Educational Research Review 4 (2009) 16–25

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Educational Research Review

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Organizational learning and program renewal in teacher education: Asocio-cultural theory of learning, innovation and change

Charles A. Pecka,∗, Chrysan Galluccia, Tine Sloanb, Ann Lippincottb

a University of Washington, United Statesb University of California, Santa Barbara, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 31 May 2007Received in revised form 26 May 2008Accepted 4 June 2008

Keywords:Teacher educationOrganizational learningChangeInnovationSocio-cultural theory

a b s t r a c t

Pressures for change in the field of teacher education are escalating significantly as part ofsystemic education reform initiatives in a broad spectrum of economically developed anddeveloping nations. Considering these pressures, it is surprising that relatively little the-oretical or empirical analysis of learning and change processes within teacher educationprograms has been undertaken. In this paper, we illustrate some ways in which contempo-rary socio-cultural learning theory may be used as a lens for addressing these issues. Usinga theoretical framework developed by Harré [Harré, R. (1984). Personal being: A theory forindividual psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press], we show how processes ofindividual and collective learning led to changes in a teacher education program observedover an eighteen month period of time. Important innovations in program practice weregenerally found to have their sources in the creative work of individual faculty. Howeverprogram level changes required negotiation of new ideas and practices within small groupsof faculty, and with the larger collective of the program. We conclude that the Harré model,and the socio-cultural learning theories from which it is derived, may offer a useful theoreti-cal framework for interpreting complex social processes underlying organizational renewal,innovation, and change.

© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Escalating pressures for change are evident across a broad spectrum of vocational and professional education fields, asknowledge and education are increasingly viewed as critical resources in competition for power and position in a globalizingworld economy (Billett, 2006a; Boreham, 2002). Since teacher quality is widely viewed as one of the most important factorsaffecting educational outcomes, the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs has become a focal point of concernin many national policy contexts (Blackmore, 2002; Tessema, 2007; Young, Hall, & Clark, 2007). Agendas for change varydramatically, from those related to equity, social justice and diversity (Gay, 2002; Cochran-Smith, 2004) to those whichadvocate wholesale abandonment of university-based programs of teacher education (Podgursky, 2004). Perhaps the onlytruly solid ground of agreement across these agendas is the need for change.

Of course, critiques and related admonitions for change in teacher education are hardly a new phenomenon (Conant,1963; Sarason, 1993). For example, Goodlad and his colleagues (Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990) documented a varietyof pervasive and systemic problems in a national sample of teacher education programs. These included disconnectionfrom the general academic life of the university, fractionated and incoherent curricula, weak and ambivalent relationshipswith the public school system, and chronic inadequacies in funding. Contemporary critiques raise many of the same issues(Levine, 2006). However, what is new in contemporary public talk about teacher education is the level of political attention

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 206 616 1176.E-mail address: capeck@u.washington.edu (C.A. Peck).

1747-938X/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.edurev.2008.06.001

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these programs are receiving, as the wave of high stakes accountability policies which have dominated primary and sec-ondary education for the past decade enters the arenas of higher education and teacher preparation (Bales, 2006; Leveille,2005).

In the context of both contemporary and historical pressures, it is surprising that the process of change itself has receivedrelatively little theoretical or empirical study in the field of teacher education. The relatively few existing reports of systematicorganizational change efforts provide valuable demonstrations that substantive programmatic change may be achieved insome cases (Cochran-Smith et al., 1999; Akmal & Miller, 2003). However, the essentially descriptive and atheoretical nature ofthese accounts means that they contribute in only a limited way to development of a knowledge base about organizationalchange in these programs. There is a clear and pressing need for more systematic theoretical and empirical work thatcontributes to our understanding of processes of organizational change in teacher education, and which might be used as afoundation for program renewal efforts.

This kind of work could be usefully situated in a variety of research traditions focused on educational change, includingthose drawn from the fields of sociology (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), political science (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987), or organi-zation science (Huber, 1991). Our purpose here is to propose a theoretical framework for examining programmatic renewaland change in teacher education derived from another perspective—that of contemporary socio-cultural learning theory(Boreham & Morgan, 2004; Brown & Duguid, 1991). We draw on ethnographic data collected in one teacher education pro-gram undergoing significant reform to illustrate how this framework may be used to understand individual and collectivelearning processes as they contribute to organizational change.

