Only a few years back, when our race made its first steps into outer space, this photograph was relayed back to earth by the astronauts of Apollo 8. It is the image on our planet as ‘spaceship earth’ – a vulnerable and isolated biosphere in the vastness of the universe. It says a great deal about where we live, what we define as home, and it challenges us to think about how we live. It shows a world not delineated by boundaries and frontiers, but a world united as a whole. It shows a world of connection and interconnection, it represents unity, completeness, wholeness rather than fragmentation and disintegration. It represents something else, there is no ‘away’ where we can throw our rubbish, everywhere is ‘here’.
The world of the image tells its own story, and we can associate our own versions of a story to it. What we see, sometimes is not what we actually get.
We in the West have grown up, and live in a very privileged version of this world. But the legacy of the Western world is increasingly being drawn into question, not only from beyond its borders, but from within. If everyone on the planet were to live their lives as we do in the West, we would need five planets, not just this one. This is simply unsustainable. Alex Steffen (2008) recently commented on a tension between the unthinkable and the unimaginable dimensions of our Western way of living. Unthinkable because the challenges facing humanity are on such a scale, and in many cases of our own making, that it is easier to pursue ‘business as usual’ and hope that the problems will go away, unimaginable because the way that modernism has presented individual lifestyle to the Western citizen is such that any deviation from consumer society is perceived by the majority as a retrograde step, an inconceivable transition. The result is that it is almost unimaginable to live in a Western society where ecology drives our economy, despite this having been the basis of human existence for many millennia prior to industrialization. We live in a time that seems to have forgotten what a sustainable way of living is like. We need to connect to the tools, the models and the ideas that will achieve the change.
The story is complicated further by our continuing success as a propogating species. We are also witnessing the greatest population explosion in history. The recent United Nations report that predicted projected population growth in some parts of the world will exceed all previous estimates. Young people across the world are growing up in much more connected ways than earlier generations, with new communications technologies being more accessible and individualized one catalyzing force of this connection is an awareness of the consumer economy that fuels such innovation. Whilst these young people might not want exactly the same lifestyle as their parents, they will no doubt aspire to their own version of prosperity, and many look to the West as a vision of what that might be like.
An ecologically defined economy is currently insufficiently clear for people to make a lifestyle change and see it as a prosperous choice. We don’t know a great deal yet, about how to build a society that is environmentally sustainable, we don’t even know if we can build one that is shared across people on the planet and which promotes stability, social participation and human rights in such a way that it avoids the critical tensions of inequity that the consumer society fuels.
Towards a new paradigm
At the time of writing, many countries are working their way through a catastrophic banking crisis. What is clear about the unfolding story is that the prevailing paradigm in modern banking has been focused on equilibrium and stability, and deviance from these conditions is inconceivable. And yet the inconceivable has happened and we have had the first run on an English bank (Northern Rock) in living memory. It suggests that these conditions of certainty and stability are not necessarily conducive to the times in which we live.
It is difficult to accept uncertainty. It is easier to convince ourselves everything is alright and continue to pursue an illusion of certainty. But it is important to confront reality, we might not comprehend it, but at least we don’t fall into the trap of consensual agreement that blinds us to reality. We need to explore probabilities, and these do not arise from certainty nor from consensus, in effect we need to move to a mindset that can live with uncertainty as a constant.
One central theme informing the background noise of this book is the constant uncertainty of climate change. It seems to me that the preoccupation with the banking crisis is deflecting attention away from the seriousness of climate change and its repercussions for the human race. As our political leaders attempt to flog the carcass of the banking industry back into life, the much bigger picture is not being looked at and considered other than an economic possibility.
Drawing comparison with banking, James Lovelock (2009) says ‘perhaps sometime in the past the asset manager who cared for your pension fund showed you a growth curve for your investments that rose smoothly without a break from now until 2050, but now you would be full of doubt about so smooth and continuous a progress and would know that growth can be interrupted…Yet we are asked to believe that temperature will rise smoothly for another forty years (p5).
