This two-day program will address two aspects of the relationship between instructional policy and teachers’ classroom practice: 1) the role of social networks in carrying logics of instruction from the environment into districts, schools, and classroom; and 2) the role of framing in local processes of meaning making. With regards to social networks, we will investigate the ways that policy ideas are carried via social networks from the environment into schools and classrooms. We will investigate features of social networks that make them more or less likely to influence teachers’ classrooms. We will then look at how teachers and others interact with one another to make meaning of new instructional approaches. Drawing on frame analysis, we will investigate how teachers and others come to understand instructional approaches in social interaction, and how that interaction is influenced by relations of status and authority. On both days, we will thoroughly review relevant theories—institutional theory, social network theory, frame analysis—and discuss the affordances and constraints of these different theories for illuminating different aspects of the policy implementation process.
In order to assure capacity in the room we kindly ask you to register your attendance at toril.eggen@ils.uio.no