1. Educational renewal and change as problems of learning

The notion of treating the challenges of education reform and program renewal as problems of learning has considerableappeal (Hubbard, Mehan, & Stein, 2006; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). This lens foregrounds the agency of faculty andfaculty leaders as primary “authors” of the change process, and positions both the disciplinary knowledge and the localpractical knowledge of faculty as resources for innovation (Brown & Duguid, 1991). It also raises a variety of substantivequestions about the nature of learning processes related to organizational change (Argyris & Schön, 1996): How is learningto be understood in relation to program innovation, renewal, and change? If both individual and collective learning processesare important, how are these related to one another? How can individual and organizational learning processes be designed,guided and supported in ways that contribute to program renewal?

Although these kinds of questions have received little attention in the field of teacher education, interests in connectionsbetween learning and organizational change have an extensive history in other fields (Argyris & Schön, 1978; March & Simon,1958; Senge, 1990; Weick & Westly, 1996). Indeed, the notion that organizations can “learn”, or that it is possible to createsuch a thing as a “learning organization” has been one of the most popular, and popularized, notions in the fields of businessand education over the past two decades (Senge, 1990). Although a comprehensive review of research in this area is beyondthe scope of our purposes here (see Easterby-Smith, 1997; Gherardi & Nicolini, 2001; Huber, 1991; Levitt & March, 1988),several tensions which have been thematic to this literature are relevant to the present discussion. We examine three ofthese tensions below, and situate our present investigation in each.

The first has to do with what has been characterized “normative” vs. “empirical” perspectives on organizational learn-ing and change (Argyris & Schön, 1996; Easterby-Smith, Snell, & Gherardi, 1998; Robinson, 2001). Normative approachesare conceptualized as focusing primarily on strategies and prescriptions for organizational improvement—generally takingup questions related to the goal of creating “the learning organization” (Garvin, 1993; Senge, 1990). Empirical approachesare conceptualized as those focused on description and analysis of organizational learning processes—including some per-spectives which are agnostic about the value of such learning (Vince, 2001), or even skeptical regarding its empiricalsubstance (Fenwick, 2001; Simon, 1991). While noting the general divergence of the normative and empirical literatureson organizational learning, Robinson (2001) has observed that there also are examples of empirical work, including theseminal work of Argyris and Schön (1978, 1996), which have been designed expressly for the purposes of organizationalimprovement. Consistent with this approach, our efforts in the present paper represent an attempt to utilize empiricaldescription of learning processes within an organization as a resource for strategic organizational change and improvementof practice.

A second thematic tension in the literature on organizational learning has to do with varying conceptualizations of therole of the individual and the collective(s) as these contribute to processes of learning, development and change at theorganizational level (Lehesvirta, 2004). In one sense, questions related to the nature and direction of influences betweenthe individual and society may be recognized as the familiar ground of a great deal of contemporary social theory (Bahktin,1981; Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978). In the literatureon organizational learning, interests in the relationship between individual and collective processes of learning and changehave been expressed in the following kinds of questions: in what sense do ‘organizations’ learn?; to what extent, andthrough what processes, does individual learning affect the organization?; to what extent, and through what processes,do the characteristics of organizations affect individual learning? In considering these questions, we have taken note of asignificant convergence of perspectives grounded in sociology (Giddens, 1984; Sewell, 1992), anthropology (Lave, 1988) andpsychology (Vygotsky, 1978) toward models which conceptualize the relationship between individual and collective learningand change as transactional and co-evolutionary, in the sense that changes in one constitute resources and conditions for

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changes in the other (Boreham & Morgan, 2004; Billett, 2006b). These kinds of transactional models are particularly usefulfor resolving conceptual paradoxes and dilemmas arising from interpretations that privilege either individual or collectivefactors underlying the processes of learning and change.

