Lynne Keevers

Organizing practices of reflection: A practice-based study

This article extends debates of how organizing practices of reflexivity and collective mindfulness are encouraged and sustained for learning, critique and change. We present, in a practice-based study, a fourfold framework of anticipatory, deliberative, organizing and critically reflexive practices. Our empirical study illustrates how these multiple forms of reflexive practice can support and co-shape one another so that knowing what to do next emerges in the midst of practice. Our analysis demonstrates the value of going beyond the optical metaphor of reflection to that of critical reflexivity and the metaphor of diffraction. This approach extends understandings of reflective practice in ways that foreground entanglement, co-production and the relational qualities of practice. Diffraction encourages managers and practitioners to not only reflect on what has been done but to also map the effects of their practices and interventions. This orientation assists them to notice the impact of their actions and better understand the complexities of organized reflection-in-action.

Made to Measure: Taming Practices with Results-based Accountability

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a three-year participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of material-discursive practices, is part of the performance measuring apparatus creating differences that include some things and exclude others. We articulate some of the organizing practices of social justice in a locally-based community organization, follow their translation into RBA planning practices and then return to analyse the introduction of RBA practices into the daily work of an organization. In this way, we demonstrate how situated and ongoing practices begin to unravel through intra-action with RBA boundary-making practices and its redrawn relations of accountability.

‘I like the people I work with. Maybe I’ll get to meet them in person one day’: teaching and learning practice development with transnational teaching teams

Significant changes have occurred in the international education landscape driven by the need for access to higher education in developing countries. One response to this situation has been the provision of higher education in the developing country via partnership arrangements with overseas institutions. Rapid growth in transnational programmes has resulted in many opportunities for nations seeking to build their capacity, for institutions and for staff and student learning, as well as significant challenges. This research contributes to addressing some of these challenges by focusing attention on teaching and learning practice development with transnational teaching teams. This paper is grounded empirically in an international collaboration between three Australian, one Malaysian and one Vietnamese university. Employing a practice-based approach using multi-site participatory action research, the researchers investigated the professional development needs of transnational teaching teams and their experience working in transnational programmes. The study suggests that for professional development to be effective in transnational education it needs to be collaboratively designed and negotiated, context-sensitive and specific, practice-based and involve teams engaging and learning together in their daily work contexts. Such an approach harnesses the diversity of transnational teaching teams and enhances dialogue and relationships amongst team members.

Food and music matters: Affective relations and practices in social justice organizations

In this article, we focus on the organizing practices of a community-based, not-for-profit, social justice organization. We investigate how organizational participants interweave bundles of practices involving food and music to choreograph the affective relations that bring forth a sense of belonging, participation, recognition and respect between diverse people, thereby enacting social justice. This article examines the everyday, organizing practices associated with food and music and shows how not only are food and music excellent entrances to understanding organizational practices but they are also instrumental in constituting and reconstituting the performance of social justice. In this way, our article brings attention to the dimensions of knowing which are not primarily about representing but about affecting. In particular, practices of respect, recognition and belonging are rendered communicable across the boundaries of difference, dependency and inequality, forming platforms for solidarity and the understanding of differences. The article illustrates how organizing practices involving food and music play important roles in creating the conditions of possibility for diverse people to work collaboratively and respectfully together. We contend that the lived experience of organization cannot be understood without attentiveness to affect and affective relations.

Leading the way: changing the focus from teaching to learning in large subjects with limited budgets

To lead positive change in the teaching practice of teams that service large numbers of diverse students from multiple degree programs provides many challenges. The primary aim of this study was to provide a clear framework on which to plan the process of change that can be utilized by academic departments sector wide. Barriers to change were reduced by adapting and utilizing Kotters principals of change specifically by creating a sense of urgency and defining a clear goal designed to address the problem. Changing attitudes involved training staff in new teaching and learning approaches and strategies, and creating a collaborative, supportive team‐based teaching environment within which the planned changes could be implemented and evaluated. As a result senior academics are now directly involved in delivering sections of the face‐to‐face teaching in the new environment. Through promoting positive change we enabled deeper student engagement with the theoretical concepts delivered in lectures as evidenced by favorable student evaluations, feedback, and improved final exam results. A collaborative team‐based approach that recognizes the importance of distributed leadership combined with a clearly articulated change management process were central to enabling academics to design, try, and evaluate the new teaching and learning practices. Our study demonstrates that a concerted focus on “change management” enabled teaching team members to adopt a major shift in the teaching and learning approach that resulted in measurable improvements in student learning.