Leveraging Global Climate Education Networks to Improve Climate Literacy Outcomes
Michael R.L. Odell, Teresa J. Kennedy
University of Texas at Tyler, United States of America
Addressing climate change is a global concern. Climate change is a complex interdisciplinary issue that requires experts to collaborate from different academic disciplines. Climate education integrates knowledge from the sciences, economics, the social sciences, and education to develop curricula and approaches to educate students, teachers, citizens, and policy makers. By understanding these different sectors and their concerns it may be possible to develop climate change education approaches that minimize the politics around climate education and lead to better outcomes. Climate education can increase awareness and understanding of the complex issues surrounding climate change. Understanding is key to making informed data-driven decisions and policies. High-quality climate education is more likely to engage the populace to critically evaluate the science and policies that are enacted to mitigate or even reverse current climate trends. At the global policy level, climate education is a key component of UNESCO's sustainability agenda. It aligns with UNESCO's focus on education for sustainable development, climate change education, and capacity building. UNESCO's goal is to empower individuals with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to address climate change and work for a sustainable future. One global network is the GLOBE Program. This network has over 120 partner countries that engages students, teachers, scientists, and citizen scientists in studying and addressing climate change. Member countries sign bilateral agreements to share data. It is likely that everyone attending the ICSEI conference is from a GLOBE Partner Country. The GLOBE Program plays a significant role in sustainability and climate education by promoting hands-on scientific research, fostering interdisciplinary learning, encouraging global collaboration, and providing professional development opportunities. By engaging students in real-world environmental investigations, the program inspires a sense of environmental stewardship and empowers the next generation to address the challenges of climate change and contribute to a more sustainable future. The GLOBE Program promotes a cross-disciplinary approach to learning by integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education with other subjects, including social sciences and arts. This interdisciplinary approach helps students understand the broader social, economic, and cultural dimensions of sustainability and climate change. It encourages critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, empowering students to address complex environmental challenges. In spite of its large size, the network is not well known outside the environmental and climate science communities. This session will provide an overview of the program. Participation in this network is free and there are resources including curricula, databases, visualizations, etc. available to educators and policymakers for implementation or adaptation to support climate education. All materials are available in the 6 UN languages. Examples of teacher and student artifacts will be presented to demonstrate how GLOBE can enhance climate education within school systems or through a citizen scientist approach.
Examining The Role Of Leaders’ Personal Networks In Supporting The Community Engagement Of A Local PLN In England
Sotiria Kanavidou, Maria Kaparou
School of Education, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Research Objectives and Questions
Studies on inter-school collaboration are increasingly applying network tools to capture how school leaders’ collaborative relationships can enhance the brokerage of social capital (i.e. resources) and therefore community improvement (e.g. Daly et al., 2015; Sinnema et al., 2020). However, little is known about how individual leaders perceive their roles and operate in evaluating, synthesizing and mobilizing social capital that emerges from the wider community. This research paper employs a mixed-method social network design and examines the brokerage roles of school leaders in sharing resources within and beyond the PLN community.
RQ1. What are the different models for brokerage in a PLN, based on the leadership level and site/school?
RQ2. What strategies do school leaders use to broker resources in a PLN?
Theoretical Framework
The paper draws evidence from social capital (Burt, 2002) and social network theory (Daly, 2010). Rodway et al. (2021) explained that although formal leaders (headteachers) seem to have the responsibility to bridge ties (outdegree) and seek expertise from external groups (indegree), teacher leaders can also mobilize innovative ideas (social capital). This study adopted Gould and Fernandez’s(1989) brokerage roles: Liaison, Consultant, Coordinator, Gatekeeper and Representative.
Methodology
Design
The present study utilized a case study design, attempting to capture the complexity of the unit (Yin, 2009)- the Lakeside PLN. The Lakeside includes 5 schools that comprise a Multi-Academy Trust. The member schools have developed several community connections (e.g. unions, local politicians) to expand the community impact of the organization in the locality.
Instruments and procedure
Social network survey: Participants were provided with a complete list of names of all the leaders that work across the PLN (N=147) on a 4-point Likert-type scale and invited to nominate their colleagues with whom they collaborated to improve their professional practice. This survey was used to purposefully select participants (i.e executive, senior, middle and administrator leaders that work in one of the schools or across PLN) for the interviews (N=13).
Semi-structured interviews: The interview focused on interactions within and beyond (e.g. teachers, politicians) the leadership teams. Respondents were invited to note the people they collaborate to improve their professional practice, use post-it notes and place them onto an A3-sized paper with three concentric circles (indicate frequency), to discuss the content, challenges and strategies.
Data analysis
The NetDraw, VennMaker and UCINET software packages (Borgatti 2006) were used to visualize the networks and calculate in-degree (incoming ties), out-degree (outgoing ties), and brokerage roles based on the leaders’ role and site/school. The qualitative findings were analyzed thematically.
Results
Brokerage strategies and models differ based on the needs and responsibilities of individual leaders. Senior leaders seem to have the formal responsibility to liaise with disconnected groups (e.g.year groups) formalizing collaboration, acting also as gatekeepers communicating with community partners. The hierarchical structure of governance hinders the development of vertical relationships between senior and middle leaders.
Implications
The research provides insights regarding how school practitioners can strengthen knowledge brokerage within and beyond school partnerships, and investigate how collaboration in PLN supports school effectiveness and improvement.
