Future Directions of Educational Change

Social Justice, Professional Capital, and Systems Change

Helen Malone, Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, Kristin Kew, Helen Malone, Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, Kristin Kew, Helen Janc Malone, Helen Janc Malone, Santiago Rincón-Gallardo, Kristin Kew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351980616
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Future Directions of Educational Change brings together timely discussions on social justice, professional capital, and systems change from some of the leading scholars in the field of education. Engaging in theory and evidence-based debates covering issues such as literacy education, whole system reform, and teacher leadership, this volume argues that quality and equity are equally important in reshaping existing education systems both within the United States and globally. The authors offer contextual analyses of current educational research and practice while looking toward the future and offering thought-provoking arguments for challenging and rectifying the systemic inequalities within education today.

1

Introduction

The Many Future Directions of Educational Change

Dennis Shirley

Educators at all levels stand in the midst of change today as never before. International alliances, scientific consensus, democratic principles, and humanitarian values that long have been taken for granted in many nations are under scrutiny by angry and restive populations. Forces of globalization such as open markets, demographic mobility, and technological transformation have created unprecedented prosperity for some but are rejected by those on the receiving end of others’ innovations. As currents of change sweep around us, even anchors of free and democratic societies such as their public school systems are up for grabs. Newly confident entrepreneurs, encouraged in many cases by ministries of education, are moving rapidly into terrain previously sheltered from the profit motive.

Times such as these require clear thinking, impeccable research methodologies, and trustworthy scholarly findings that can illuminate the key issues at stake for public deliberation. Without these the continued progress of humanity toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2030 will be cast into doubt. This is no small matter as the great achievement of the past seven decades has been the replacement of diplomacy for war at a level unprecedented in modern history. To progress toward the SDGs this anthology makes a signal contribution. It is divided into three sections devoted to social justice, professional capital, and systems change. Its individual chapters illuminate the most important issues in the field of educational change today. In every case, the chapters push beyond the study of individual topics to address broader concerns that confront all of us concerned with the improvement of teaching and learning in schools, wherever they may be found.

Readers of Future Directions of Educational Change will engage with a host of challenging questions. For example, how should we conceptualize the imperative for social justice in education not as an isolated topic set apart from our everyday curricular choices but rather as part and parcel of all that we do in our schools? In his chapter, Santiago Rincón-Gallardo observes the racialized bifurcation of predominantly scholars of color advocating for greater social justice and predominantly White educators focused on traditional problems of teaching and learning. Such a schism within the heart of the profession deprives educators from whatever positionality from optimal learning and debate with one another. It is particularly poignant given the presence of liberating pedagogies, such as the tutorial approach developed by Gabriel Cámara and colleagues such as Rincón-Gallardo in Mexico, that blends social justice with transformative teaching and learning (Rincón-Gallardo, 2015, 2016). Rincón-Gallardo sets forth four provocative theses that can help catalyze the field of educational change itself to engage more deeply and broadly with social justice movements not only outside of our institutions but also inside our schools and classrooms.

Other considerations then emerge from these four theses. Alison Skerrett draws upon findings expanded upon more fully in her recent book (Skerrett, 2015) to ask in her chapter how educators can stretch our understandings of cultural diversity so that we go beyond simplistic binaries of native and immigrant students to embrace a growing population of transnational students who move back and forth across countries throughout their childhoods and adolescence. Especially in an age of newly resurgent nationalism, it is imperative for all educators to break down the ancient curses of insularity and exclusion and to develop more global and cosmopolitan approaches to teaching and learning (Shirley, 2017).

Some of the questions in Future Directions of Educational Change are epistemic or methodological in nature. How do we know if the research questions we pose and the methodologies we adapt are matched to the interests of the populations most needed of new approaches to curriculum and instruction? What kinds of guidelines can we put in place to ensure that research includes not only intended outcomes of a given intervention but also unintended consequences that may be more permanent and long-lasting than the intervention itself? How can we build a unified profession where the classroom teachers who are in the most sustained interactivity with students collaborate along with the research community so that the balkanization of the profession that has weakened it for so many years gives way to a more multi-perspectival approach that dignifies all of those who make it their lives’ work to educate a rising generation?

