Conference Agenda

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.