The Future of Educational Change: Deep Learning and Social Justice

• In Event: 53.066 - The Past, Present, and Future of Educational Change

Abstract

This presentation seeks to set a direction for the future of research and practice in the educational change field. It identifies deep learning and social justice as two key areas requiring deliberate attention and cultivation if the educational change field is to remain relevant. It then articulates three theses for the future of educational change.

Perspective

Education policy and practice are conceptualized here as cultural and political in nature –cultural because they are embedded in and produce systems of belief, thinking, and action that guide everyday practice and behaviors (Bruner, 1996; Evans, 1996; Sarason, 1982); political because they involve relationships of power and authority (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1983; Grindle, 2004).

Methods and Evidence

Prominent educational change compilations produced over the past two decades (Hargreaves, Lieberman, Fullan, & Hopkins, 1998; Educational Change SIG, 2011-2016; Malone, 2013; Mehta, Schwartz, & Hess, 2012; Sugrue, 2008) were reviewed using a critical immanence stance (Giroux, 1983), that is, looking at possibilities for the future (what can be) in view of the present (what is). Deep learning and social justice were identified as key themes that, although peripherally touched upon in the educational change field, remain elusive and have become crucial to respond to current worldwide economic, social, and political trends. Based on these key identified gaps three theses were articulated that seek to integrate deep learning and social justice into a future-oriented agenda for the educational change field.

Results

The three theses below seek to offer direction for the future of educational change, together with implications for educational change research and practice.
1. Learning is a practice of freedom. Education policy and practice should be problematized, examined, and redesigned in terms of the extent to which they foster the conditions of individual and collective freedom required for deep learning to develop and spread across entire educational systems.
2. The instructional is political. Instructional practice has mostly been examined in its technical dimensions (e.g., learning tasks, use of time). The instructional core (City, Elmore, Fiarman & Teitel, 2009), however, can and should also be conceptualized as a basic unit of social relationships of power and authority. The pedagogical relationship between students and teachers resembles the relationship between the citizen and the State. Education policy and research should take a hard look at the extent to which instructional change agendas reproduce social relationships of domination or create new, human-centered relationships of dialogue, mutual learning, and solidarity.
3. Good policy ≈ good pedagogy. Education policy should be examined and designed with attention to the extent to which it models effective pedagogical relationships of mutual learning between central offices and schools or reproduces vertical relationships of authority and control.

Scholarly Significance

The three theses proposed here advance clarity of direction for the educational change field towards an equity and action oriented agenda, and thus are highly relevant to the 2017 AERA Conference theme: Achieving the promise of educational opportunity.

Author

• Santiago Rincon-Gallardo, Michael Fullan Enterprises