible in changed organizational practices (cf. Büchner 2018). However, it also becomes clear that the more the debate about digitization in organizations turns to a cultural approach, the less influence a gender-sensitive perspective has had so far. This becomes particularly relevant because, from a praxeological perspective, the central actors in the creation of a new digitality are not neutral entities, but are situated in gendered power relations themselves. (ct. Acker 1990; Wajcman 2010). To address this desideratum, the constitutive relevance of gender for organizational digitality will be demonstrated, building on concepts from feminist organizational and technology research. In addition, initial praxeological considerations for capturing gender in organizational digitality will be presented and subsequently discussed using the example of organizational digitality of workspaces in universities.

Acker, J. (1990): Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. In: Gender & Society. 4/1. S. 58-139 BMBFSJ (2021): Digitalisierung Geschlechtergerecht Gestalten. Dritter Gleichstellungsbericht der Bundesregierung. 10. Juni 2021, Berlin. https://www.bmfsfj.de/resource/blob/184544/665a7070dbc68f9984fe968dc05fd139/dritter-gleichstellungsbericht-bundestagsdrucksache-data.pdf Büchner, S. (2018). Zum Verhältnis von Digitalisierung und Organisation. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 47(5), S. 332-348. Carstensen, Tanja; Prietl, Bianca (2021): Digitalisierung und Geschlecht: Traditionslinien feministischer Auseinandersetzung mit neuen Technologien und gegenwärtige Herausforderungen. In: Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien 27 (1-2021), S. 29–44. Nassehi, A. (2019). Muster. Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft. München: C.H. Beck. Stalder, F. (2016). Kultur der Digitalität. (1. Aufl.). Berlin: Suhrkamp. Wajcman, J. (2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–152. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24232027

The presentation is embedded within the START (Self-Determination through technological support of Autonomy, Resilience and organisational Transformation) project in AT/CH (funding: FFG). One of START’s aims is to ensure and strengthen a self-determined life style for people with disabilities (PWD). START therefor co-develops an IT tool. This will digitally facilitate PWD’s access to a multitude of services or activities. Such services continue to be offered to a large extent by classical organisations that provide support for PWD. Just like other organisations, also organisations from this sector have been confronted with the effects of digitalisation (Bosse/Haage 2020:529f). Wherever digital services and tools are being introduced, aspects of education become an issue: for individual users inside the organisation (‘learning in organisations’), for the organisation as a whole (‘learning by organisations’) and for the ecosystems that the organisations are embedded in (‘learning between organisations’). In my PhD thesis I will pay attention to a new analytical sequence that I call ‘preceding digital situations’ and ‘subsequent target situations’ in the lives of service users (PWD) who (will) use digital tools like START’s prototype. A ‘preceding digital situation’ involves an IT tool to initiate, plan, prepare to guide or document a subsequent ‘target situation’, i.e. an activity of everyday life (like eating, cooking, shopping) and/or a suitable support service (feeding, mobility assistance, etc.). I hypothesise that (in this context) preceding digital situations can show a severe lack of self-determination, while most emphasis by the organisation’s staff or IT developers is put on ensuring and strengthening self-determination in the ‘target situations’. The (comparatively short) event of using the digital tool is not even regarded as a situation itself. My presentation will focus on the first part of the sequence: the often overlooked ‘digital situations’. It will showcase various examples, gathered by vignettes on situations (Miko-Schefzig 2022:114ff). They can help to raise awareness about action logics at the intersection of organisation, diversity and (constantly advancing) digitalisation (in the social field). Furthermore, they can contribute to negotiate new organisational orders and practices of action.

