Curricular reform as social imaginary and institutional restructuring: implications for the international and comparative education study

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Educational development

Proposal

“Social imaginary,” proposed by social theorist Charles Taylor, is about a social understanding. It is the way that a given people imagine their collective social life. “Social imaginary” involves the way ordinary people imagine their social surroundings, which are carried in imagines, stories, and legends. It is shared by large groups of people. Social imaginary as people’s common understanding makes possible common practices, and that relates to a widely shared sense of legitimacy. From this perspective, we can said that if the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that the practice largely carries the understanding. Therefore, social imaginary is not about theory or concept which can be imagined without limit. On the contrary, social imaginary points to a process in which new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups, or people whom are induced into new practices. It is expected that, gradually, in the course of slow development, a set of practices gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute another new social imaginary. (Taylor, 2004, P.23-30)
As for curricular reform, we also can apply this perspective to detect a similar set of curricular practices through people’s narratives in which they imagine their school and institutional surroundings, and that make possible a set of their curricular practices (in a transformative way) and gradually change their meaning of curricular reform in schools and for school practitioners. The relation between imaginary and practice is not one-sided, and that points to a very complex of social process. Curricular reform can be an example that carries imaginary and institutional restructuring as practice in an intertwined way. How do schools make sense of curricular reforms and make practice, and how practice-makings, in another way, change meaning of curricular reform for practitioners and their views of school as an institution in a transformative society.
This study explores how social imaginary and school institutional restructuring are interrelated in schools and how that relates to the meaning of policy implementation in comparative education studies. The study is a multiple cases study in which 4 senior high schools are chosen. Major data collecting includes non-participant observation, interviews and document analysis. Participants include: 4 principals, 6 department heads, 4 teachers who involves curricular reform in their own ways and meanings. Giving the context of two major curricular reform policies -9-year integrated curriculum guideline in 1998 and the new 12-year-basic education and curriculum in 2018- the study found that there is a course of slow development of curricular and school practice in the past twenty years of Taiwan, due to the two curricular policies touching the very foundations of institutional structure that relating to culture rebuilding, changing power relations and resource redistribution. However, the new 12-year-basic education and curriculum which is situated in a more matured democratic surroundings, is more articulated to the desires of educators and the society. Therefore, democratic imaginary and school practice is hand in hand, though many interviewed educators may not recognize but they are always making practices of curricular reform programs in resolving conflicts within schools.
The tentative conclusions are that: (1) as a society from authoritarian to democratic, curricular reform, emphasizing on school-based management, teacher-as -professional and student –as- active-inquirer, is more likes a new social imaginary. However, in practice it faces institutional challenge in which ways of restructuring power relations and resource redistribution and cultural rebuilding are critical practices. Those practices determine how the new social imaginary of democratic school can be realized or not. (2) Those four school cases show different courses of development in the realization of social imaginary through practice of reform programs. (3)The findings show implications for the study of international and comparative study in ways that besides providing reform choices in policy levers as comparative framework (such as OECD,2015), social imaginary can be an alternative comparative framework that it can detect how true it is that school reform is realized at the levels of schools and common people, and how their realization and practice in turn change people’s meaning of school for social transformation.

References
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
OECD (2015) Education Policy Outlook 2015: making reforms happen. OECD Publishing.

Author

• Chin Ju Mao, National Taiwan Normal University