Climate change and banking may seem to have little in common, but they are both non-linear complex systems and changes can occur very suddenly. Both science and banking rely heavily on theory and models, experiment and observation tend to play second fiddle the expansive theoretical modeling industry.
In a similar way, we might consider educational reform as a complex, non-linear system. One thing that we know from such systems is that they are unpredictable. The increasing hegemony of the performance culture has now embedded into almost every aspect of educational practice and it is predicated upon predictability in the form of targets. Whether it serves the people well remains questionable, being educated is different from being schooled. Education is aligned closely with economy, as the Minister for children, young people and families Beverly Hughes MP said at a recent conference ‘We need to develop in young people the capacity and skills to meet the ambitions of our economy.’ The role of reform of education, and the purpose of governmental intervention is assigned to ‘support you and to give you the framework’ through which local authorities can implement the requirements of central government. Fine, if the solutions being presented attend to the real needs of the time and are not, in a similar way to banking, simply reflecting a paradigmatic failure of the immensity of the crisis that is looming in front of it. Our attention on the educational function for economy has led us to believe that education is our solution in the desire for a better future. This is, as David Orr said, not entirely the case, ‘it is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.’ (Orr 1994)
To understand the possibilities of how these issues might play out in the education sector it seems to me that we need to ask whether the reforms of yesterday, aligned with those that are now underway, provided the pathway for a transition to a much more sustainable future, or will they simply realign themselves and assume business as usual. In effect, are we witnessing another run of the Emperors New Clothes?
My observations of current reforms suggest that what is happening is yet more of what Larry Cuban described as ‘first order change’ – where there is a renewed effort to make what already exists more efficient and effective, where the basic organizational features of what we call school remain intact, and where there is little substantive alteration of the ways in which adults and young people perform their roles (Clarke and Christie 1994).
Perhaps then, by way of an alternative design, we need a new frame of reference, a new paradigm. This is a conceptual challenge, a practical challenge and a leadership challenge. The current paradigm is failing to provide a sufficiently coherent overview any more, driven as it is by an assumption that schools require a state equilibrium and stability in order to define their goals and practice successfully. I maintain that this is a false interpretation of school and a poor analysis of learning. A good deal of the day to day of learning is disconnected, multifaceted and succeeds in spite of, and not because of the impremateur of orderliness. It is time we recognized that many of the problems that we encounter with schools in developed Westernised systems are the result of the failings of the managerial paradigm, it is out of time with the world it represents. It is time to connect to a different version of our future.
The need for a revision of existing ways of looking and engaging with our institutions is not strictly limited to education. Recent events such as the financial market collapse (Soros 2008) and the increasing awareness of rapid depletion of critically required resources such as oil and global warming (Lovelock 2009), are serving to underline the need to change our behaviour across many organizations, to reconnect with the creative and to build novel solutions to persistent problems. The narrative, on both personal and collective levels, is therefore under revision, but it is not a moderate reform, it is a narrative of transformation.
As well as artists such as Ben Okri suggesting that stories drive nations, social theorists have long argued that the ‘thought world’ (Douglas 1986) we create is known to subsequently define the worlds in which we live, and these serve as dominant operational narratives. Berger and Luckmann (1966) developed the notion of constructed realities in their sociological studies describing how people live out their lives within social contexts and draw meaning through them at both personal and collective levels. A coherent life narrative enables people to create tacit assumptions on what is real, what is right and what is considered to be appropriate ways of living. These assumptions have a great influence upon daily life, they generate powerful cultural frames through which personal and institutional lives are governed. Quite simply, in Douglas’s (1986) thought worlds, the dominant organisational narrative (p.70) is so overpowering that it serves as the script for our lives. Most of us, for most of the time, barely see or name the script, it falls outside of conscious awareness and whilst it underpins the institutions in which we work and through which we might live our lives, it remains difficult to influence because the constructed reality of the institution appears to us as the objective reality - changing this is at the heart of changing a culture and changing our mind.
