The concept of fundamental educational change

Educational Theory

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 277-295

  Waks, Leonard J ^a  

^a TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 41149148836     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00257.x     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. The journal referred to here is Journal of Educational Change, edited by Michael Fullan and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. The handbook is International Handbook of Educational Change, edited by Andy Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Michael Fullan, and David Hopkins (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).
2. Larry Cuban, "Curriculum Stability and Change," in Handbook of Research on Curriculum, ed. Philip W. Jackson (New York: Macmillan, 1992), chap. 8.
3. Andy Hargreaves, "Pushing the Boundaries of Educational Change," in International Handbook of Educational Change, ed. Hargreaves et al., 282.
4. Ibid., 281.
5. Cuban, "Curriculum Stability and Change," 216.
6. Michael Fullan, The New Meaning of Educational Change, 3d ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
7. Talcott Parsons, "A Functional Theory of Change," in Social Change: Sources, Patterns and Consequences, ed. Amitai Etzioni and Eva Etzioni-Halevy (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
8. Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, and Richard Fisch, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974).
9. Cuban hedges a bit by qualifying his identification of second-order with fundamental change. For example, he says at one point that second-order change is fundamental in that it alters "essential" ways that organizations are put together. At another he says that it is change in the "basic" structure of organizations. But this does not help matters. Second-order change is defined in terms of change in the goals, structures, and roles. To say that it is fundamental to the extent that it involves "essential" arrangements or "basic" structures is just to say that it is fundamental when and only when it is.
10. Walton H. Hamilton, "Social Institutions," in The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, vol. 8, ed. Edward Seligman (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 84. Throughout this discussion of institutions, I stay close to the authoritative encyclopedia entries cited in this note and the next in order to assure conformity with standard sociological usage.
11. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, "Social Institutions: The Concept," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 410.
12. This list is from Eisenstadt. More or less identical lists can be found in Parsons, "A Functional Theory of Change"; Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge, 1959); and Jonathan H. Turner, The Institutional Order (New York: Longman, 1997).
13. Talcott Parsons, "Evolutionary Universals in Society," American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964): 339-357.
14. Hamilton, "Social Institutions," 88.
15. The approach to social institutions adopted here is broadly "structural-functional," within the tradition of Emile Durkheim, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Talcott Parsons, among others. This is the oldest and still the dominant sociological philosophy. It has been critiqued as neglecting conflict and privileging established institutional orders over proposed innovations on the grounds that existing orders are "functional." These criticisms have been addressed by sociologists in this tradition, and the overall framework has been reformulated to obviate such concerns. For instance, in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), Robert K. Merton addressed the criticism that functionalism contains a bias in favor of the status quo by noting that, from a logical point of view, functionalism does not privilege existing structures because innovative alternatives could serve the same functions. Merton's critique of functional unity introduces issues of power inequalities and conflict into a broadly functionalist perspective. The essays in Jeffery C. Alexander, ed., Neo functionalism (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985) and Neofunctionalism and After (oxford: Blackwell, 1998), have reformulated functionalist theory in ways that sidestep the familiar criticisms.
16. Cuban, "Curriculum Stability and Change," 223.
17. Ibid.
18. American schools today continue to serve distinct racial populations, but this is no longer an effect of the institution of segregation.
19. Cuban, "Curriculum Stability and Change," 241.
20. This basic function of institutions as tools for survival was emphasized by Bronislaw Malinowski and runs through the sociological and anthropological literature. In his book The Institutional Order, Turner says, "The analysis of human social institutions begins with the recognition that social structures and systems of cultural symbols [are] used to sustain humans in an environment.ultimately a social institution is defined in terms of its consequences - often termed 'functions' - for maintaining, reproducing, and organizing a population so that it remains viable in an environment" (2, 4).
21. Hamilton, "Social Institutions," 85.
22. See, for example, Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. A model of institutional change in education has recently been advanced by William Reid in Curriculum as Institution and Practice (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999). I draw heavily on both of these sources in laying out a general model of the change sequence here.
23. Eisenstadt, "Social Institutions: The Concept," 413. He says further that these entrepreneurs are themselves limited by existing institutional norms, but that these are not "fixed" in any given situation: "The process of institutionalization is to a great extent a process of innovation of various appropriate institutional norms and organizational frameworks, as well as a process of setting up, beyond such structural cores and organizational settings, new types of structural frameworks" (414).
24. As Eisenstadt puts it, "it cannot be taken for granted that even if the various potential needs for such crystallization.exist within a society, crystallization will indeed take place and people will be found who are willing and able to invest in the setting up of such norms and organizational frameworks. [But] if such positions do not become crystallized or filled, there may easily develop a disintegration of any given social system or the institutionalization of a system at a very low level of efficiency" (1).
25. Ivan Illich developed his notion of learning networks in DeSchooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). The Parkway Project organized a network of informal learning activities situated in Philadelphia's Franklin Parkway region as an alternative high school. The project is described in John Bremer and Michael von Moschzisker, The School without Walls: Philadelphia's Parkway Project (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
26. A.S. Neill, Summerhill (London: Penguin, 1968).
27. Thomas Dublin, "Prologue" to the history of Lowell, Massachusetts, in Lowell National Historical Park Handbook, http://www.nps.gov/archive/lowe/loweweb/Lowell%20History/prologue.htm.
28. Whittier cited in "Prologue," Lowell National Historical Park Handbook.
29. Stephen Rice, Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
30. Sylvia Marie Clark, James Gordon Carter: His Influence in Massachusetts Education, History, and Politics from 1820 to 1850 (PhD diss., Boston College, 1982), http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/ AAI8215460/.
31. Carter first developed the idea of a normal school for teacher training in Letters to William Prescott on the Free Schools of New England, with Remarks on the Principles of Instruction (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1824). His system of ideas, first expressed in a series of opinion articles published in The Boston Patriot, was subsequently presented in his book Essays on Popular Education (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1826).
32. Clark, James Gordon Carter, 10.