A third tension reflected in the literature on organizational learning mirrors controversies in broader fields of con-temporary learning theory regarding the value of “acquisition” versus “participation” metaphors for understanding thelearning process (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1997; Greeno, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this context a focus on acqui-sition refers generally to interests in the process and trajectory through which cognitive skills, and underlying mentalprocesses and representations, develop in individual learners (Anderson et al., 1997). The acquisition metaphor is extendedin the literature on organizational learning in the form of concepts such as organizational “search”, “retrieval”, and “sort”,etc. (Honig, in press; Huber, 1991). Conversely, the “participation” metaphor favored by many socio-cultural theoristsforegrounds the ways in which learning may be understood as a socially negotiated process of change in the ways indi-viduals participate in cultural practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, Baker-Sennet, Lacasa, & Goldsmith, 1995). Recenttheoretical work on organizational learning develops this analytic view through constructs such as “relational prac-tices” (Boreham & Morgan, 2004), “expansive learning” (Engeström, 1987, 2001) and “communities of practice” (Wenger,1998).

An important point to be underscored here is that the participation metaphor reflects a view of learning and changeas essentially isomorphic processes involving the social negotiation of meaning (Lave, 1993). Our somewhat interchange-able use of the terms “learning” and “change” throughout the present article reflects this dualistic interpretation of theirrelationship—the sense in which they may be viewed as both causes and consequences of each other. At the same time, thisperspective is useful to our practical interests in the ways in which learning and change are achieved in teacher educationprograms through concrete social transactions that take place between groups and individuals as they develop new ways ofdoing things together.

While organizational learning in teacher education programs has not been studied from this socio-cultural perspec-tive, studies of learning and change in other organizational contexts illustrate the value of such an approach. For example,Engeström (1995, 2001) has carried out an extensive line of research using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (Cole &Engeström, 1993) as a framework for analyzing learning and change in community medical clinics. This framework con-ceptualizes organizational (“expansive”) learning to be shaped by a complex web of relationships between individual andcollective social practices, including organizational rules and policies, division of labor, individual and collective goals, andintellectual and material resources (tools) for action. A significant product of this line of research has been development ofan intervention methodology for facilitating organizational change via carefully scaffolded renegotiation of the meaningsand practices of both individuals and groups within and across organizations.

In another line of inquiry drawing on a similar set of core assumptions about the importance of organizational structures,policies and practices as these affect individual and collective learning, Popper and Lipshutz (1998; Lipshutz & Popper, 2000)have studied organizational learning processes in hospital and military organizations. Their work has clarified the importanceof institutional practices they term “organizational learning mechanisms” (OLM) as these affect individual and collectivelearning and change in the organizations they studied. For example, in observing the work of Israeli fighter pilots, Popper andLipshitz (1998) found that regular post-combat briefing sessions were a powerful context in which individual pilots learnedfrom analyzing their successes and failures on flight missions, and that pilots regularly changed their collective practicebased on these analyses. In contrast, Popper and Lipshitz observed that other institutional practices ostensibly designed topromote learning (often those designed by “trainers” or administrators not directly involved in day to day practice) wereignored by practitioners. The authors concluded that variations in the quality of OLMs present in the organizations theystudied accounted for important differences in the extent to which individual and collective practice changed as a functionof experience.

A third example of how theories of learning have been utilized to analyze organizational learning and change is drawnfrom the strategic management literature in business. Crosson and Bedrow (2003) carried out a detailed study of the processof organizational renewal undertaken by the Canadian Postal Corporation (CPC). These researchers used a theoretical modelof organizational learning as an analytic framework for interpreting interview, archival and observation data collected overthe period of two years. They conceptualized the relationship between individual and collective learning in terms of a fourstage process of intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing knowledge. Crosson and Bedrow’s analysis providesan elegant conceptualization of the respective roles of individual and collective learning leading to the construction of neworganizational knowledge, as well as an empirical account of related organizational change. Their framework is, however,much less explicit about the nature of organizational practices which support the learning process.

Taken together, these studies illustrate some ways in which socio-cultural theories may be useful in resolving someof the conceptual tensions reflected in the literature on organizational learning. While focusing variously on structuraldimensions of the organizations as “activity systems” (Engeström, 2001), organizational practices affecting opportunitiesto learn (Lipshutz & Popper, 2000), and the relationships between individual and collective learning processes (Crosson &Bedrow, 2003), these studies share an important set of assumptions regarding the inseparability of individual and socialaspects of learning. Engeström (2001) has observed that much of the practical value of this general view will be achievedonly through research which offers concrete description of social processes through which individual and collective learningand change are negotiated. We present a framework for describing these processes below, and illustrate its application toanalysis of learning and change in a program of teacher education.