But it can be changed. It is quite clear that we need to find new words in order to inform and transform our thought world so that it can respond more appropriately to new challenges facing environment, community, and economy . Whilst our current lexicon is locked to another, older world view, a new lexicon provides a way to see a different reality. The very act of disturbance of existing through worlds, generates a different pattern of insight, this has an effect upon how we might live our lives as our personal and social constructions are challenged.
Chapter two: Maintenance
In his recent work, Otto Scharmer (2007) poses three poignant questions for leaders, Who are we? What are we here for? What do we want to create together? He suggests that our answers differ according to the structure of attention that we use to respond to them. If we apply a materialistic or deterministic point of view, then our answers will tend towards business as usual. But there are other ways that we might consider these questions, and by doing so, we might find our responses raise a new profile of considerations that embrace a more holistic perspective.
By placing ourselves in situations where we can reframe our present thinking, we can see new choices that are available and open to us to select. In a sense, we can revisit our stories and we can amend and rewrite the script. This is why I think these wider population, resource and climate related issues represent a leadership challenge of great magnitude. True leaders are able to step beyond the present world views and offer new insight. It is a time of choice, do we proceed with business as usual, or do we embrace a new order of things and work together to build a more sustainable world?
Maintenance as transition
'...in 2006 mankind's thirst for oil crossed the milestone rate of 86 million barrels per day, which translates into a staggering 1,000 barrels a second! Picture an olympic sized swimming pool full of oil; we would drain it in about 15 seconds. In one day we empty close to 5,500 such swimming pools.'
Peter Tertzakian (2006) A thousand barrels a second: the coming oil break point and the challenges facing an energy-dependent world. New York McGraw Hill
In his work on Transition Towns, Rob Hopkins (2008) suggests that the whole concept is underpinned by a simple premise: 'that the end of what we might call The Age of Cheap Oil (which lasted from about 1850’s until the present) is near at hand, and that for a society utterly dependent upon it, this means an enormous change' (p.18).
At the same time that Hopkins (and others) was raising the alarm on oil depletion and lack of government response the International Energy Agency made the following declaration.
‘Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.’ Claude Mandil (2005) Executive director of the International Energy Agency - IEA.
However, somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the International Energy Agency changed its mind. Previous assessments of oil supplies were dismissed as unreliable and the Agency undertook the first ever detailed analysis of what the global oil resource looked like. Until very recently ‘it was mainly an assumption - a global assumption about the world’s oil fields.’ (Fatih Birol - IEA, author of the Energy Outlook IEA 2008). It was a country by country, field by field study, both onshore and offshore and in addition it looked at decline rates across the major 800 oil fields in the world. So we move from fiction to fact, and with the first set of data made publicly available, what are we looking at?
First, the IEA expects conventional oil extraction in the major fields to plateau in three or four years time and then it will begin to decline. In global terms there is an assumption that this can continue - working in the known fields until around 2020 when it will plateau as well.
Second, a new, revised figure has been identified for the decline rate, that is the rate at which oil is declining in the global oil fields. Last year (2007) this rate was stated at 3.7%, it has been revised to 6.7%.
This has some startling implications. It is now taken as given that oil is running out - the IEA are clear that this is the case. What is not clear is how fast we are running out. But when we add into the equation the IEA revised estimate we could be looking globally at 2020 being the likely point at which we face a crash. A point where our energy demand exceeds the available level of supply to meet the national needs. This is the reason we need to build resilient sustainable communities, without them we face considerable civil disorder.
So where are the plans? Where are the contingency strategies? If we are really looking at something that is just over a decade away then we need to begin to weave a post-oil mentality into the fabric of society - we don’t seem to be hearing the clock ticking.
