Session Information
03 SES 07, Curriculum Change in Scotland: Policy and Practice
Paper Session
Contribution
As has been widely noted in the research literature (e.g. Sarason, 1990; Cuban, 1998), educational change is highly problematic. As schools engage with new policy, there typically exists an implementation gap (Supowitz & Weinbaum, 2008) as social practices fail to match policy rhetoric. This central problem of educational change – the ubiquity of educational innovation (initiatives to bring about change) and the correspondingly weak rate of return in terms of actual changes in the social practices that comprise teaching and learning in schools – raises important questions. For example, why is externally initiated innovation so often unsuccessful in changing schools? What are the barriers that inhibit the successful take up of such innovation in schools? What factors might promote sustainable changes to the practices of schooling?
The paper addresses such questions, reporting upon a particular initiative designed to bring about and sustain change. The context is provided by a set of policies initiated by a Scottish Education Authority, The Highland Council, to promote the development of formative assessment practices (especially peer and self assessment) and to facilitate the introduction of a new national curriculum development, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE ) which provides a unified curricular framework from ages 3-18. The research draws upon a number of case studies – teachers taking part in the Highland development project – and data generated from teacher network meetings and focus group sessions. The research addressed the following research questions:
- How does the project facilitate and sustain curriculum change?
- What are the relationships between teachers’ identities, beliefs, and philosophies and the ways they enact curriculum change?
- What changes in pedagogy and provision have emerged from the project?
- What factors may be important in sustaining change?
We utilise socio-cultural theory – the critical realism (Archer, 1995), combined with insights from Actor Network Theory (Law 2004; Elder-Vass, 2008) – to examine how social activity is dependent upon an assemblage of different [f]actors: including material contexts, departmental and school culture and human biography. The research is fundamentally an analysis of the activity that occurs in schools in response to the espousal of new government policies and the promulgation of programmes by the council that are designed to promote the policies in question. In the light of such conditions, we acknowledge the importance of attending to the intra-action of human and non human actors (Barad, 2007), and the inevitability of teacher mediation of policy (Osborn et al., 1997) – the iterative refraction (Supovitz, 2008) that occurs as policy is translated as it migrates from setting to setting – as well as the corollary that traditional methods of curriculum evaluation, based upon notions of fidelity of implementation, should be treated with caution.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Archer, M. (1995) Realist Social Theory: the morphogenetic approach (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Half way: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (Durham and London, Duke University Press). Cuban, L. (1998) How schools change reforms: redefining reform success and failure, Teachers College Record, 99(3), 453-477. Elder-Vass, D. (2008) Seraching for realism, structure and agency in Actor Network Theory, The British Journal of Sociology, 59(3), 455-473 Law, J. (2004) After Method: mess in social science research (Abingdon, Routledge) Osborn, M., Croll, P., Broadfoot, P., Pollard, A., McNess, E. & Triggs, P. (1997) Policy into practice and practice into policy: creative mediation in the primary classroom, in G. Helsby & G. McCulloch (Eds) Teachers and the National Curriculum (London, Cassell). Sarason, S.B. (1990) The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform (Oxford, Jossey-Bass Publishers). Supovitz, J.A. (2008) Implementation as Iterative Refraction, in J.A. Supovitz & E.H. Weinbaum (Eds), The Implementation gap: understanding reform in high schools (New York, Teachers College Press). Supovitz, J.A. & Weinbaum, E.H. (2008) Reform Implementation Revisited, in J.A. Supovitz & E.H. Weinbaum (Eds), The Implementation gap: understanding reform in high schools (New York, Teachers College Press).
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