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Fig. 1. The “Vygotsky Space”.

2. Conceptual framework

We draw upon a theoretical framework developed by Harré (1984) to organize our analysis of processes of organizationallearning and change in teacher education. The Harré model is derived explicitly from the socio-cultural learning theoryof Vygotsky (1978). As such, the core assumptions of the model emphasize the functional interdependence of individualand collective learning processes, and include particular attention to the process of “mediation” of learning through theappropriation and transformation of conceptual and material tools. Prior uses of this framework, termed the “VygotskySpace” (Gavelek & Raphael, 1996; McVee, Dunsmore, & Gavelek, 2005), have focused on analysis of the ways in whichindividual learning and development is constructed through a process of internalization and transformation of cultural toolsas individuals participate in social practice (Herrenkohl & Wertsch, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978). Here we use the framework as aheuristic model for exploring some of the ways in which organizational change is constructed out of processes of individualand collective learning (Gallucci, in press).

The “Vygotsky Space” represents individual and collective learning in terms of changing relations between two contex-tual parameters of social activity. The first of these distinguishes between individual and collective activities; the seconddistinguishes public and private activity contexts (see Fig. 1, adapted from Harré, 1984; McVee et al., 2005). The interactionsbetween these dimensions are conceptualized as four phases of a process through which cultural practices are taken up byindividuals (appropriation), adapted and changed in the context of individual needs and uses (transformation), then exter-nalized (publication) in ways that may be negotiated and eventually taken up by others (conventionalization). This may beviewed as a kind of Lamarckian co-evolutionary process—in the sense that learning and change develop in a cumulative waythrough transactions between individual and collective dimensions of practice.

We used the Harré framework to analyze individual and organizational learning processes observed over a period of 18months in a teacher education program undergoing substantive renewal and change. With regard to the tensions articulatedearlier in the literature on organizational learning, our analysis is intended to contribute both to improved understand-ing of how organizations such as teacher education programs may be said to “learn”, and to simultaneously contribute topractitioners’ efforts to improve organizational learning capacity and outcomes (Argyris & Schön, 1996).

3. Organizational learning and change in teacher education: a case illustration

The case data we draw on here were collected as part of an extensive process of inquiry and renewal carried out in amoderately sized teacher education program situated in a mid-sized research intensive university in the United States. Theprogram change and renewal process was undertaken as a strategic response to state policy initiatives requiring that teachereducation programs adopt a new set of outcome standards (“Teacher Performance Expectations”—referred to as “TPEs”), aswell as a related set of extensive teacher performance assessments (TPAs), as part of a broader state accountability initiative.We utilized methods of qualitative case study research as described by Yin (2003), Merriam (1998) and others to constructa descriptive account of the events and outcomes of program change process which was undertaken in response to thesenew policies. This account was based on several triangulated sources of data, including participant observations, repeatedinterviews with key participant/informants, written artifacts of faculty and student work, and open-ended questionnairesrelated to faculty and student perceptions and experiences with the change process.

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We developed the analysis reported here to evaluate the extent to which the Harré framework was useful in makingindividual and collective learning processes that took place during the renewal work more explicit and visible. To do this,we read through the entire data corpus and identified text segments that referred to specific programmatic changes whichhad emerged over the period of renewal. We evaluated each “change story” for the robustness of its documentation: to whatextent was the account documented across multiple data sources and informants? To what extent could each change storybe traced in our data from the inception of new ideas and practices to program level change? This preliminary analysisyielded five well-documented accounts of program change which could be traced through multiple contexts in which theywere negotiated over the 18-month period of our study. These included changes in course content, changes in courseworkassignments and projects, changes in supervision practice, articulation of new program outcomes, and development of anew program-wide lesson planning format. Numerous other examples of change were evident in our data, but were notdocumented richly enough over time to allow us to evaluate the extent to which they could be satisfactorily described usingthis theoretical framework.