Whilst this may initially seem difficult to take in, and perhaps the idea seems unreal as we busy ourselves in our daily routines, it is not necessarily the case that oil depletion represents a backward step in our lives if we take it as an opportunity to rethink how we live and 'plan sufficiently in advance and with imagination and creativity' (ibid). In Hopkins work, the challenge is clear – it is focused on resilience, or more accurately we need to rebuild resilience into our lives. This is something that we have slowly lost in our oil-dependent society, but which is abundant in many parts of the world where oil plays a smaller role in the daily life. Whilst oil has undoubtedly eased many of the toils of life that only a few generations ago (see list of oil related products below)
Figure one: Oil related products
Air conditioners, ammonia, anti-histamines, antiseptics, artificial turf, asphalt, aspirin, balloons, bandages, boats, bottles, bras, bubble gum, butane, cameras, candles, car batteries, car bodies, carpet, cassette tapes, caulking, CDs, chewing gum, cold, combs/brushes, computers, contacts, cortisone, crayons, cream, denture adhesives, deodorant, detergents, dice, dishwashing liquid, dresses, dryers, electric blankets, electrician’s tape, fertilisers, fishing lures, fishing rods, floor wax, footballs, glues, glycerin, golf balls, guitar strings, hair, hair colouring, hair curlers, hearing aids, heart valves, heating oil, house paint, ice chests, ink, insect repellent, insulation, jet fuel, life jackets, linoleum, lip balm, lipstick, loudspeakers, medicines, mops, motor oil, motorcycle helmets, movie film, nail polish, oil filters, paddles, paint brushes, paints, parachutes, paraffin, pens, perfumes, petroleum jelly, plastic chairs, plastic cups, plastic forks, plastic wrap, plastics, plywood adhesives, refrigerators, roller-skate wheels, roofing paper, rubber bands, rubber boots, rubber cement, rubbish bags, running shoes, saccharine, seals, shirts (non-cotton), shoe polish, shoes, shower curtains, solvents, spectacles, stereos, sweaters, table tennis balls, tape recorders, telephones, tennis rackets, thermos, tights, toilet seats, toners, toothpaste, transparencies, transparent tape, TV cabinets, typewriter/computer ribbons, tyres, umbrellas, upholstery, vaporisers, vitamin capsules, volleyballs, water pipes, water skis, wax, wax paper
were a regular part of daily routines, it has also been a contributor to the fragmentation of community – as people are free to travel much greater distances for work, are able to utilize labour saving devices and rely less on each other and more upon service and manufactured products from specialized industries. Seeing the re-construction of community as a by product of an oil-depleted world raises the prospect of other possibilities of transition thinking.
Clearly the transition identified in Hopkins work is considerable, but it is realisable. It is a good example of a need for a change of narrative, one that redefines the meaning of local community in order to begin to generate suitable responses to local needs. Community resilience is a critical feature of the transition movement, building upon earlier ideas and social movements of self-reliance, social action and local empowerment. It is not enough for communities to wait for others to solve this challenge, people need to act for themselves, as George Monbiot observes:
'Our hopes of a soft landing rest on just two propositions; that the oil producers figures are correct, and that governments act before they have to. I hope that reassures you.' (Monbiot, G. (2005) Crying sheep: we had better start preparing for a decline in global oil supply.' The Guardian, 27th September 2005)
So an element of resilience, and building transition comes in the form of self-reliance. This is not however, a call to resort back into an insular life. Instead, it is a move to embrace the possibilities of collaborative action. As Leadbeater (2008) recently observed ‘We are compelled to share our ideas; that is how they come to life. And when we share ideas they multiply and grow, forming a powerfully reinforcing circle. You are not defined simply by what you own. You are what you share. That should be our credo for the century to come.’(p239)
Leadbeater’s arguments in We-Think (2008) echo some of the earlier work of Ivan Illich (1973) who in his discussion of societal ‘reconstruction’ proposed a transition towards a more ‘convivial society’. Pre-empting the technological revolution of the internet, Illich foresaw a future where there would be a change in consciousness amongst people prompted through an increasing alienation from institutions that produce wealth for the few whilst dehumanizing the experience of work for many. ‘A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.’ (p12) He goes on to say that at the present time, (and I would concur that he could equally suggest at this time), ‘people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional elite’ (ibid). The result being that ‘institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions’ (ibid).
Resilience can therefore be seen as a form of social action, it draws down to local people acting locally to determine agendas for change that have local meaning and purpose. This implies that there is a means of achieving such ambition, and resilience therefore has systemic implications, connecting the local with national and international matters. It emerges as a centrally important theme in the context of our response in creating sustainable communities.