The authors represented in this volume do not have single and simplistic answers to these questions. Some view themselves as building upon a grand narrative of increasing human prosperity with education as a major catalyst for liberation and equity. In the chapter by Alfredo Sarmiento and Vicky Colbert, for example, the achievements of the bottom-up Escuela Nueva reform movement in Colombia are situated within rights-based approaches founded upon the seminal work of John Rawls (1999) and Amartya Sen (2011). The signal contribution of this chapter is to show how even the smallest experimental project can blossom into a network impacting more than five million students given the right engagement of all actors at the local level. At the same time, the Escuela Nueva movement is not doctrinaire and has worked well with business groups such as coffee groups and the World Bank (Colbert & Arboleda, 2016). Educational change needs to be agile and adaptive, not sectarian and insular.

Other authors reject modernist narratives altogether for educational change. They interrogate the unintended consequences of managerialism for students and teachers in nations with complicated histories of misrecognition and exclusion in their school systems. In the chapter by Patti Lather, for example, researchers’ troubled histories reproducing dominant narratives are so thoroughly denounced that nearly the entire corpus of educational scholarship is cast into doubt. As a result, one is left with “praxis in the ruins.” One cannot imagine a sharper contrast to the confident optimism about future directions of change than was projected in the previous chapter on Escuela Nueva by Sarmiento and Colbert.

Others, thankfully, are more optimistic. Jon Saphier shows how educators in the economically challenged community of Brockton, Massachusetts, have worked together collaboratively to produce high achievement results in their local high school. Carol Campbell reveals how Canada, in spite of its federalist model that provides for no central ministry of education, has developed a shared approach to professional learning across provinces that in part explains the country’s outstanding results on international assessments. The case of New Zealand, as explained by Jan Robertson, illustrates how educators’ professional capital has been deployed to improve the learning outcomes of students from Māori and Pasifika cultural heritages. Alan J. Daly draws upon his research (Daly, 2012) into educators’ social networks to show how new forms of documenting and developing social capital can transform schools from isolated islands of remote bureaucracies into nodes of learning and exchange among educators that uplift learning and inspire broader, system-level changes. These chapters illustrate educators at their best: facing up to societal challenges with mindful determination to improve the learning of all of the students who are entrusted to us (Shirley & MacDonald, 2016).

To scale up, governments must not only become involved in educational change, but they must lead it. How this is done will vary enormously across contexts (Rincón-Gallardo & Fleisch, 2016). Still, wise policy makers will recognize that there are some similarities across jurisdictions that enable cross-cultural borrowing and adaptation at a national scale. In her important chapter in this volume, Beatriz Pont shows that many countries have overwhelmed educators with a veritable tsunami of reforms, many of which are ill-conceived and poorly connected. The preparation and professional development of school leaders is an area that has been widely neglected, with less than 4 percent of all reforms in the countries comprising the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) devoted to this area. In other areas, however, countries are learning from one another and implementing changes that improve both overall achievement and equity. Pont points to three changes that are especially salient: teacher effectiveness, early childhood education, and coherent structures. These are high-impact areas that will improve professional capital and student learning across settings, even though there will always be cultural differences from one school system to another (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Shirley, 2016).

If the field of educational change is going to evolve, it will need to deal much more forthrightly with the majority of humanity, who does not live in the Global North. In his chapter, Brahm Fleisch observes that the tendency of researchers to identify “reference societies” (Bendix, 1978, p. 292) that provide putative exemplars for all other nations inevitably has a number of pernicious consequences. However well-intentioned, such analyses can end up flattening the diversity of the world’s cultures into researchers’ own normative classifications. True valuing of diversity requires a much more open-ended exploration of just what is happening at the levels of schools and classrooms, especially in the Global South.

In terms of studying system-level change within a single nation, the chapter by Pak Tee Ng, expanded upon at length in his new book (Ng, 2017), shows how the tiny city-state of Singapore has developed an innovative approach to lifelong learning titled “SkillsFuture” that goes beyond the usual ways that learning is secluded into schools. Singapore, with life expectancy and per-capita income surpassing that of the United States, shows how countries with no natural resources can excel on many measures. When new results from the Program for International Assessment for Student Achievement (PISA) of the OECD were released in December 2016, Singapore was first in the world in science, reading, and mathematics (OECD, 2016). Intriguingly, Singapore displays none of the epistemic doubt or explicit teaching for social justice found elsewhere in this volume. Its success on many measures raises challenges for the entire field of educational change, including assumptions, such as the belief that liberal democracy is a natural companion of educational excellence. Singapore has pursued its own independent path, in which Confucian heritage cultural values focused on social harmony, ready adaptation of ministerial mandates, and a practical, down-to-earth realism loom large.