Observation and interview data showed how new ideas and policies were introduced in the program, interpreted byindividual faculty, transformed in the context of negotiations that took place in small faculty work groups and, ultimately,adopted in program meetings that served as contexts for establishment of new program wide practices. We characterizedthe regularities we observed in the contexts and activities in which individual and collective learning and change werenegotiated as Program Work (Quadrant I), Home Work (Quadrant II), Studio Work (Quadrant III), and Group Work (QuadrantIV). We describe each of these activity contexts below and illustrate its function in the program renewal process.

3.1. Quadrant I: program work

Many cycles of individual and collective learning we observed in the program began with some kind of “disturbance”of organizational equilibrium (Engeström, 1987). A significant disturbance involved the implementation of the set of newstate policies—the Teaching Performance Assessment requirements. These were introduced via a set of program meetingsin which the requirements of the policies, and their potential challenges for implementation, were presented and discussedby program faculty and staff. The new policies effectively constituted a new set of ideal and material program conventions,represented within Quadrant I in the Vygotsky space. While some faculty had been aware of the impending policy changes, formost these meetings represented their first serious engagement with the tasks of implementation. Faculty were particularlyconcerned with the potential impacts of the new policies on the students and on the program:

“(the director) had given me the TPE’s a long time ago . . . but then when we got the actual tasks last year, I guess that’swhen I really started to deal with them. Having conversations with student teachers made a huge difference in termsof “oh, this is really what its going to look like”.

The introduction of new state policies was by no means the only event we observed which disturbed the equilibrium ofprogram practice. For example, at several points in the renewal process new types of student outcome data were introducedwhich challenged faculty assumptions about the efficacy of their own practice. These data constituted the type of “surprise”observed by Argyris and Schön (1996), which generated new opportunities for individual and organizational learning.

3.2. Quadrant II: home work

New policies and (later) data introduced at program meetings were initially interpreted by individual faculty and staffin terms of their implications for their individual practice. In the context of the TPA policies, we understood this process asone in which faculty came to internalize ideas and practices from the new policy mandates as they used these as new toolsfor interpreting their existing practice (Vygotsky, 1978). This typically took the form of reviewing existing course syllabi,assignments and evaluation instruments to identify correspondence between the new mandates and existing practice. Acomment we often heard in interviews which reflected this process was something like “Oh, I am doing that already”.Certainly, many faculty did not pursue the issue more substantively than this. However, in some cases, individual courseinstructors undertook a careful process of interpreting the concepts and practices outlined in the TPA policies in terms oftheir alignment with existing program structures and course curricula. One instructor described how she made sense of thenew policies:

“I sat down and I looked at everything I knew about the program and said ‘this is where I think this might fit, givenwhat I know’. ‘I took all my courses and I went though and I highlighted, I took each one and highlighted, okay, here’swhere I see evidence of that, here’s the data I want to collect to know about this”.

This kind of analysis formed the context for further learning, and began to clarify the needs for innovation and change.

3.3. Quadrant III: studio work

As described above, faculty attempts to appropriate the new ideal and material tools proscribed by the new state policiesfrequently created “disturbances” in existing practice (Engeström, 1987). Some of these led to insights about needs forprogram improvement: “It made me realize, like, wow, where is some of this stuff . . . so how the heck are we gonna make

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sure? What is gonna be our evidence?” A frequently voiced concern had to do with the challenges faculty recognized forimplementing the complicated and demanding new performance assessment tasks in a fashion that made sense to students:

“And you know (the students) are frustrated too. This last week they apparently learned about TPA Task I in one class,and its supposed to be implemented in another class . . . and nobody could tell them . . . and, so they were just like“what???”