So what exactly is resilience?
Resilience refers to:
The ability of a system, from individual people to entire economies to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shock from external sources. (Source: Wiki 2009)
I think that there is a very important characteristic implicit in this definition - that of adaptability. Whilst it might appear that there is really very little that we might do on a personal level to influence the actions of major multinational corporations in their ongoing quest for oil, or across institutions in their attention to targets and goals we can, I think, begin to explore quite legitimately and with integrity, the ingredients of resilience that will enable us to survive in a time of sustainable retreat. To begin this work, we can look at current understanding of resilient systems, we can look to the natural world, and in particular the science of ecosystems.
Simon Levin identifies three features that make ecosystems resilient and adaptive: Diversity, Modularity and Tight Feedback.
Let us take a look at each of these.
Diversity: concerns the number of elements that compose a system - this may be people, species, different businesses or schools. Resilience arising from diversity is related not only to number of participants or members of a system- so the more diverse the system the more resilient, but also from the number of different types of connections that exist between the different participants or members. A good way of thinking about this is to imagine a wheat field, a monoculture such as a wheat field is not a diverse system, whereas the forest is a diverse system because it is biodiverse.
A second type of diversity is found in the difference between systems. Difference between systems in natural systems is a strength, not a weakness. It is Fordism (Kelly in press) that has pushed human thinking towards a deeply held belief in the singularity of approach to all aspects of human endeavour ranging from mass production of commodities through to policy approaches to activity as diverse as farming (where the legal requirements for animal management are the same regardless of herd size) to healthcare and education. However, design and practice may be more efficient in replicable modeling, but they are not necessarily more resilient as a repeat pattern in one context becomes the default pattern across many contexts. The recent collapse in the banking system shows how a commonly held belief in a particular way of operating can have catastrophic results (Soros 2008), and perhaps more pointedly, any challenges to the modus operandi is not tolerated .
We are learning that replication based modeling, which is the idea of exact solutions being taken from one place and dropped into another is not a way to build local resilience. Instead we would anticipate a more resilient approach to the use of successfully identified practices being to locate them into new systems and adapting them according to local configuration and need - each community for example, will nurture and generate its own solutions even when it connects with systems elsewhere. Overall, diversity demonstrates resilience through lots of niche responses and subtle changes to locally defined needs, in effect the political message is that local matters.
Derren Brown, the famous illusionist recently ran a programme on television where he offered a fool-proof service to horse racing punters. The basis of the programme was that he traded on his amazing ability of prediction. He invited people to come forward and place a fixed bet on the winner of a specific horse race. One thousand people responded by putting money on a horse, but here was the rub, Brown spread bet, he covered every horse in the race and thus guaranteed that some of his clientele were going to win. Taking only his winners, who were still committed to the notion that he was able to pick out winners, he repeated the process again and again, slowly thinning down the number of people each time whose horse won the race and always inviting the winning punters to continue to put increasingly large amounts of money on the horses. So punters who stuck with Brown’s winning bets began to win large amounts of money, and being on the inside track so to speak, meant that they were very likely to win again as the suggested bets were from a trusted source, and there was no cause to believe he would fail. Of course, eventually there was only one punter left, who was persuaded to put all her life savings on a horse of Browns choosing. It lost. However, television being what it was, Brown had it covered and she didn’t really lose because he had put the money on a different horse. Thus maintaining the magic, but not after revealing the scam to the trusting woman, and to the audience.
I tell this story because it emphasizes the importance of difference between systems which we have seemingly lost in our pursuit of educational reform. Despite more than two decades of endless change, we still seem no closer to making any real sense out of public sector developments. Public spending on education has gone up and down, according to the colour of the political flag that was in office, but in the main, the plethora of initiatives that successive governments have committed to as drivers of improvement in services have singularly failed to make the grade. We are now in a situation where we need to try a new direction as money is once again short, and there is a growing recognition that we need to redesign service in a way that high standards are established without resorting to spending more than economically we can afford to spend. For some this new agenda is seen as a paradigm change. For most however, I think in reality it will be a variation on the existing theme. Our reform, is simply that, reengineering the existing form, not transforming. Whatever happens, it is very likely that educational service reform will continue to undertake an equivalent of Browns spread betting, sifting only the successful initiatives as evidence of how to improve the system, and leaving on the sideline a growing number of ‘also ran’ schools.
