A Conceptual Framework:
Dissemination as a Collaborative Change System
Change cannot occur until stakeholders personally commit to change.
Therefore, I have developed a conceptual framework to assist us in
developing such commitment, a framework from which a National
Educational Dissemination System (NEDS) could be designed. The
suggested model is intended to form the first thread for discussion
over Dissmn8, anticipating as an outcome a collaboratively developed
NEDS model about which commitment can be gained. Dissmn8 is NCRVE's
new listserv focusing on Dissemination issues. See the end of this
article, for information on how to join.
What has become clear in studies of educational innovation is that all
professionals create working knowledge that they use when practicing
their profession. Simply put, researchers, teachers, policymakers all
generate a knowledge base for themselves premised on their experience
with knowlege generated by others assimilated into it. This is to
say, professional communities, such as teaching or researching, use
knowledge generated from outside themselves by first transforming it
into working knowledge through the outside knowledge's interaction
with the varying processes used by the specific community. Examples
of such processes are teaching, administering, managing, and
researching. Thus, all communities involved in the education
enterprise are knowledge producers, knowledge transfer agents, and
knowledge users. Therefore, the proposed NEDS, designed as a
principled collaborative change system, will consciously, with intent
and cohesiveness, views all stakeholders as expert in the production,
transfer, and use of knowledge. A NEDS acts as a change agent by
bringing the actors together and establishing the processes that
recognize how knowledge that effects change is--in
reality--constructed throughout its history of production, transfer,
and use.
We view a NEDS as a "principled" collaborative change system premised
upon the overriding principle that a person's change in behavior--not
the transmission of tangible outcomes per se--is the primary goal of
the system.
Defining "Principled" Collaborative Change
A "principled" collaborative change system is organized around four
principles:
- building and maintaining continuous communications from research
phases through implementation phases among all actors in the
production, transfer, and use of knowledge
- building and maintaining social networks as compared to
concentrating on developing the capacity to produce and transmit
tangible outcomes
- building and maintaining a collaborative change planning and
implementation strategy which accounts for transfer as a developmental
process moving with patience and purpose from knowledge which enables
potential users to commit to change to knowledge which enables them to
implement best policy/practice
- building and maintaining multiple, simultaneous strategies because
of the importance of redundancy in a system which focuses on persons,
recognizing that these persons and the groups to which they belong
change at different rates, times, ways, and so on
Thus, the NEDS strikes a balance among user-driven responsiveness,
targeted dissemination, and social networking, organizing itself
around three basic, interacting, and mutually reinforcing functions:
- knowledge distribution (one-way distributing of knowledge, as
through newsletters)
- knowledge acquisition (assisting in the accessing of knowledge, for
example, a school-to-work resources database)
- knowledge collaboration (multi-way flowing of knowledge, as with
electronic discussion groups)
Each of these components uses a varying blend of several approaches to
accomplish its tasks. Such techniques include database development
and use, information brokering, publications, marketing/promotion,
direct interpersonal linkages, and electronic communications.
An example of how such an integrated system operates is NCRVE's
Dissemination Program. For example, multiple, simultaneous strategies
are used by the program staff, introducing necessary redundancy into
the program's marketing initiatives. A new NCRVE publication is
simultaneously marketed through our newsletter; electronic resources
such as NCRVE's World Wide Web server, gopher server, Internet
discussion groups and bulletin board systems, conference display
booths, targeted marketing flyers and presentations.
A NEDS is an integral part of the national educational infrastructure,
offering to its constituencies a consistent, reliable method of
translating and brokering R&D-based knowledge, practitioner-based
knowledge, and policy-based knowledge in ways useful to and usable by
these persons. The activities of the NEDS encourage the development
of social networks among all stakeholders, again, so that knowledge is
distributed and exchanged in useful, usable ways with the ultimate
goal of changing persons' behaviors.
All interested persons are invited to join the conversation:
vocational and general education, K12 and postsecondary, all three
levels of government, associations, and their affiliates.
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