We are learning more about the kinds of whole system change that schools require, and we are doing so in ways that are both simplifying the organizational work of educators while freeing up their potential to facilitate deeper manifestations of student learning. Joanne Quinn and Michael Fullan demonstrate that such work, as activated in their New Pedagogies for Deep Learning network, can occur and on a global scale. When governments become insular, educators can respond by becoming cosmopolitan. The New Pedagogies for Deep Learning network illustrates one promising way in which such transformations can begin.

None of us can choose where we are born or the times that we live in. The future of educational change will look very different to us based not only on our race, class, or gender but also on simple twists of fate that leave one child an orphan and another the beneficiary of unearned opulence. Educators must now stand up to the nettlesome realities that now confront us with fortitude and dignity, mindful of our historical responsibilities and with full gravitas of the consequences should we falter. Education has an indispensable role to play in charting the future of humanity. So study carefully the future directions of educational change now, and share what you have learned with others, ensuring that in your own way, you will contribute to the betterment of the human condition through education.

References

Bendix, R. (1978). Kings or people: Power and the mandate to rule. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Colbert, V., & Arboleda, J. (2016). Bringing a student-centered participatory pedagogy to scale in Colombia. Journal of Educational Change, 17(4), 385–410.

Daly, A. (2012). Data, dyads, and dissemination: Exploring data use and social networks in educational improvement. Teachers College Record, 114(11), 1–38.

Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching and learning every school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Ng, P. T. (2017). Learning from Singapore: The power of paradoxes. New York, NY: Routledge.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2016). PISA 2015 results, volume 1: Excellence and equity in education. Paris, France: Author.

Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rincón-Gallardo, S. (2015). Bringing a counter-hegemonic pedagogy to scale in Mexican public schools. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 5(1), 28–54.

Rincón-Gallardo, S. (2016). Large scale pedagogical transformation as widespread cultural change in Mexican public schools. Journal of Educational Change, 17(1), 411–436. doi:10.1007/s10833-016-9286-4

Rincón-Gallardo, S., & Fleisch, B. (Eds.). (2016). Bringing effective instructional practice to scale. Special Issue, Journal of Educational Change, 17(4): 379–383.

Sen, A. (2011). The idea of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shirley, D. (2016). Three forms of professional capital: Systemic, social movement, and activist. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 1(4), 302–320. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JPCC-08-2016-0020

Shirley, D. (2017). The new imperatives of educational change: Achievement with integrity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Shirley, D., & MacDonald, E. (2016). The mindful teacher (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Skerrett, A. (2015). Teaching transnational youth: Literacy and education in a changing world. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

I

Social Justice

2

Social Justice

Section Introduction

Santiago Rincón-Gallardo

Broadly speaking, the educational change field is the body of ideas and knowledge that seeks to understand and improve efforts to improve schools and school systems. The term social justice, on the other hand, makes reference to fairness in the relationship between individuals and society and more specifically to fairness in the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and privilege. The quest for social justice is the dual, and often contentious, pursuit of (individual and collective) freedom and a harmonious social order.

Within the educational change field, social justice has either remained a secondary concern or been treated rather superficially. To be sure, educational equity, understood as a fair distribution of educational opportunities and outcomes among all students, is widely acknowledged as a desirable goal of educational systems. And it is true that some educational change scholars have examined and brought attention to the (mal)distribution of educational opportunities or outcomes among students based on their race, ethnic identity, cultural or socioeconomic background, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. More recently, some scholars and organizations have articulated the need to make inequity in outcomes the major focus of improvement efforts (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015), whereas others have suggested that educational excellence can and should be pursued through increased equity (Blankstein, Noguera, & Kelly, 2015; OECD, 2013).

But educational change has touched upon social justice superficially in at least two crucial ways. First, when present in educ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: The Many Future Directions of Educational Change
• I Social Justice
• II Professional Capital
• III Systems Change
• Contributor Biographies
• Index