Process Enactment Research Articles

The links between experiential learning and 4E cognition.

In this article, we explore the connections between two distinct approaches: experiential learning (EL) and 4E cognition. EL emphasizes the role of concrete experiences as the building blocks of learning, whereas 4E cognition views cognition as arising from the interactions that an individual has with their physical and social environment. Despite their divergent theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and interests, we argue that both frameworks share a common vision of cognition and that their integration could mutually enhance their respective fields. This article outlines the historical origins and underlying assumptions of both frameworks, highlighting the potential links that can be established between them. Specifically, we explore the significance of embodiment, embeddedness, extended cognition, and enactive processes in learning and cognition. To bridge these frameworks, we propose employing the concept of "concrete experience" as an active engagement of individuals with their physical and social surroundings. By encompassing the essential aspects assigned to concrete experiences in EL, as well as the embodiment, situatedness, extended cognition, and enactive features of 4E cognition, this notion serves as a unifying element. Ultimately, the article suggests that combining the insights from EL and 4E cognition can offer a richer, more holistic understanding of representation.

One policy, two implementations: probing policy specifications in two EMI courses in a Macao university

ABSTRACT Despite growing literature on EMI policy implementation in higher education contexts, there is a lack of research on how these policies are enacted at the micro-level, particularly in the classroom settings. The present study explores the language beliefs and practices of a psychology professor in two English-medium instruction (EMI) courses which differed in course types and students’ preparedness, in an effort to understand how language policy was enacted in nuanced EMI settings. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, classroom observation, and course artifacts, the study reveals that the non-native English speaking participant held a consistent belief in enforcing a strict English-only policy within the classroom, yet she managed students’ and her own language practices slightly differently (e.g. speak time, pace, vocabulary, L1 proportion) based on specific course objectives. The findings highlight the importance of consistent and mindful language policies that allow for flexible implementation where unique features of individual EMI contexts are accommodated. Through highlighting the agency of EMI teachers as language policy arbiters, we reimagined the original ROAD-MAPPING framework [Dafouz, E., & Smit, U. (2016). Toward a dynamic conceptual framework for English-medium education in multilingual university settings. Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 397–415] to capture the granular and dynamic process of EMI policy enactment and implementation in authentic classrooms. Practical implications are drawn accordingly.

Conceptualizing an Initial Framework to Support Discipline-Rich Project-Based Learning in STEM

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is positioned as a pedagogical approach to support authentic, discipline-rich STEM curricula. However, much of the research has focused on the effectiveness of researcher-created curricula rather than teacher-created curricula. In this manuscript, we seek to illuminate the ways in which teachers create discipline-rich STEM projects. Drawing on the theory of the curriculum enactment process, we analyzed curricular artifacts from our teaching practices that we created as secondary STEM teachers who designed and enacted project-based learning. From the analysis, we propose a framework grounded in disciplinary standards to support teachers in creating discipline-rich STEM projects by attending to (1) the Elements of PBL; (2) Content Storyline; (3) Practice Pathway.

Conceptualising inclusive curricula for learners with complex special educational needs: narrowing the design gap between commonality and difference

ABSTRACT The growing emphasis on inclusive education over the last decade has placed renewed focus on curriculum and the extent to which standard or different curricula should be enacted for learners with special educational needs. This paper explores the enactment process for a state-mandated, standard curriculum in Irish special schools. A two-phase, explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach to data-gathering was adopted. Phase 1 incorporated a questionnaire distributed to the principal of every special school in the Republic of Ireland (n = 133). Phase 2 consisted of a multi-site embedded case study with three special schools for children with varying levels of general learning disability. The findings illustrate how special education teachers modify the curriculum to make it more accessible for all learners and showcase the pertinence of curriculum design frameworks for framing those illustrations. The paper concludes by demonstrating the potential of a modified curriculum design framework for ensuring that learners with the most complex needs have better opportunities to access a curriculum with degrees of commonality to their peers.

