Speaker
Prof.
Torgny Roxå
(Lund University)
Description
Academic teachers form their conceptions about teaching while interacting with close colleagues inside significant networks. These significant and trustful interactions take place privately, backstage. Hence, teaching will not change unless these significant conversations change. For change in teaching to happen, academic teachers need to talk to new people about teaching and student learning, talk about new things, or talk in new ways, while interacting inside their significant networks. Such change will both signify change and drive change further.
From an organisational perspective it is productive to approximate significant relationships with cluster, weak ties, and strong ties as they are explored in network research. In the organisational meso level, academic teachers form workgroups, disciplinary communities, or other entities, where they interact through strong ties. In these clusters traditions, habits, tacit assumptions, and recurrent practices are formed, cultural features making it appropriate to talk about clusters as microcultures. Between clusters/microcultures information is carried through weak ties. Mark Granovetter, in a seminal article from 1973, coined the phrase the strength of weak ties. Organisational leaders in higher education who wish to improve teaching therefore should pay attention to and strengthen the weak ties carrying information about teaching and learning.
This presentation outlines a perspective on educational development in higher education based on aspects mentioned above.
Primary author
Prof.
Torgny Roxå
(Lund University)