We can see this in the logic underpinning much of the school to school networking taking place. The emphasis on knowledge transfer, replicating across the system any examples in the system of great success, making sure that the champions of these successes are highly visible and ready to make clear for all that will listen what exactly constituted their success (see for example the DCSF Teachers as researchers programme 2007-2009). The findings will then form the basis of the next development in areas that lack the cutting edge knowledge. We are already seeing this in the work of the schools challenge initiative (DCSF 2008). Knowing ‘what works’, is persuasive, it comes with the full backing of government seeking solutions in areas under pressure of greatest need, and as an approach it is endorsed by most of the professional development community who need to be seen to have a body of knowledge and be seen to know how to use it properly.
In this world, certainty plays a very significant part in ensuring that we have an equitable, open opportunity for all. Indeed, this has formed the basis of many recent school improvement initiatives, and certainly underpins much of the concept of what is known as ‘evidence led practice.’ The usual systems of carrot and stick apply, performance will be defined and measured against the implementation and management of the new developments in their new settings. We can presume, as knowledge transfer mechanisms begin to embed, that a few organisations improve, many will drift, some will fail.
It seems clear to me that in our next phase, we need to examine the idea of transformation and challenge the tyranny of certainty vehemently. What we do know about knowledge is that ‘whenever knowledge connects with knowledge, new connections take place. Ideas spawn ideas, which synthesis with each other until more knowledge results. It is completely natural.’ (Verna Allee 1993). We simply don’t know a great deal about how to transform a system in the form of a service that has been around for over a century because until now all we have ever done is reform it. Embracing the reality of ‘not knowing’ is much harder for us to take on board and embed into our organisational psyche. In the previous two phases of public sector reform, under both conservative and labour administrations, professional knowledge was managed in unprecedented ways by reinforcing the assumption that someone out there knew best, and in that certainty, we simply had to find out what it was, where it was, how it worked and how to repeat it somewhere else to make improvements. This may now be proving to be a short sighted approach.
Embracing lack of knowledge places a profession of educators in a very interesting position. It means we have to learn. We have to learn to see the problems differently. It means we have to learn to live with chaotic, diverse and emergent public service rather than assuming a fixed, orthodox approach that will suit all-comers. We need to learn how to create the conditions that are conducive for innovative, creative ideas that can be explored, deepened and connected over time not through procedure and content, but through a philosophy of emergence - a willingness, collectively to listen, study, trial, reflect, reconstruct and communicate with integrity and in a culture of trust. We need to learn to create a learning community, designed around relationships that are focused on emergence (Senge et al 2006).
A third dimension of building resilience comes in what Levin calls modularity. This is concerned with how connections are made. In particular this is concerned with networks and the sharing of information and know how. A resilient system is one that self-organises in the event of a shock. In Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen's work (Harnessing Complexity (2000) New York. Basic Books) they cite the example of apprenticeships as a good way of thinking about how ideas are passed, developed but do not remain dependent upon any one source. There are many other examples, but the main point is that social networks such as communities can generate resilience through their attention to the different forms of cultural, social and intellectual capital available across a dispersed community of people, it re-emphasises the importance of an acceptance of diversity as a prerequisite of robust resilient community.