Enacting machine agency when AI makes one’s day: understanding how users relate to AI communication technologies for scheduling

Abstract AI Communication Technologies (AICTs) make decisions about users’ communication on their behalf. Users’ implementation of AICTs that autonomously act may enable and constrain how they accomplish their work and interact with others. Drawing on interviews with users of two AICTs with differing levels of autonomy designed for work-related scheduling, this study investigated how users enacted AICTs in practice. Users of both tools drew on AICTs’ autonomous capabilities to enact machine agency, a structure that assigns AICTs the power to allocate resources, which helped them increase scheduling efficiency and guide how others interacted with them. Users of the tool that autonomously implemented decisions described a process of enactment in which they used the tool to control their work, perceived the tool was exhibiting too much control, and acted to regain control. I present implications for understanding how people enact machine agency with AICTs that make decisions about their work.

Professional learning networks: a descriptive phenomenological study with primary school teachers in Greece

Purpose Professional learning networks (PLNs) involve teachers’ collaboration with others outside of their school to improve teaching and learning. PLNs can facilitate teachers’ professional growth and school improvement. This study aims to explore the drivers for participation within PLNs, the enactment process and the impact of PLN participation on teachers, students and schools in Greece. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive phenomenological study was conducted to explore the lived experience of primary school teachers participating in PLNs. Findings The findings showed that individuals who were open to change were driving innovation to address a need or a lack in their daily practice that was not satisfied within their usual community of practice. The key element of the participation was peer collaboration with openness of communication without attendant accountability pressures. The change was mainly identified in teacher skills and the school climate. An individual could bring change only if the school is already open to change. In some cases, resistance to change in schools was identified before enactment or during enactment. The transformation of teachers’ and leaders’ stances is discussed, enabling the opportunity to maximise school improvement. Originality/value The study examines PLNs as European Union-funded initiatives that are developed by teachers in centralised education systems under the phenomenological research paradigm. It explores the PLNs in a different setting compared to the existing conceptual theory of change for PLNs.

Translating government policy into practice: How new UK medical schools enact widening participation.

Increasing the diversity of medical students, or widening participation (WP), is critical for social justice and healthcare delivery, and many governments are setting policies to encourage WP. However, establishing policy is only the first step in an educational change process: we also need to know "how" policy is enacted or how medical schools interpret and put into practice WP policy. Addressing this gap, the aim of this study was to examine policy enactment in six new UK medical schools with an explicit WP mandate. This qualitative study, underpinned by social constructivism, used semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of key actors (6 Deans and 14 Admissions staff) of putting policy into practice when setting up a new medical school. Data coding and analysis were initially inductive, using thematic analysis. We then applied Ball's theory of policy enactment to organise the data into four contextual dimensions of 'situation', 'professional', 'material' and 'external'. On the surface, there were many similarities across the six schools in terms of the four dimensions. However, how these dimensions interacted illuminated tensions and differences. For example, some schools found themselves increasingly subjected to local and extra-local rule systems, including pressure to follow host university norms and hosts struggling to accept that medical schools are heavily regulated. There were also tensions between the new medical schools and the medical education "establishment", including lack of power and being judged by overly narrow outcomes. Different contexts seem to influence the enactment of WP to medicine in different places, even in the same country, even in medical schools established at the same time. That policy enactment is a complex, non-linear process of enactment is important to acknowledge: context is critical. Our findings will inform future policies and practices that aim to increase WP in medicine.

Architectural design and managerial control: Lefebvre, Latour and the process of enrollment

Organizational scholarship on architecture often applies Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived framework. Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, most notably, have illustrated how architectural design exploits each of these, exerting managerial control through processes of enchantment, emplacement, and enactment. Although this “3E framework” has been productively applied to buildings from the modern and postmodern periods, its weaknesses become apparent in the current occupant-centric design period. Drawing on Actor Network Theory’s account of translation, we propose enrollment—a 4th “E”—which enables us to better capture the nature of spatial control in the occupant-centric design period. Our 4E expanded spatial control framework recognizes the tensions that Lefebvre originally observed, tensions concealed by Dale and Burrell’s otherwise rightly influential work. This expanded framework also augments our understanding of modern and postmodern periods: the dominant Building Movements of the past Century, we claim, have each engaged in a recursive enrollment of socio-political ideals.

