Distributed Leadership in Ontario’s CAAT sector English Department Academic Coordinators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study uses the theories of distributed leadership (DL) and the lens of hermeneutic interpretation to explore and describe the interactional tasks and functions that English department Academic Coordinators (ACs) across the province of Ontario carry out in their leadership work as an alternative to the traditional administrative systems. Interviews with 15 English department Academic Coordinators at Ontario anglophone colleges in the CAAT (Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology) system provided the key data for the study. Document analysis in the form of organizational charts, union and corporate documents as well as observational journaling were used to provide data to account for the ACs practices. Study findings indicate that CAAT ACs in English departments have a unique and influential role as both teacher leaders and boundary spanners. Participants suggested this was because their role required them to span both the macro-world of the college context as well as the micro-world of their own departments and faculty peers. Results from the data indicate that there are multiple challenges to these interactive and collaborative coordinator interactions. Participants suggested this was caused by clashing with other faculty and administration over their influence and ability to work through change in policy and teaching practice. The theoretical lens of DL helps to illuminate some of these challenges. Throughout the study, participants also described positive aspects of their work that were used in order to maintain connections, establish trust and organize the flow of communications and to attempt to use influence to lead their respective departments and the college staff from the bottom up. Their experiences may provide a descriptive entrance into a conversation about collaborative forms of leadership that are already being used in the CAAT system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".