Bosse, Ingo; Haage, Anne (2020): Digitalisierung in der Behindertenhilfe. In: Handbuch Soziale Arbeit und Digitalisierung. Pp. 529-539. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juvena Miko-Schefzig, Katharina (2022): Forschen mit Vignetten. Gruppen, Organisationen, Transformation. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juvena

Digital technologies are increasingly finding their way into the provision of social services. For social organizations, this presents a wide range of opportunities and challenges. To meet these challenges, an interdisciplinary consortium consisting of five scientific organizations, three IT companies and 14 social institutions in Austria is working on the "Digital Social Route Map" project. The core of the project is the creation of a digital tool that helps people find information about services to solve social problems. The aim is to create an innovative product that, with the help of target-group and demand-oriented use of adequate digital technologies, creates added value for those affected as well as for social service providers compared to existing offers. The consortium works in an integrative and participative process with potential users and different organizations. The implementation of the "Digital Social Route Map" poses numerous challenges for the organizations involved in the project, as they are caught between the diverse opportunities offered by digital technologies and the heterogeneous demands of (potential) stakeholders. Particularly in the areas in which digital technologies find their way into direct client work, multi-layered technical, ethical, and organizational questions arise that can stand in "contradictory relationship to professional logics of social work" (Kutscher et al. 2020). Among other things, social organizations have to deal with data protection concepts and IT security, ensure equal technical access for their (vulnerable) stakeholder groups, consider the impact on the relationship with and trust by clients, and ensure the quality and diversity of services. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of the stakeholder groups requires that aspects of diversity - which are of central importance for (social) organizations - be given special focus when organizations implement digitization processes (Mayer/Vanderheiden 2014; Becker 2016; Dreas 2019). On the one hand, digitization can create further barriers to access, but at the same time it can also represent an opportunity to establish diversified, innovative, needs-based, and low-threshold services. In this respect, working with these ambivalences of integrating new technologies is a crucial aspect in the digitization process of social organizations and their services (Deckert/ Langer 2018; Grunwald 2018; Roehl/ Asselmeyer 2017). In order to address the described tensions and ambivalences between digitalization and diversity-conscious service orientation, social organizations need to engage in experimental and disinhibiting learning and transformation processes. In this contribution, experiences from a practice-oriented research project are shared that exemplify how social organizations can deal with these processes.

Becker, M. (2016). Was ist Diversity Management? In K. Fereidooni & A. P. Zeoli (Hrsg.), Managing Diversity. Die diversitätsbewusste Ausrichtung des Bildungs- und Kulturwesens, der Wirtschaft und Verwaltung (S. 291–317). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Deckert, R., & Langer, A. (2018). Digitalisierung und Technisierung sozialer Dienstleistungen. In K. Grunwald & A. Langer (Hrsg.), Sozialwirtschaft. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Praxis (S. 872–889). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Dreas, S. A. (2019). Diversity Management in Organisationen der Sozialwirtschaft. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Grunwald, K. (2018). Organisationsentwicklung/ Change Management in und von sozialwirtschaftlichen Organisationen. In K. Grunwald & A. Langer (Hrsg.), Sozialwirtschaft. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Praxis (S. 333–356). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Kutscher, N., Ley, T., Seelmeyer, U., Siller, F., Tillmann, A., & Zorn, I. (Hrsg.). (2020). Handbuch Soziale Arbeit und Digitalisierung. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Mayer, C.-H., & Vanderheiden, E. (Hrsg.) (2014). Handbuch Interkulturelle Öffnung. Grundlagen, Best Practice, Tools. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rubrecht. Roehl, H., & Asselmeyer, H. (Hrsg.). (2017). Organisationen klug gestalten. Das Handbuch für Organisationsentwicklung und Change Management. Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel.

In recent decades, people have been highly engaged in collective organizing rather than individual efforts to find solutions to the multiple crises across the globe. In ever-increasing complexity, people find radically new ways to go beyond thought through creativity and imagination (Simpson & den Hond, 2022: 141). Creativity and imagination in organizing enable alternative practices emerging from different approaches, such as commons, social and solidarity economy, and degrowth movements (Weber 2022). Imagining democratic and participatory spaces by and for people creates new pathways for demolishing power hierarchies within organizing (Schröder 2018). Discussing these increasingly new patterns of organizing is worth to analyze, since the current Western-center, colonial academic debate limits our understanding of exploring alternative patterns and organizing strategies in "the colonial, gendered and racial asymmetries of the constituted order" (Bourassa, 2017: 82). Critical, feminist, and decolonial approaches seem more suitable to criticize the power relations and understand this topic rather than the dominant universalist and hierarchical approaches.