Generative AI in Responsible Conversational Agent Integration: Guidelines for Service Managers

Responsible integration of conversational agents (CAs) like chatbots is crucial for service firms to mitigate risks and foster positive outcomes. This article provides managerial guidelines through a Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) lens, focusing on CDR Culture, Management Structure, and Digital Governance across the service firm, software provider, and customers/society. It examines how organizational sensemaking processes of creation, interpretation, and enactment are triggered by CA-related issues and events. The research highlights the role of generative AI (GenAI) in implementing CDR factors and responsible CA software development lifecycle phases during development and integration. Guidelines are provided for leveraging GenAI to enhance CDR Culture, incorporate ethical considerations into CDR Management Structure, and enable robust Digital Governance mechanisms to prioritize customer/societal well-being. A multilevel framework illustrates reinforcing the guidelines through organizational sensemaking processes, and fostering responsible CA integration aligned with ethical principles and societal values.

Becoming Ecological: The Contribution of Collaborative a/r/tography to Generalist Primary Teachers’ Agency in Arts Education

Internationally, it is widely acknowledged that many generalist primary teachers (GPTs) enter the teaching profession with a paucity of arts practice and pedagogic skills. Many perceive a lack of confidence, competence, and community to change this, particularly in regional and isolated teaching contexts. As a means to address this, this article considers the value of engaging in collaborative a/r/tography as a means of developing more creative ecological approaches to teacher professional development and learning. A multimodal storied assemblage of four primary teachers’ experience of engaging in collaborative a/r/tography is explored, and through diffractive analysis, the authors surface the intra-acting affective agents that enable metho-pedagogic learning possibilities. Specific ways in which collaborative a/r/tography works to foster GPTs’ curricula and metho-pedagogic sensibilities, as well as a sense of creative ecology, are addressed. Speculation as to the ways in which collaborative a/r/tography fosters GPTs “becoming ecological” in relational practices and processes of curriculum enactment and pedagogical engagement is offered thereby contributing to understandings of the generative capacity of a/r/tography as a framework for developing teacher agency and change.

How Institutional Logics Inform Emotional Labour: An Ethnography of Junior Doctors

Sociological analysis of emotional labour can be aided by considering how institutional logics inform the performance of emotional labour. We consider the link between institutional logics and emotional labour by conducting an in-depth case study of junior doctors in a large UK hospital. We point to three key institutional logics – bureaucratic, consumerist and professional logics – and show how they inform the emotional labour of junior doctors. We also consider how doctors respond to these logics through enactment processes of choice, resistance and negotiation. In this way, we make an important theoretical contribution by identifying the way that institutional logics relate to the performance of emotional labour. We also make an important empirical contribution by contributing to a growing body of ethnographies on the emotional labour of doctors.

Educators’ Perceptions of Professional Growth Plans in the Context of Professional Learning Communities

Professional Growth Plans (PGPs), a model of professional development for educators, were completed in the context of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) as part of a grant from a state Professional Educator Standards Board. Participants were in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and represented different educator roles in two urban elementary schools. The PGP process was introduced in PLCs and focused on the implementation of High Leverage Practices (HLPs) for inclusive classrooms (McLeskey et al., 2019). In a collaborative effort with university facilitators, educators engaged in tenets of Participatory Action Research (PAR) through enactment of the PGP process to implement and reflect on outcomes related to their use of HLPs. Educators selected PGP goals focused on areas of instructional growth and improvement of student performance. PAR was enacted in the context of educators’ individual instructional settings through implementation of PGPs. The purpose of the grant was to familiarize and support educators in the PGP process. The purpose of the study was to identify educators’ perceived benefits and challenges with the implementation of PGPs within the context of a collaborative PLC.

