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Evidence suggests that networking can be beneficial to enhance learning in challenging contexts, when there is a shared purpose, trustful relationships, and the development of meaningful collaborative practices. In Chile, the adoption of collaborative network practices has faced some challenges due to the long history of neoliberal policies characterised by hierarchical and market governance that promotes competition over collaboration among schools. Using Hood’s (1998) cohesion/regulation matrix, the Chilean education system can be characterized as fatalist, where cooperation among peers is mandated solely to meet external requirements to regulate schools’ and practitioners’ practice. However, in recent years, collaborative projects have been implemented that are framed and supported in an egalitarian culture, highlighting the importance and value of collaboration and support among peers to develop effective teaching practice. By analysing three experiences of networking in Chile, we identify two barriers for networking, distrust and isolation, and analyze the ways in which these networks attempted to overcome them to sustain effective collaboration. The first experience describes the implementation of the collaborative inquiry networks (CIN) methodology. This programme was designed to facilitate the development of networked leadership capacities of principals and curriculum coordinators to support teachers’ practices during COVID-19 in one municipality (Pino-Yancovic & Ahumada, 2020). In the second, we report on a group of principals who developed focussed interventions in their network of urban primary public schools to enhance the exchange of knowledge and practices among network participants. The third centres on the development of a model to enhance teacher leadership and professional learning in Initial Teacher Education through collaboration in a university–school partnership. Finally, we present some lessons to be considered in similar social and policy environments to successfully introduce a collaborative networked approach.

This chapter describes the Chilean market-oriented educational system, which has a marked individualist culture while simultaneously introducing policies and strategies to encourage collaboration among teachers to use research evidence to improve their practices. Using Hood's (1998) cohesion/regulation matrix, we argue that two system approaches are in place in Chile. First, a fatalist way where cooperation among peers is mandated solely to meet rule-bound approaches to regulate schools' and teachers' practice. Second, an egalitarian way promoted by a political discourse that has highlighted the importance and value of collaboration and support among peers to promote effective teaching practice. In this chapter, we inquire how teachers navigate this complex scenario to use evidence to inform their practice by conducting a systematic literature review of studies about Chilean teachers' use of evidence for their teaching practice. The systematic review addressed the following research questions: What is the nature of the literature on the use of evidence for teaching practice among Chilean teachers? What type of evidence is used by Chilean teachers to support their teaching practice? And, to what extent do Chilean teachers engage with peers while using evidence for their teaching practice? Findings show that research on the use of evidence for teaching practice in Chile is still scarce and quite recent, and that teachers face significant challenges to collaborate in a context that systemically rewards competition.

Drawing on the experience of the Observatories, a set of interconnected research centers in Italy, this chapter explains why academics are in one of the best positions to orchestrate interorganizational initiatives of change and development, and highlights two prerequisites that appear necessary to render salient this orchestrator role of academics: (i) the extensive use of multiple approaches of collaborative research and (ii) the creation and maintenance of a platform allowing the management and diffusion of the network-based learning mechanisms underlying each change and development effort. The contributions extend existing knowledge on organization development and collaborative research.

This chapter interrogates notions of the child and her brain as configured in the laboratory of pediatric neuroscientists, and by parents (overwhelmingly: mothers) of children classified for special education services on the basis of their varied learning capacities and incapacities. Data are drawn from my current New York-based study in a laboratory conducting fMRI research on resting-state differences amongst controls and children variously diagnosed with attention deficit hyper-activity disorder (ADHD), learning disabilities, autism and Tourette syndrome. Parents of children with those same diagnoses struggle with the strengths as well as the school-based weaknesses of their children, and in interviews they picture their children's brains quite differently than do the scientists. Young adult activists who grew up with the diagnoses of ADHD and learning disabilities appropriate lab-based descriptions of neurological difference to their own purposes, claiming a positive identity for themselves. At stake in the space between these diverse perspectives on childhood difference is the future of human developmental variability as it comes under biomedical research and regulation.

To review and synthesize findings from peer-reviewed research related to students’ sources of ideas for writing, and instructional dimensions that affect students’ development of ideas for composition in grades K-8.

The ideas or content expressed in written composition are considered critical to ratings of writing quality. We utilized a Systematic Mixed Studies Review (SMSR) methodological framework (Heyvaert, Maes, & Onghena, 2011) to explore K-8 students’ ideas and writing from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Students’ ideas for writing originate from a range of sources, including teachers, peers, literature, content area curriculum, autobiographical/life experiences, popular culture/media, drawing, and play. Intertextuality, copying, social dialogue, and playful peer interactions are productive strategies K-8 writers use to generate ideas for composing, in addition to strategies introduced through planned instruction. Relevant dimensions of instruction include motivation to write, idea planning and organization, as well as specific instructional strategies, techniques, and tools to facilitate idea generation and selection within the composition process.

A permeable curriculum and effective instructional practices are crucial to support students’ access to a full range of ideas and knowledge-based resources, and help them translate these into written composition. Instructional practices for idea development and writing: (a) connect reading and writing for authentic purposes; (b) include explicit modeling of strategies for planning and “online” generation of ideas throughout the writing process across genre; (c) align instructional focus across reading, writing, and other curricular activities; (d) allow for extended time to write; and (e) incorporate varied, flexible participation structures through which students can share ideas and receive teacher/peer feedback on writing.

Educational Robotics is a research field aimed at promoting an active engaging learning through the artifacts students create and the phenomena they simulate. In fact, designing, building, and programming a small robot, users discover and learn in a playful and joyful way. Moreover, the constructivist approach fosters the development of creative and critical skills, as well as problem-solving, communication skills, cooperation, and teamwork. This chapter presents the results of a research with university students, carried out at the Università della Calabria (Italy): an Educational Robotics laboratory has been integrated in a Cognitive Psychology Course in order to examine the kind of learning, workgroup retention, and engagement. Outcomes show that engaging experiences can remarkably enhance students’ learning efficiency and retention of the acquired materials. Moreover, a rich interaction can provide entertaining and appealing experiences capable of promoting learning and understanding.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.