Circularity

Any substantive educational change runs into tremendous roadblocks. Tyack & Cuban’s book Tinkering Toward Utopia is probably the standard text exploring this issue. Michael Fullan’s work is a justifiably popular series of handbooks on this topic. There are a couple of basic perspectives that emerge with substantive educational change. Here’s the range I view myself operating within.

1. Significant educational change doesn’t stick until a generation dies out. Effort doesn’t really change this. It just mimics the larger changes that are all ready occurring. In effect, you are just keeping up with the progression from early to late adopters.

2. Educational change requires systemic change from all levels of the system. You can’t just change one stakeholder’s views, you have to change the views of all stakeholders. With education’s societal role, this is a big task, and in practice it ends up looking a lot like 1. Expense is justified because the average person seems so easy to tip with just the right sort of push.

3. Educational change is significantly affected by the loose coupling (controls) that exist within it. Teachers are basically autonomous agents. They are mainly affected by their own moral imperatives, not by external direction. As a result change rates are largely dictated by the rate at which teachers re-interpret their own priorities.

4. Educational change is similar to religious change. As such it can be viewed through Stark’s somewhat antiquated lens of rational choice theory, or through the lens of Wilson’s evolutionary based group level selection theories. The latter view is largely the same as 3,. but tackles the usually avoided issue of group dynamics.

Essential Tensions

Educational solutions often seem cyclical in nature. Chances are you aren’t imagining things if you think today’s focus on problem based learning looks a lot like the 50’s focus on lab work. A simple way to view this dynamic is in terms of essential tensions.

Essential tension basically means there isn’t a single absolute solution to a problem. Instead there is a dynamical balance that needs to be maintained. A shift to one side of a spectrum needs to be counterbalanced by increased focus on the spandreled roots of what was removed. One of the ideas of essential tension is that freedom lies in the balancing of forces rather than the removal of problems.

Here is a small selection of references I think touch on this idea:
From a religious perspective
-J Bonner Ritchie  on essential tensions between individuals and organizations

From the perspective of organizational evolution
-Willis, R. (2004). A complexity and Darwinian approach to management with failure avoidance as the key tool. In Complexity theory and the management of networks: Proceedings of the workshop on organizational networks as distributed systems of knowledge (P. Andriani & G. Passiante Eds.). Imperial College Press: London. pp. 74-88

From the perspective of knowledge construction
-Impossible knowledge - Haig-Brown, C. (2003). Creating spaces: testimonio, impossible knowledge, and academe. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(3), 415-433.

-Difficult knowledge  - Pitt, A. & , Britzman, D. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: an experiment in psychoanalytic research. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), 755-776.

Cyclical Educational Solutions

Educational initiatives often seem cyclical. Many current initiatives resemble initiatives pushed 30 years ago, and later seen as inadequate. To many, it is ironic that the system has just gotten over those old failures. The problem is, in education, as in religion static solutions aren’t possible.

Educators are generally trying to prepare people for some aspect of life. This is true even of your math teacher. Question them and they will invariably have a reason why learning math is important. Often it has nothing to do with content, but rather about the lessons one learns and enables during the process. A decent portion of any educational initiative involves the maintenance of essential societal tensions. Some universalist versions of religion are similar. Form matters less than inward effects.

Problems occur when proposed balance shifts are envisioned as static solutions. For instance, a generation or two ago, student were expected to personally construct knowledge from a somewhat disjointed set of facts. Students “pieced” together lessons and demonstrated their grasp of the gaps in big summative assignments. Rubrics and details were pretty non-existent. In these tasks the grades were more about whether a student “got it” rather than how well they matched a pre-made set of criteria. Obviously this has problems. It tests whether or not you think the same way as your teacher. The response was movement towards feminist pedagogies: no hidden bars, and heterogeneous scales. Is this a static solution? Certainly not.

Focus on this solution for long enough and implicit culture shifts in this direction. This is not a bad thing. However, any shift comes with its own set of emergent problems. In this case, there are complaints about a loss of personal knowledge construction and criticality. The response is a re-interpretation of old solutions. We see a push toward knowledge construction: this time through social construction rather than individual construction. A good way to look at this process is through the lens of essential tensions.