روش نقشه مفهومی: کاتالیزور برای یادگیری سازمانی

In this paper, concept mapping is suggested as a methodological catalyst for organizational learning. Concept mapping, by virtue of its psychological and sociological foundations, offers a way to simultaneously understand complex systems in terms of both intra- and inter-personal relationships. We posit that key stakeholders, when taken together, represent the organization as a bounded unit and set the stage for the interaction between evaluation practice and organizational learning. We illustrate this argument by reference to an evaluation study in which concept mapping was used by two stakeholder groups as a process of structured conceptualization. Ultimately, the methodology facilitated the development of a jointly authored conceptual framework to be used in future program planning, development, and evaluation.

In this paper, we illustrate how concept mapping can be viewed as a transformative process that has the ability to bring together diverse views and values of multiple stakeholders to conceptualize and represent complex constructs in a clear and systematic manner. In this way, we discuss how concept mapping can be used as a potential methodological catalyst for organizational learning. We posit that key stakeholders, when taken together, represent the organization as a bounded unit and set the stage for the interaction between evaluation practice and organizational learning. Organizations devote considerable energy in developing collective understandings of events. It is the interpretations of events (or constructs) within a structured ‘meaning making’ environment whereby learning can occur (Daft & Weick, 1984). We illustrate this argument by reference to an evaluation study in which concept two stakeholder groups used mapping as a process of structured conceptualization.

The Manitoba School Improvement Program (MSIP) functions as a natural experiment within which to investigate the efficacy of using a transformative methodology to co-construct a definition of student engagement. Student engagement, as noted earlier, is often held out as a key goal of school improvement efforts. MSIP, being a school improvement organization with student engagement as an espoused outcome, provided a ready-made context within which concept mapping as a participatory method could be employed. Participatory evaluation endeavors strive to provide a shared knowledge base through the direct involvement of stakeholders in the evaluation process. They build on a fundamental insight that in order to transform an organization, the people affected by the change must be involved in creating that change. Participation and collaboration have been found to produce a long-term commitment to use the evaluation process and techniques thereby building a culture of learning among those involved (Cousins and Earl, 1995). Participatory evaluation advances the notion of a collaborative approach to the research decision-making process as distinct from externally controlled alternatives. In particular, such designs offer a powerful approach to organizational improvement by creating learning systems that lead to better-informed decisions. At the heart of any evaluation endeavor lies the need to answer the question, ‘what counts as success?’ Within a participatory framework, stakeholders are charged with the responsibility of defining program goals and outcomes. Such a task is, first and foremost, definitional. And as we have seen in the case of the present student engagement example, much definitional ambiguity colors the landscape of school improvement. Participatory evaluation advocates for the active involvement of key stakeholders in all facets of the process with the intention of cultivating an ownership that will ultimately translate into evaluation utilization. In the context of the present example, it is difficult to conceive of successful school improvement in the absence of intentional efforts to build capacity and foster ownership of the improvement agenda among students and their teachers. Or, to put it another way, you cannot mandate what matters. Cultivating the necessary degree of ownership, then, is the promise of a participatory approach. MSIP, as a school improvement initiative, must hold as central the participation of its students and teachers in fostering the development of the espoused student engagement outcome. Our aim in this paper has been to demonstrate how concept mapping-as a transformative methodology—holds the potential to both foster ownership and build capacity in students and teachers. Specifically, the concept mapping process as it has been described here encourages the relevant stakeholders (students and teachers) to assume active postures in the social activity of ‘meaning making’ (Penny, 2002) or, to put it slightly differently, in arriving at a co-constructed definition of student engagement. While it is not our intent to discuss the content specifics of the co-constructed definition of student engagement in this paper, it is our intent to illustrate the utility of concept mapping in the process of definitional co-construction. We saw earlier, in Table 1, the way in which the brainstorming phases of concept mapping contributed to the development of a jointly authored list of definitional constituents of the student engagement construct. Table 2 and Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 offered evidence of how the participants clustered the individual items into higher order concepts and then made judgments about their relative importance. The graphic representations in Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 also illustrated the participants' relational understanding of the concepts. In these ways, the concept mapping process provides evidence driven suggestions for both policy and practice developments. The findings illustrated in Fig. 4, for example, prompt questions such as, why is diversity important for these teachers and students? Is the school diverse? Is the community diverse? Is the city diverse? Alternatively, school members and policy makers alike may be interested in why variety in school policy/structure does not elicit more interest from teachers and students? Or, is there a perceived lack of input into school policy? Beyond functioning as a catalyst for explicating the architecture of student engagement in eyes of the two key stakeholder groups of students and teachers, we have also seen that concept mapping, as a participatory methodology, has the potential to encourage those all important intersubjective interchanges between the key stakeholders. Specifically, we are referring here to the pattern matching analysis and corresponding graphical representation as illustrated in Fig. 6. It is pattern matching that identifies those issues that are most amenable to action or further exploration insofar as there is a meeting or alternatively, a missing, of the minds. Fig. 6, for example, communicates the former in that both students and their teachers see issues of ‘diversity and belonging’ as pivotal, while variations in ‘school and policy structure’ are much less so. Alternatively, the latter missing of the minds is evident in the divergent perceptions of importance of ‘aspects of pedagogy’ and ‘students at the center’ (as reflected in the steep slope of the lines). We have seen, then, that concept mapping as a transformative methodology begins with the individual developing a sense of personal vision with respect to a concept (in this case student engagement), becoming aware of this mental representation, and then exposing it to the influence of others. Thereafter, the capacity to ‘think together’ is promoted through the intentionally structured practice of discourse. Such focused discourse opportunities allow for the creation of a shared ‘picture of the future’ that fosters genuine commitment by virtue of the practice of key stakeholders, as participants in the process, developing ownership over the vision. And it is the systemic approach of concept mapping that fuses all of these elements into a coherent body of theory and practice. The unfolding of events as characterized in this paragraph should strike readers as familiar. Specifically, the developmental trajectory is one reviewed earlier in connection to Senge (2000) ‘five disciplines’. These ‘five disciplines’ are well regarded as hallmarks of a deliberative and intentionally developed ‘learning community’. And it is in this way that concept mapping methodology functions as a catalyst for organizational learning.