Therefore, new theoretical, empirical, and methodological discussion at the acacemic level are crucial for finding out the research on this topic. To discover diverse patterns, widening the gaze on learning, education and training in and between organizations may offer new perspectives. Commons in education (Pechtelidis & Kioupkiolis: 2020), alternative research methodologies for teaching (Dryjanska, Kostalova & Vidović 2022) and learning in and between women’s cooperatives in their networks (Cazgir 2022) are contributions addressed in this symposium in order to analyze innovative and transformative patterns of organizing.

Such alternative forms of organizing indicate an ontological shift (Bourassa, 2017). From a diversity perspective, the contrtıbutıons of the symposium address the micro-heteropolitical attempts to build open participatory democratic space and may allow us to discuss and evaluate the possibility of alternative patterns of organizing..

These theoretical, methodological and epistemological reflections address the different ways of organizational learning in, by, and between organizations (cf. Göhlich a.o. 2018). The symposium aims to bring together discussion on ontology, methodology, and epistemology in order to explore pathways, practices, and pitfalls of the alternative patterns of organizing.

- How does „organizing“ benefit from "diversity"?

- How and to what extent does diversity promote radically inclusive, democratic organizational strategies?

- How does organizational education challenge the individualistic approach?

- How does the alternative organizing process create inclusive, democratic, and sustainable possibilities? What are the main obstacles and challenges?

- How do micro-organizations trigger democratic transformations?

- Which methods are more suitable for research on organizational learning?

- How and to what extent does learning between the organizations contribute to the transformative potential of organizations?

Following these questions, the organizing of diversity and in diversity will be discussed through theoretical, empirical, and methodological lenses. The symposium addresses organizing from a micro-scale research perspective including their macro-scale transformative potentials. By this, the symposium explores patterns of alternative and diverse organizing, of researching and learning in their pathways, practices and pitfalls.

Through the implementation of several commons-based case studies in the educational field we sought to make an OntoShift to the commons which means to try to escape from the onto-political frame of the modern West where independent individuals interact with each other. The ability to act emerges from within the relationship, not from the outside, and there is no single, essential individual, but rather many different ‘I's’, each of which are implicated in many different communities and are therefore a part of ‘many we’s’, which present a challenge to the modern individualized ontology on which the institution of education is based. The purpose of this shift is to explore whether the ontology of the commons is more inclusive and beneficial for the individuals involved in the sense that it promotes equal freedom in the here and now. In so doing, we describe rituals, practices, and mentalities produced within these alternative educational social spaces, and provided an understanding on how alternative children’s subjectivities and citizenship come into being. All these practices are deemed as micro-heteropolitical attempts to build open participatory democratic spaces for being and becoming. In educational commons, the very practice of education and learning becomes a common good or resource which is collectively shaped and managed by the members of the educational community in terms of equality, freedom, active and creative participation.

Bourassa, G. N. (2017). Towards an elaboration of the pedagogical common. In A. Means, D., R. Ford, & G. Slater (Eds.), Educational commons in theory and practice (pp. 75–93). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. De Lissovoy, N. (2011). Pedagogy in common: Democratic education in the global era. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), 1119–1134. Kioupkiolis, A., & Pechtelidis, Y. (2017). Youth Heteropolitics in Crisis-ridden Greece. In S. Pickard, & J. Bessant (Eds.), Young People and New Forms Politics in Times of Crises: Re-Generating Politics (pp.273-293). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Korsgaard, M. T. (2018). Education and the concept of commons. A pedagogical reinterpretation. Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol.50. Pechtelidis, Y. (2018). Heteropolitical Pedagogies, Citizenship and Childhood. Commoning Education in Contemporary Greece. In C. Baraldi & T. Cockburn (Eds.), Theorising Childhood: Citizenship, Rights, and Participation (pp.215-239). Palgrave Macmillan. Pechtelidis, Y., Kioupkiolis, A. (2020) ‘Education as Commons, Children as Commoners: The Case Study of the Little Tree Community,’ Democracy and Education

