Vectors of educational change: An introduction to the twentieth anniversary issue of the Journal of Educational Change
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Vectors of educational change: An introduction to the twentieth anniversary issue of the Journal of Educational Change Dennis Shirley1 Published online: 13 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article introduces a special, 20th anniversary issue of the Journal of Educational Change. The special issue edictoras have organized significant international contributions to theory-building into three areas. These concern diverse modalities of educators’ professionalism, debates around “getting to scale” with successful innovations, and conflicting views of social justice in schools and societies. Each of these areas comprises an independent vector of disagreement and debate, with differing meaning and interpretations based upon the cultures and histories of the given systems under review. The article asks what kinds of new research, and what kinds of affiliated theories in these topic areas, can best help to move the field of educational change forward in the coming years. Keywords Professionalism · Change · Reform · Social justice Twenty years ago, Founding Editor Andy Hargreaves launched the Journal of Educational Change from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. It was a bright beacon of hope at the time. After years of slogging away in the salt mines of school improvement, it seemed that reformers had reached a cul-de-sac. We needed some new ways of thinking to move our work forward, and the Journal looked like just the promising venue for publishing research and sponsoring debates that the times demanded. It was a personal matter for some of us. I had been studying community organizing for educational change in inner city schools in Texas for over a decade and had seen evidence of a promising new model of conjoint school and community uplift (Shirley 1997, 2002). Just as real momentum was being established with many of these schools, however, new regimes of accountability intensified beyond what * Dennis Shirley [email protected] 1
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
386
Journal of Educational Change (2020) 21:385–392
anyone had imagined when state-wide testing was introduced in the US in the 1980s. Standards were promulgated with increasing force. Exit options like charter schools in the US and academies in the UK spread like wild-fire. The traditional grammar of schooling (Tyack and Tobin 1994), was back with a vengeance. Such phenomena now have been documented in tens of thousands of schools in the US and beyond. Accountability pressures provided new rationales for educators to return to forms of frontal instruction and curriculum delivery that innovators had sought to surpass with more active, student-initiated forms of learning. As evidence accumulated, many began to suspect that it was no longer a matter of tinkering here and there to upgrade the new reforms, some of which we had tacitly supported, but rather of critically interrogating them. It became important to determine what the purpose of education was in the first p
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