Tight feedback: Where the consequences of action is quickly recognised there is less likelihood of inappropriate and continuous adoption of poor solutions. Tight feedback brings home the effect of what we do in any given situation. The selected level of feedback will relate to the types of connections we make with others, and the number of connections we establish - thus the three themes feeding into resilience are themselves interdependent, without each other the system breaks down and is weaker than with them all acting as a coherent whole.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that we are coming to a tipping point in our society where our reserves of a critically important resource – oil, will in less than a generation, move into decline. This raises a series of challenges for our species, at international, national and local levels. In the transition from an oil dependent to a post-oil economy, we will need to find new ways of using the resources we have available, and we will need to establish new structures and systems to suit the changes that will arise from this transition. Using Hopkins (2008) recent terminology, we can usefully think about this challenge as one where we build resilience into our communities. This is an integrated, systems based approach to change which combines personal and collective action at a local level, but pays close attention to systemic implications and possibilities that emerge from strategic intervention.
The next chapter will …
Chapter three: Design
Nearly a decade ago I made a first attempt at a conceptual framework to focus attention on the ways schools might enhance their operational performance in response to the challenge of sustainable community (Clarke 2000). The framework was a taxonomy of reform, designed on an axis of development from a modernist to an ecological paradigm. It represented a dissatisfaction with the school effectiveness and improvement field and an attempt, a flawed attempt as it turned out, to design a way forward through the concept of a learning community. I argued for a shift from the mechanical interpretation of the process of education, to a living systems interpretation of the process of education that was grounded in lived experience that drew more from the ecological than the managed world view. The framework, which tried to provide arguments for ‘learning communities’ of school, subsequently made me draw into question the appropriacy of managerialism as an organising device that would enhance educational improvement, founded as it is within a contrasting world view from that of living systems, where order, predictability, and accountability form the basis of operational practice across both the management and development of the educational journey.
Figure one: A taxonomy of transformation – from a managed to an emergent paradigm (adapted from Clarke 2000)
Mindset of managed change Mindset of change as emergent phenomena
First order dominated – making what already exists more effective and efficient Second order dominated – confronting organizational issues and challenging the orthodoxy
Delivery focused Reflective and process focused
Visionary Innovative, seeking novelty
Change as simplification of self Change as complexification of self
Isolated and individually accountable Collaborative and collectively responsible
It is through the attempts to create learning communities I have come to realise quite how the organisational thinking frame - the narrative of the thought world, dominates organisational improvement. It permeates every aspect of our institutional activity, and yet it remains unsettling as the vehicle of choice for many school leaders who are required to introduce change. I think that this restlessness amongst school leaders is at this stage intuitive, rather than rational (Atkinson and Claxton 2000, Clarke 2002). There is a feeling, that somewhere in the drive for higher performance there is a disconnect between beliefs, values and assumptions of how we might wish to live, and how we are actually living, what Fallon and Barnett (2009) describe as Pseudo Community.
This disconnect is creating turbulence and school leaders are beginning to look outside of the existing school improvement frame. They have become frustrated because they attempt to influence and inform the change process, by attending to the surface structures. Leaders do not, and indeed cannot, base their practical day-to-day decision making on knowledge alone as they pursue change, because that knowledge deals primarily with the surface change of their learning community. To influence what Peter Senge and his colleagues (2004) call ‘deep structure’ we need to tackle the beliefs, values and assumptions people hold and draw upon as they manage their lives. These beliefs, values and assumptions provide the bedrock upon which the ‘surface structure’ (ibid) of rules, procedures and processes become real. The combination of the deep structures and surface structures go a long way to define the activity of a society, an organisation, a community, a classroom, a family. In our case, having a well conceived theoretical framework of how to operationalise a learning community in itself might help us to interpret the reality of the school in a new way, but it hardly serves as a way of scoping human activity to lead towards operationalising a new paradigm, because we still mediate the meaning of learning community through the prevailing dominant narrative.
Paqette and Fallon (in press) discuss these ‘framing’ issues in detail in their recent work. Defining four paradigmatic frames they explore the nature of the learning community that will most likely emerge (see figure), given the thought world in which it functions. Earlier research (Bertrand and Valois 1980) indicated that few schools and school systems operate within the assumptions and values of only one type of paradigm. Nevertheless, they found that teachers and administrators in most learning communities orientate in favour of a single socio-cultural paradigm and a single educational paradigm and that the latter flows from the former.