In these contexts, faculty worked to resolve the tensions they experienced by reinterpreting both the concepts andpractices required by the new policies, and also those within their existing coursework and fieldwork. These situationsconstituted major sites for individual innovation and learning—sites for transformation of both the new policies and existingideas and practices. We chose the term “studio work” to describe the process whereby individual faculty members resolvedthese tensions by developing new conceptual and material tools for implementing the new policies. These consisted ofnew course structures, assignments and program procedures which allowed them to implement the new state policies inways they viewed as consistent with local program values and strengths. For example, Susan, a literacy methods instructor,describes how she developed a new approach for evaluating lesson plans which made the requirements of the TPA morevisible to students:

“So I basically made a rubric (for the lesson design frame). I can’t tell you how many hours it took me to create thatrubric, so that it would show (the students), because they wanted to know where they stood in relation to each of thecomponents”

Another faculty member described how he adopted his course to respond to the new policy demands, as well has hisemerging understanding of how the program was evolving has a whole in the context of the new policies:

“We started out with the idea of trying to re-conceptualize how the course would be taught with reference to the TPAs.This was before the program had really made any decisions. . .but I could sense kind of where things were going to goand I made changes in emphasis and content I thought would be consistent with where TEP would ultimately go”.

We came to recognize these kinds of faculty and staff actions as a major site of individual innovation, learning and changein the program renewal process.

3.4. Quadrant IV: group work

In some cases, innovations remained at the level of individual practice. However, new ideas and practices were very oftenbrought forward by individual faculty or staff members for discussion with other colleagues in ways that led to broadercollaboration and adoption. The significant shift which carried innovations from private to public contexts is illustrated bySusan’s account of how she shared a model she was developing for lesson plan evaluation with a colleague:

“I had a conversation with Angela, and we re-arranged (the rubric), and then I sent everything to her to see if she couldsee the distinctions in each of the categories: ‘emerging, applying, practicing and integrating’. Then I gave it to (thestudents) this week.”

Angela described a closely related example of how her individual insights and innovations moved into public view viacollegial dialogue and discussion:

“There were some aspects of the TPA where I remember noting (the notes I keep when I’m teaching a class) that ‘this isa good idea’, and then talking with Susan about that ‘there’s this section in the TPA and we should consider embeddingsomething about that in the lesson design frame, because I think its something good’.”

These informal groups of faculty or staff often shared responsibility for some specific aspect of the program, and consti-tuted what Wenger (1998) has described as a “community of practice”. Examples of communities of practice we observedin the present study included a small group of faculty and doctoral level teaching assistants who shared responsibility fortwo sections of a course on English Language Learners, and the group of experienced classroom teachers who served as fieldsupervisors for student teachers. New ideas and proposals for changes in collective practice were deliberated in these groups,and proposals were typically modified on the basis of these discussions. For example, a group of field supervisors in theelementary program considered a proposal for using a new syllabus for fieldwork brought forward by one of the members ofthe group (formerly each supervisor had devised a curriculum for their “own” student teachers, based on a relatively looselyorganized set of concepts from program standards). The inception of the new syllabus was located in a single supervisor’sinterpretation of the implications of the new state policies for supervision practice. However, the new ideas and strategiesshe developed and negotiated with her colleagues for how the policies might be taken up by the group effectively movedthis individual learning to the collective arena.

We observed that not all innovations developed, deliberated, and piloted through this process of learning and innovationwere adopted and consolidated over time, or at larger collective levels of program organization. Some innovations remainedappropriately situated in specific arenas of program practice. However, our data show how the cycle of innovation andlearning did sometimes result in widespread and institutionalized change, which in turn functioned as a new set of programwide conventions. For example, the changes in the lesson plan framework initially proposed and developed by Susan and

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Angela, and subsequently discussed by groups of program faculty and staff, were later presented for program wide adoption.Faculty described how the new state policies had been appropriated, transformed through local learning and innovation,and then adopted as new program wide policy and practice:

“We adopted a generic lesson plan frame for the whole program that is actually way above and beyond anything thatthe TPAs ask for. It grew out of work that Susan and I had done over several years. We would look at student lessonplans, realize what was missing, and add framing questions to address that. So (the faculty) did a generic lesson plan intheir methods course, and those were somewhat uniform because of the lesson design frame the program adopted.”

The new lesson plan framework then constituted a new set of program conventions (Quadrant I) to be appropriated byindividual faculty:

“We have had to decide (as a program) that we are going to have a common lesson planning framework that isused throughout the program that systematically requires students to attend to, in both assessment, instruction andevaluation phases of the instructional cycle, to the needs of kids who are learning English, and also to kids withidentified special education needs. So now you pick up a lesson plan in any methods course in the program and you’llsee that there is attention to ELL kids and special ed kids.”

