Date of Submission
8-4-2023
Document Type
OIP
Degree
Doctor of Education
Department
Education
Keywords
Child and Youth Care, practicum, knowledge leadership, organizational knowledge creation, knowledge mobilization, higher education
Abstract
Child and Youth Care (CYC) Practicum Education (CYCPE) operates in more than 40 public postsecondary institutions (PSI) across Canada. CYC educators instruct and assess, while supervisors mentor thousands of students at child, youth, and family-serving organizations. As an emerging profession, CYC does not yet experience well-established governance, widespread postsecondary research infrastructure, nor public recognition, leaving CYCPE with threats to its credibility and existence. Despite individual CYC educators’ and programs’ extensive professional knowledge, we lack CYC-specific CYCPE organizational knowledge. This problem of practice (PoP) limits CYC educators’ ability to inform, improve, and innovate upon CYCPE’s design and delivery. This organizational improvement plan (OIP) positions CYCPE as an organization, to propose change initiatives that will disrupt its epistemic bubble. A critical postmodern (CPM) perspective forefronts tensions generatively. Organizational culture and discourse theory’s concepts provide a framework to analyze the PoP. Knowledge Leadership (KL)—within a Distributed Leadership (DL) higher education context, along a River Change Model (RCM) change process—propels a change initiative toward a desired state. Organizational knowledge creation and knowledge mobilization (KMb) expands CYCPE’s possibilities. By way of a CYCPE Consciousness-Raising Campaign, two streams of faculty-led change activities are detailed. This inquiry provides a novel perspective on CYCPE’s organization; syntheses of CYCPE’s extant data; application of KL in experiential education; and modification of Outcomes Harvesting (OH) to measure the change initiative’s contributions to a complex context. Ultimately, this inquiry is a call to action, for CYC educators to create and mobilize organizational knowledge, to benefit CYCPE’s complex design and delivery.
Recommended Citation
Cragg, C. (2023). From Epistemic Bubbles to Generative Possibilities: Knowledge Leadership and Knowledge Mobilization for Child and Youth Care Practicum Education. The Organizational Improvement Plan at Western University, 337. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/oip/337
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