Possibility and persistence of educational change research: Concluding remarks to the twentieth anniversary issue of the
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Possibility and persistence of educational change research: Concluding remarks to the twentieth anniversary issue of the Journal of Educational Change Corrie Stone‑Johnson1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Dennis Shirley’s introductory remarks to this Special Issue of the Journal of Educational Change and all of the articles presented here are a powerful reminder of everything this journal has tried—and arguably succeeded—to be over the last 20 years. The Journal has served a valuable role in the educational research community since its inception. In addition to being a venue for international researchers to explore the shifting terrain of educational change in their own contexts and in places far away, the Journal has taken pride in encouraging the heterodox views inherent within the field. The articles herein embody the vitality of our field. Vectors of disagreement demonstrate that the change process is messy, contested, and complicated but also full of promise, momentum, and force. There is a danger in a type of “both-sides-ism” that can imperil a field, watering down what is published to a pablum that inspires no one. The articles in this issue—and in the twenty past years of the Journal—are in no such danger. These articles take a stance, urging us to be better researchers and citizens of the world. Take the vector of professionalism, for example. Who determines what professionalism is? Does everyone experience it the same way? Over the last decade I have described how different generations of teachers experience accountability broadly and professionalism specifically, underscoring that what one generation finds constricting another often finds helpful (Stone-Johnson 2011, 2014, 2016). Within this vector I considered what I termed “parallel professionalism”: (2017)—the notion that different generations of teachers can experience a phenomenon simultaneously yet differently. This collection of articles does something similar, showing how phenomena such as professionalism, taking change to scale, and educating for justice are all agreed upon as important but not are experienced by educators in the same way.
* Corrie Stone‑Johnson [email protected] 1
University at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA
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Journal of Educational Change
Even as we have encouraged and even sought out research across these vectors of disagreement, research within the field of educational change remains stubbornly bound to what Tyack and Tobin (1994) refer to as the “grammar of schooling”. This turn of phrase is among the most frequently used within our field, and for good reason; it encapsulates how we understand school and why it remains so challenging to make it fundamentally any different than it has nearly always been. Across nearly all of the regions of the world covered in this journal, school looks nearly identical. Thus, while the views presented within these pages may be heterodox, there is a certain stubbornness to the structural orthodoxy of school. This tension—between the possibility of change and the persis
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