The adoption of this new set of program conventions represented the completion of one cycle of organizational learningand change, and also the beginning of another.

3.5. New cycles of learning, innovation and change

In some cases, we were able to trace the ways in which newly adopted innovations at the program level generatedadditional cycles of individual and organizational learning. For example, two TEP instructors described how they had takenup the new lesson design frame (Quadrant I) and how it had impacted their practice (Quadrant II), and how they subsequentlydeveloped new experiences and assignments for their course (Quadrants III and IV):

“(the new lesson design frame) was very informative . . . we had always had TEP students examine (their) students’mathematical errors, so for the student teachers to now do that with English language learners and kids with specialeducation needs was very informative. I think it helped them look a little bit more critically at their planning. I thinkwe spent more time talking about that. We gave them models for assessment, a couple of video tapes of teachersdoing individual assessments . . . so I think we were a little be more organized with that and we gave them a lot ofinformation to think about.”

These new cycles of innovation illustrate the reflexive and transactional nature of the relationship between organizationaland individual change, as well as what Engeström (2001) has termed “expansive” cycles of learning in organizational settings.

4. Discussion

We have described some ways in which program renewal and organizational change in teacher education may be viewedthrough the lens of socio-cultural learning theory. Using Harré’s (1984) conceptual framework, we used interview, obser-vation and archival evidence from a program undergoing significant renewal to illustrate how programmatic changes wereconstructed out of individual ideas and innovations, how these were subsequently negotiated among members of the pro-gram, and, in some cases, adopted as collective policy and practice. The value of such a perspective lies in the ways in whichit concretizes the functional relationships between individual and collective dimensions of learning and innovation, andshows how these aggregate to organizational change. Our analysis of specific social transactions underlying the processes oforganizational learning is responsive to concerns expressed in the literature regarding the need for more explicit descriptionof how exactly the processes of organizational learning take place (e.g., Engeström, 2001). Our analysis thus complimentsstructural accounts of organizational learning within and across “activity systems” (e.g., Engeström, 1987, 2001) by illus-trating some of the specific kinds of participatory practices which may mediate learning and change in teacher educationprograms.

The significance of the present analysis may also be interpreted in the context of the persistent tensions noted earlierin the broader literature on organizational learning. The tensions often noted between normative and empirical researchon organizational learning are negotiated here through focus on concrete descriptions of specific social processes relatedto learning and change. That is, the Harré framework allowed us to show how organizational learning and change weobserved might be understood as a process in which individuals and (various) groups produced new ideas and practicesthrough participation in specific kinds of social contexts and activities. Such an analysis contributes usefully to both ourtheoretical and empirical understanding of how change is achieved, and to our practical interests in improving opportunitiesfor organizational learning.

Among the practical implications of this analysis, one of the most important has to do with the critical role we observedlocal knowledge of practice to play in the innovation and change process (Brown & Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In each ofthe significant programmatic changes we documented, the locus of innovations in practice could be traced to the insightsand initiative of individual faculty or staff members. It is important to distinguish this finding from the commonplace notion

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of fostering “ownership”, and related ideas about securing “buy-in” to administrative agendas for change. The point we aremaking here is that the primary resources for innovations which successfully engaged both the problems of implementingthe new state policies and also opportunities for program improvement resided in the contextualized knowledge of practicethat faculty and staff possessed. At the same time, our analysis makes the role the collective (that is, faculty, staff andadministration) equally visible as an essential dimension of the organizational learning and change process. That is, while thesources of new ideas and innovations were consistently traced to individuals; it was only through collective negotiation andaction that programmatic change was achieved. We interpret this finding to imply that strategies for organizational changemust be designed with careful attention to the role that local knowledge plays as a resource for learning and innovation.