Being ANTish in Aotearoa New Zealand: leaders assembling net-work

ABSTRACT This article takes up an ANTian sensibility to explore the enactment of a policy for educational collaboration in one region in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand (New Zealand). The case offers potential for considering the benefits of a sociology of associations (Latour 2005/2007): a Treaty-based bicultural nation, school atomisation consequential to a decades-long ‘system’ of self-managing schools, and geological actors in the form of damaging earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. The article considers the introduction of voluntary Kāhui Ako | Communities of Learning as a policy initiative intended to address achievement and equity concerns by providing support for collaboration. While the policy as articulated focuses on the aspirations and abilities of human actors in leadership roles, I take up ideas around actants, symmetry, alliance and translation to foreground other actors – both present and long absent – involved in myriad processes of policy enactment.

Premature return of self-initiated expatriates in the spectre of a global crisis: a sensemaking perspective

Global mobility studies have focused on the repatriation of assigned expatriates in multinational organisations overlooking the difficulties that self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) face upon returning home prematurely. Recent converging global crises have demonstrated the precarious and challenging circumstances that SIEs confront when relocating abroad of their own volition without the security and support of an organisation. Applying a sensemaking lens, our qualitative study reveals that a global crisis’s volatile and unpredictable nature triggers a sensemaking process for SIEs on whether to withdraw prematurely or remain on assignment. Specifically, we unpack how, in attempting to put structure on what was a highly complex, anxious, and stressful situation, SIEs engaged in a sensemaking process of enactment, selection, and retention in deciding whether to return home early. This process involved interpreting varying contextual cues and emotions in acute conditions, processing conflicting information from a nexus of sensegiving actors, and engaging retrospectively in reflexive frames. Our findings enrich existing work on the challenges of SIE repatriation by illuminating the utility of crisis sensemaking to understand how SIEs navigate premature withdrawal amid crisis conditions.

Pupils’ development: Policy enactment in Swedish school-age educare

ABSTRACT The historical roots of what is now a modern Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) were formed from a social pedagogical starting point in which children’s social development, freedom and well-being were prioritized. SAEC has now become more focused on an educational pedagogical assignment and has been incorporated into the Swedish curriculum. SAECs could therefore be seen as institutions under reconstruction, in that their current work is formed in what can be regarded as a transition period. This transition could imply new points of departure concerning work practices and forms of documentation, both of that could challenge older traditions. Using policy enactment theory as a methodology, this case study discusses the work practices and forms of documentation that are in use now, with a specific focus on the latter. The main purpose of the article is to explore and develop SAEC staff’s points of departure for developing their documentation and assessments and how the new curriculum assignment is enacted in the context of SAEC’s pedagogical practices. The study’s findings show that the enactment process could be seen as an initiative based on local needs for clarity. The developed documentation and assessment practices are described as a cultural shift away from former practices.

Sense-Making in the Wild: The Historical and Ecological Depth of Enactive Processes of Life and Cognition

The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description of sense-making entails the co-emergence of an agent’s self and a meaningful world, as well as the emergence of a normativity that guides the behaviour of the coupled agent-environment system. This emergent process happens at different levels of interactions: biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal and linguistic. Sense-making therefore accounts for the natural origins of intentionality and meaning and gives continuity to the emergent enactive processes of life and mind. The standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and neglects many historical and ecological aspects relevant to the scientific study of life and mind processes as they happen in concrete fields of action. To address this issue, I propose the enlarged description of sense-making in the wild, which is based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development defines sense-making as a historically situated process that transforms the previously given dynamical configuration of the agent-environment system into a new one. Enactive-situated normativity asserts that in addition to the agent’s self-maintenance and the material constraints of the agent-environment system, many dynamical constraints, ecologically situated, shape the origin, maintenance and development of sense-making processes. Finally, transverse emergence describes the transformational process of the whole agent-environment system dynamically, as a reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors that exhibit the typical behaviour of the system. Sense-making in the wild thus aims to facilitate conceptual tools to study enactive cognition, as it happens in concrete fields of action.