Collaborative Learning: Mobilizing Professional Identities In A Professional Learning Network
Heather McPherson, Stephen Peters, Shanmugavalli Narayanan, Yeon Hee Kang
McGill University, Canada
Introduction
In-service, peer-to-peer professional learning and development (PLD) are critical to school improvement. Understanding how teachers collaborate, occupy expert roles, share and receive expertise, and learn from one another is vital for advancing knowledge on workplace learning and organizing collegial learning (Horn & Kane, 2019; Horn & Little, 2010). This presentation explores collaborative PLD among high school science teachers learning in an emergent professional learning network (PLN) to develop inquiry-based teaching practices (Brown & Poortman, 2018; Hargreaves, 2019). We ask: How do participants enact professional identities during collaborative learning? How are professional identities mobilized for peer learning?
Analytical Framework
To answer these questions, we focus on how participants communicated in peer-to-peer sharing interactions. To do this work, teachers enact situational and institutional-specific roles and identities in their talk. By borrowing discourse analytic tools from conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics (Schegloff, 2016; Tannen, 2007) and applying these tools to teacher-to-teacher conversations occurring in collaborative lesson plan development and broader group discussions, we provide a detailed picture of how teachers occupy professional roles, orientate these roles to an emergent understanding of the work of teaching, and leverage them for professional development. By cross-referencing our discourse analysis of peer-to-peer interaction with researcher-led interviews, our analysis provides insights into how teachers constructed their professional identities within a PLN.
Methods
The PLN included eleven participants: three novice teachers, five experienced teachers, the school board science consultant, and one pre-service teacher, all working in a suburban school board in Quebec, Canada. Author 1 is a part-time science at the school board, a co-facilitator and faculty lecturer who acted as a boundary spanner, moving across the school, university, and school board communities, navigating the research-to-practice divide (Bednarek et al., 2018). Author 2 is a facilitator and university lecturer. The research team organized and facilitated eight lesson study and lesson planning workshops from October 2022 to May 2023. Whole group and working group interactions were recorded and transcribed.
Results
Our results focus on exchanges between PLN participants as they developed inquiry-based teaching practices and provided constructive, critical, or supportive but superficial feedback. We examined exchanges between teachers as they commented on each other's video-recorded classroom teaching; we follow teacher interactions and how these interactions demonstrate the face-threat co-incidental with critical peer feedback for both the feedback-receiving and -giving teachers as they navigate their professional competence and politeness norms. Our study examines tensions of practice, with a focus on how teachers navigated developing sophisticated new pedagogies.
Discussion and Conclusion
This paper advances the research on PLNs by analyzing teacher discourse, providing important insights into the PLN experience. We explored teachers' talk as they co-constructed their practice through dialogue and experimentation, occupied professional and expert roles and recognized those of others. This research extends the literature on PLNs, suggesting that teachers' talk during per-to-peer learning highlights the structures that can potentially elevate in situ learning and classroom practice. These insights can inform stakeholders on how teachers learn and enact sophisticated pedagogies during collaborative professional learning in a PLN.
Knowledge Brokers’ Role in Social Media: What Type of Information do they Mobilize across Communities?
Martin Rehm1, Marie Lockton2, Anita Caduff2, Alan J Daly2
1University of Regensburg, Germany; 2University of California, San Diego, USA
Focus of Inquiry
For educational systems to embrace educational innovation, they need to constantly create, access and share new information and resources (Ariyani & Zuhaery, 2021). Taking a social network perspective, we stipulate that social media can contribute to such a process (Authors, 2021; Manca, 2020). Moreover, we argue that knowledge brokers, defined as actors who connect otherwise disconnected people (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021), hold instrumental positions in sharing innovative information. Yet, it has been argued that more research is required to better understand knowledge brokers and the type of information they mobilize (Rycroft-Smith, 2022).
Theoretical/ Conceptual Perspectives
Social Media, such as Twitter, can foster the mobilization of innovative resources (Authors, 2021) and knowledge brokers can mediate this deeply relational mobilization process (Ward, 2017). Drawing on network science (Scott, 2017) and natural language processing (Manning & Schutze, 1999), we introduce a methodological approach that first identifies two types of knowledge brokers (active: being contacted; passive: contacting others) then investigates the content and topics they mobilize within their networks.
Data & Method
Accessing the Twitter API, we used a combination of hashtags (e.g. #education, #teachertwitter, #edutwitter, #edchat, and #edtech) for an initial Twitter data collection. We collected data from April 20, 2023 to May 26, 2023, resulting in a total of 397,415 tweets and 173,963 unique users. First, we conducted social network analyses (SNA), including community detection (De Meo et al., 2011) and betweenness centrality (Abbasi et al., 2012). We categorized knowledge brokers, based on their betweenness and overall centrality scores. We then employed lexicon-based sentiment analyses (Khoo & Johnkhan, 2018) and topic modeling (Xue et al., 2020) to determine the general sentiment and the type of information the two types of knowledge brokers shared.
Findings
Our lexicon-based sentiment analyses revealed statistically significant differences in the sentiment being shared by the two types of brokers. While active brokers exhibited more “positive” sentiment and “anticipation,” passive brokers showed signs of “anger”. The topic modeling added another valuable level to the analyses, as it revealed that passive brokers touched upon different topics (e.g. “donations”) than their active counterparts (e.g. “teacher projects”).
Educational Importance for Practice and Theory
Knowledge brokers are one key solution to mobilize knowledge (Rycroft-Smith, 2022) as they have valuable insights into the communities that they are connecting (Monod-Ansaldi et al., 2019). Moreover, a wide range of educational initiatives have already been launched that actively incorporate knowledge brokers in policy processes (Wollscheid et al., 2019). Our results provide valuable insights for policymakers and educational leaders to better understand knowledge brokers’ types of brokering (active or passive), their topical foci, and the general sentiment surrounding their brokering. These insights can in turn be used to more effectively select the knowledge brokers best suited to disseminate knowledge and resources and to support educational initiatives that strive to further improve schools and provide new and innovative information.
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