A closely related implication has to do with the challenges of engaging faculty motivation for renewal and change. Socio-cultural theories, which underscore the functional relationships between individual and collective dimensions of learningand change, suggest also that motivation is likely to be affected by dynamics operating at both the individual and collectivelevel (Hickey & Zuiker, 2005; Miettinen, 2005). We observed that individual faculty action was often driven by the need tosolve problems related to individual practice raised by the new policies. However, resolving individual problems, and takingup opportunities for improvement and renewal at the individual level, often surfaced issues that could only be addressedeffectively through collective action (Lehesvirta, 2004). Thus, faculty motivation for engaging the process of change appearedto be related, not only to their individual sense of efficacy and agency, but to their sense of the possibilities for change at thecollective level (Billett, 2006a). This suggests that it is important that the pathways through which collective change may benegotiated be made transparent and accessible. This appeared to be particularly critical to motivating the engagement of staffmembers, such as field supervisors, who perceived their ideas to often be ignored in program level conversations. Motivatingfaculty and staff to undertake the arduous process of program renewal and change may be dependent on establishing theboth expectation that their individual ideas could be heard and valued, and also the expectation that the program wouldchange in response to (at least some of) those ideas.

The analysis of organizational learning and change we present here also has a number of implications for strategicleadership of renewal work. Our data showed that many of the most powerful processes of learning and innovation took placeoutside of the view of administrative leadership, as these were situated in informal professional and personal relationshipsand communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in which program leaders did not take part. This finding suggests that importantresources for organizational learning may not be readily observable by program administrators and leaders who are notparticipating directly in these communities of practice. Learning to look for and recognize these social contexts of innovation,and support them, may be an important leadership strategy. In general, our analysis suggests that developing organizationalpolicies and practices which vest substantive power and authority in faculty/staff leaders, as well as informal communitiesof practice, is an important strategy for accessing the power of local practical knowledge as a resource for renewal.

4.1. Limitations and future directions

Several limitations to our analysis should be made explicit. Perhaps the most important of these is the manifestly positiveand productive nature of individual and collective learning processes we have used as contexts for our analysis. Learning andchange are not inherently positive, of course (Argyris & Schön, 1996). Although we chose to focus on what we considered tobe useful and productive examples of individual and organizational learning in the context of pressures for change in teachereducations programs, the underlying theoretical model of learning and change could be usefully employed to examineinnovations intended to achieve a wide variety of goals, including those which contest the values and initiatives of policymakers. Further investigation of the dynamics of leadership, control and resistance would be valuable, including thoseinvolved in organizational responses to change initiatives in higher education.

Our analysis also did not engage important issues about power dynamics that operated between program members, andthe ways in which these dynamics affected both individual and collective learning (Vince, 2001). The contexts in whichpower and voice could (and should) be the focus of analysis include those influencing which faculty and staff members wereexpected to be the sources of innovation, and whose innovations were most readily taken up for collective negotiation andadoption a the program level. The fact that many individuals from relatively marginalized groups within the TEP community(such as field supervisors) commented on “seeing the whole program for the first time”, suggests that issues of power andvoice in teacher education renewal processes, and in organizational learning processes more generally, are worthy of morefocused attention than we offer here.

We undertook the present analysis with the intention of investigating the utility of the Harré (1984) model as a tool formaking the processes of individual and organizational learning and change more visible in the program renewal process westudied. While we are encouraged by our findings, we are well aware that our focused analysis may well have framed otherpotentially important learning processes out of view. One clear example of this is that we did not systematically analyzeexamples of learning and change that took place at the level of individual practice, but which were not subsequently takenup at the collective level. We did find some evidence of these kinds of processes in our data, and we believe they merit morefocused study.

Our concluding comments summarize arguments for the relevance of socio-cultural learning theory as an approach tomaking sense of the idea of “organizational learning”. The predominance of theoretical and empirical work derived fromVygotsky and other socio-cultural learning theorists (including previous uses of the Vygotsky Space) has focused on under-standing the social origins of individual development. As Engeström (2001) and others have previously suggested, this focus

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has overlooked much of the heuristic potential of those aspects of Vygotsky’s theoretical model which locate the sourcesof collective change in the innovations and inventions of individuals. The value of this perspective for understanding andsupporting renewal efforts in teacher education may be recognized in the way it illustrates how processes of organizationallearning, innovation and change may be empirically related to specific kinds of social transactions that take place betweenindividuals, communities of practice and larger organizational collectives. More generally, we believe the present analysiscontributes to the broader literature on organizational learning by illustrating some ways in which socio-cultural theorymay be a useful tool for addressing some of the conceptual and practical problems that have accompanied the extension ofthe idea of learning into the contexts of organizational change.

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