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The purpose of this paper is to disrupt traditional, separate roles in preservice teacher (PT) education, moving toward hybrid mentoring spaces, which is practice-based and a collaborative model of supporting PTs into teaching.

Design-based research was collaboratively enacted by a research team. The authors focused analysis on video-recorded collaborative coaching conferences, as well as shared discussions of those conferences between researchers, cooperating teachers (CTs) and field supervisors (FSs). At each of three iterations of coaching conversations, changes were made to the practice of collaborative coaching, allowing the research/design team to reflect upon practices and deepen the understanding of the development of design principles.

Three design principles of collaborative coaching grew through this research – a need for shared understanding and valuing of a coaching model amongst participants to guide decision making; a partnership between CTs and FSs in centering the PTs’ reflection on problems of practice, including the need for CTs and FSs to continually reflect on how their shifting roles toward this goal; and a relational framework including transparent communication. The authors extend these principles through two narrative vignettes and a framework that focuses on hybrid spaces for coaching.

The research questions and design did not inquire into the relationship between collaborative coaching and PTs’ teaching practices.

Each narrative serves as a coaching model of how PTs, CTs and FSs, or triads, worked toward resolving practical challenges in coaching to better support PTs. The authors provide practical tools for teacher preparation programs to build collaborative relationships with teachers and schools.

Placing the PT into an active, leadership role in reflection on practice disrupts expert-novice and other binaries that may not serve programs that seek to prepare reflective practitioners. Previous studies have identified tensions when mentoring is not a collective process, but few studies have explored models that disrupt the two activity systems that often operate separately.

Balance Theory has accumulated an impressive record of empirical confirmation at both the micro- and macro-levels. Yet, it is unclear why humans consistently prefer balanced relations when imbalance offers the opportunity to reap material rewards. We argue that balance is preferred because it functions as a “compression heuristic,” allowing networks to be more easily encoded in, and recalled from, memory.

We present the results of a novel randomized laboratory experiment using nearly 300 subjects. We evaluate the independent and joint effects of degree of balance/imbalance and presence/absence of kin compression heuristics on network recall.

We find that memory for relationship valence is more accurate for balanced, rather than imbalanced, networks and that relationship existence and relationship valence are separable cognitive elements. We also use comparisons between kin and non-kin networks to suggest that humans are implicitly aware of the conditions under which imbalanced networks will be most durable.

We show that the tension/strain postulated to generate mental and behavioral responses to increase balance likely stems from cognitive limitations. More broadly, this connects balance theory to models of human cognition and evolution and suggests that human general processing ability may have evolved in response to social, rather than physical, challenges.

Around 7% of the female prison population are pregnant (Albertson, O'Keeffe, Lessing-Turner, Burke & Renfrew, 2014; Kennedy, Marshall, Parkinson, Delap, & Abbott, 2016; Prison Reform Trust, 2019). However, although recent years have witnessed growing academic interest in relation to mothering and imprisonment, limited attention has been paid to exploring the experiences of pregnancy for women serving a custodial sentence. Combining health and criminological research, this chapter offers a unique perspective of women's accounts of pregnancy and imprisonment, highlighting the specific challenges faced by pregnant women in negotiating the prison environment, whilst also illustrating the adaptive strategies adopted to cope with pregnancy and new motherhood in the context of imprisonment.

Drawing on Simons's levers of control (LoC) framework, the primary aim of this study is to advance an understanding of the balance between empowerment and constraint in a non-profit UK organisation. In particular, this study examines the antecedents and manifestations of LoC (im)balance, in relation to employees' level of engagement with the control systems in place.

For this study, 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted with different organisational members, from directors to non-managerial staff, to gain an in-depth appreciation of the main differences between managerial intentions in the design of management control systems (MCS) and employee perceptions regarding the role of such systems.

This research reveals that suppression of interactive systems and internal inconsistencies between different types of controls hinder the balance between empowerment and constraint. This imbalance is then found to have important consequences for employee buy-in, in some cases, defeating the purposes of control.

This study enhances our understanding of the gap between the design of control systems and the employee perceptions of it in an unusual organisational setting (non-profit and bringing together clinical and non-clinical staff and operations).

The study of MCS and its role in organisations has long been the focus of both academic and practitioner research. Yet, while extant literature focused on management's perspective on MCS, few studies have explored employees' attitudes and behaviours that accompany the implementation of control. What is more, little is known about the specific uses and behavioural outcomes of MCS in the context of non-profit organisations. Drawing on Simons's LoC framework, this paper addresses these gaps in the literature and investigates the balance between control and empowerment of employees in a UK non-profit organisation with significant clinical remit.

The paper aims to analyze the contribution of young academics to the field of public relations (PR) and shows which authors exert most influence on them. The study thereby contributes to the assessment of the state of the art of theory building in the field. The authors analyzed the study data against the background of two approaches on progress in the field: Nothhaft et al.’s (2018) idea of strategic communication as an elusive concept and Winkler et al.’s (2021) narrative approach.

The study comprises two parts. First, the authors conducted a survey among participants of the EUPRERA PhD-workshops between 2007 and 2019, asking respondents about their perception of the state of the field. Second, the authors performed a bibliometric (co-)citation analysis of the young scholars’ most important works.

Results indicate that though the field has progressed in terms of quantity and diversified with regard to established paradigms, it has not matured in a sense that it has settled on a generally accepted theoretical underpinning. However, the data show how the dominant paradigms in the field map onto the co-citation networks that emerged out of the works of young scholars. The authors’ findings imply that this new generation might signal their allegiance to a paradigm by citing the works of its emblematic authors.

Unlike most bibliometric studies, this one uses an author-centered approach, thus studying works that matter most to young academics themselves. Not only do the authors thereby contribute to the analysis of the state of theory building in PR research, but also expand the scope in looking at research as a social system, in which young researchers need to position themselves.

This chapter explores the impact of context on the teaching of a multicultural teacher education course and illustrates what can be learned through partnering self-study methodology with discourse analysis. The study described in this chapter draws on data collected at two teacher education institutions with different student demographics in two different states in the United States. By drawing on methods of discourse analysis, we explore how the differences between two classes manifested in response to a set of class readings on race and racial stereotyping in schools. Specifically, we look closely at the discursive resources available in each location to talk about issues of race and racism. Through partnering discourse analysis and self-study methodologies, we uncovered deep-seated assumptions held by each of us that resulted in a reification of issues of race and class in ways that surprised and troubled us.

By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.

Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.

In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.

Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.

These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.