Parallel lines – tensions in teachers’ enactment of the vision of a newly established school in Sweden

ABSTRACT This paper aims to share new knowledge about tensions in establishing a new school in a marketised educational landscape, with a special focus on teachers’ experiences of enacting a highly profiled vision. The paper is based on a single case study using observations, surveys, interviews and document studies. To cover the complex enactment process, we have created a multilayered enactment triangle to analyse the enactment process of the school and strategies the teachers use to realise the vision. To be able to hold on to the vision when the first generation of students arrive, the teachers in this study connect the vision to a more abstract ‘future school’. Meanwhile, in the daily practice in the ‘present school’, they perceive difficulties in working in line with the vision. The relations between teachers and vision and the relations between teachers and students, respectively, become parallel lines. It seems then, that for visionary work to function from the start in a newly established school, all the relations in the enactment triangle, i.e. between the vision and the teachers, the vision and the students, and the teachers and the students, need to be there.

INFLUENCE OF WOMEN ENACTMENTS (2000-2015) IN PAKISTAN

Legislation is always made with the goal for progress and ensuring equality in the society. Resultantly the laws take on the role of catalyst for social modifications. The current review is meant to know the relationship between regulation and social change in specific areas of women's empowerment, focusing on women related laws in Pakistan from 2000 to 2015. The Karachi metropolis is nucleus of the qualitative review; utilizing the purposive sampling technique, twenty lawyers were interviewed who are pleading Civil, Family and Criminal matters in the Courts. The outcomes of such legislation were regarded as progressive. This important enactment process changed the social status of Pakistani women. Media and education, along with these laws, have been identified as factors driving change in women's groups. Our female population is less aware of the laws they support rather than create new laws or change existing ones. These laws must be strictly enforced.

Accounting for the liberal State and the Spanish seizure process of 1855

Accounting practices were essential to Spain’s transformation into a liberal State. The process began in 1835 as the properties and assets controlled by the Catholic Church and Town Councils were confiscated across the country, culminating in the 1855 seizure process. Informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this paper identifies the role and importance of accounting in the enactment of the seizure process in 1855. The seizure was designed to address a worsening national debt and to replace the values and relationships of the Ancien Regime’s absolute monarchy with the political principles of liberalism. The intended outcome of the confiscation was to lay the foundations of a modern capitalist State at a time of great political, social, and economic turmoil. Ultimately, rather than supporting the liberal aims of the seizure process, accounting practices helped the dominant political classes to further promote their interests. Most properties were sold to people who were already large landowners and this confirmed the true aim of the seizure process: to increase their wealth and, thus, their political power.

Loaded Down From Speaking Up: A Resource-Based Examination of Voicer Regret Following Supervisor Delegation

As the target of employee voice, supervisors have been depicted as the driving force behind enacting employee input. In reality, voicing employees often remain key players in the enactment process as supervisors may delegate implementation responsibilities to voicers. Although the voice literature suggests that voice enactment promotes subsequent voice by giving employees evidence that their voice fosters improvements, we suggest that supervisor delegation following employee voice can, instead, turn enactment into an unintended deterrent to voice. Integrating conservation of resources theory with theory on counterfactual thinking, we argue that supervisor delegation following employee voice elicits employee overload. Subsequently, counterfactual thinking about an avoidable increase in workload evokes regret for having spoken up. This regret leads to decreased voice as employees intentionally withhold input to protect personal resources. However, we theorize that supervisor consultation represents a cost-offsetting resource that attenuates the negative effects of supervisor delegation following employee voice. We find converging support for our theoretical model in a multi-wave field study and two experimental studies. This research offers novel insights into the personal costs of voice for employees by contextualizing voice within the voice-enactment process and revealing supervisor delegation as an unforeseen impediment to employee voice.