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Focusing on the various practices of women's co-operatives, this study aims to reveal different strategies for organizing towards a diverse economy and their possible contribution to democratic transformation. In this study, findings, basis on the semi-structured interviews with women's cooperatives in Izmir Province may provide insight to discuss and evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of organizational learning in, by, and between (cf. Göhlich a.o. 2018) the women's cooperatives. The most distinctive feature of women's cooperatives from for-profit enterprises is creating an alternative organizing process. This paper proposes to discuss the impact of women's cooperatives as a new imaginary of the economy by and for women beyond the Western notion and concept. The existing literature on women's cooperatives in Turkish mainly focuses on the empowerment of women, however, this research attempts to discuss women's co-operatives by positioning those as diverse economies. By articulating democratic values into work and employment, women create a viable and diverse organizational model. This potential reveals mostly in relations of production and redistribution, the participatory and democratic management processes. Within and amongst the organizations, the diversity in women's backgrounds, the organizing purposes, the scale of organizations, the areas of the activities, and the rural-urban spaces have resulted in a variety of strategies. Women, as an agent, create hetero-political spaces. Here, the agent is a "normal" woman, not a prominent social, economic, or political actor who has the power to act and transform. In the women's cooperatives, women not only transforming the economy but also, transforming themselves in, by, and between the women's cooperatives. At the same time, their organizing strategies inspire other "possible" organizing potentials. By creating their networks, women exchange their knowledge, learn together and advocate around common goals. Apart from the potentials, the internal and external pitfalls in, by, and between the women's cooperatives will be discussed to better understand the main obstacles to creating transformative pathways. They may not be able to struggle with for-profit organizations within the market economy. To reach their main goals, the leadership of a few people may come to the fore, and democratic processes may be disrupted. Or, as recognized and promoted structures, public authorities may pose a threat to their independence by instrumentalizing them for their political purposes.

Cazgir, K. D. (2020). Covid-19’la Mücadelede Sosyal Dayanışma Ekonomileri: İzmir Kadın Kooperatifleri. Strata İlişkisel Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, No.5, September 2020, 59-88. Cazgir, K. D. (2022). WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT THROUGH CO-OPERATIVES: THE CASE OF WOMEN’S CO-OPERATIVES IN IZMIR [M.S. - Master of Science]. Middle East Technical University. Cinar, K., Akyuz, S., Ugur-Cinar, M. & Onculer-Yayalar, E. (2019) Faces and Phases of Women’s Empowerment: The Case of Women’s Cooperatives in Turkey, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State&Society, 1-28. Duguid, F., Durutaş, G., Wodzicki. M. (2015). The current state of women’s cooperatives in Turkey. Washington, DC: World Bank. Göhlich, M.; Novotný, P.: Revsbæk, L.; Schröer, A.; Weber, S. M.; Yi, B. J. (2018): Research Memorandum Organizational Education. In: Studia Paedagogica. 23 (2), pp. 205–215. Ryder, G. (2015). Leveraging the cooperative advantage for women’s empowerment and gender equality. International Labour Organization: Cooperatives and The World of Work No.1.

Equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives are a regular feature of organisational diversity strategies, yet often receive backlash (Flood et al., 2021). In some cases, this backlash can include allegations that a secret, malevolent group are using such initiatives to further their own agenda or gain power (Douglas et al., 2019). In male-dominated sectors such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), this most often applies to gender equality initiatives, which conspiracy theories accuse of being a front for extreme feminist or Marxist ideologies. These conspiracy theories have potential to undermine organisational progress on equality and diversity issues, yet often remain unchallenged. One promising intervention against various types of misinformation, including conspiracy theories, is attitude inoculation (Lewandowsky & van der Linden, 2021). In this, strategies used to spread conspiracy theories are highlighted in order to raise awareness of them and promote critical thinking about their content. However, its effectiveness for conspiracy theories linked to equality, diversity and inclusion issues remains untested.