Figure: Paradigmatic theory frames (adapted from Paquette and Fallon in press)
Managerial paradigm Existentialism paradigm Dialectic paradigm Living systems paradigm
Socio-cultural frame Positivist and economic efficiency assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society A person centered way of understanding self and society Communist and socialist assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society The sustainability of life systems and non-hierarchical complementarity of individuals and communities as ways of being and relating in a society
Educational paradigm frame Characterized by a view of education as an efficient transmission of predetermined knowledge designed to promote rational learning and knowing and maintain a socio-economic order Characterized by a view of education based on empowerment of a creative, confident, and free individual who shapes his/her learning process Characterized by a view of education as a dialectical form of knowing to promote the common good through a process of collectivism and mutual assistance leading to a classless society Characterized by a view of education based on a mode of knowing in which learners develop their capacity to create new alternatives by producing knowledge that promotes a vision of society based on non-hierarchical and democratic decision making and a complementarity of differences
Fallon and Barnett (2009) ask important questions of the fundamental and subsequent direction that learning communities might take. They expose the thought worlds in such a way as it is possible to ask the question: Which one(s) would be most appropriate and (why?) to frame our understanding of the nature and purposes of a learning community constructed in response to a changing environment?
The clear message from this research is that as schools grapple with the wish to create a learning community, they may be locked into a paradigmatic frame that impedes their chance of moving forward, which is accountable to a wider systemic approach that holds to a different set of guiding rules and principles, beliefs and values than those that they may be forming on the ground in response to new understanding of their context. This puts teachers and headteachers, students and parents on a constant collision course where ambition is often impeded by organisation. The different world views can interfere with each other, but they are working from different paradigmatic frames – they are different epistemologies. As a result, the dominant thought world prevails, and school communities find that they are not making the change to a learning community because the dominant thought world impedes the transition.
I discovered that the learning community ideas generated better understanding and provided the context for initially reinforcing but ultimately self-defeating processes of change. Indeed I now think that I deluded myself into thinking that the ideas espoused in our early formulations of learning communities were in any way a radical break from the past. I was attempting to shape and redefine a discourse of change from within an established, dominant world view. Little surprise then, that frustration has triumphed over euphoria.
Despite the failings and frustrations, I have remained closely aligned to the central tenet of the theoretical framework. That is, that we need to make a profound shift in our ‘thought world’ and take it from the mechanical to the living system. In so doing we embed deep into the functionality of any newly posited design, the fundamental truth that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, we are living beings pursuing our lives within a living system.
Recently, and almost continually during the last two years, I have begun to find ways in which this simple issue, can be achieved and I have watched and participated in a movement that is fast gaining recognition and influence in my local community . Whilst I am now far more realistic and conscious of my own role within this loose affiliation of people and projects, I feel it is time to say something more. At its simplest, I think we can safely say that the existing paradigm is best defined as a deficit model of education, where schools, students and professionals all adhere to a thought world where success is defined by knowing, and that the ‘knowing’ is something that is more often than not defined by someone else, somewhere else. In Michael Fielding’s work this is an issue of democratic representation (Fielding 1997), in Terry Wrigley’s view it is one of class access (Wrigley 2005). From whatever critical position we adopt, it is clear. The resulting ‘catch up’ of those charged with providing the educational service within this knowledge framework is perpetual; no matter how well intentioned and well designed those pursuing learning organisational design from within the existing paradigm will never resolve the problem of ownership and power, because the ownership of the knowledge is beyond the self or the resources of the organisation of the school. This I think serves to compound small successes, and doubly disempowers those who are struggling to deal with existing demands. Second, the entire system that serves to manage and improve education is premised on the first assertion. So we have inspections, national curricula, state mandates, off-the-shelf solutions which schools become ever more obliged to use in order to at least show some semblance of effort to keep in line with the direction of the flow. It is initially reinforcing, people see success, they are reported as improving, they receive adulation, they then buy into the idea that it is the only game in town, and once they do this the likelihood of introducing any alternative design is impeded, significantly.
What we see in educational reform is a repeating pattern, as Seymour Sarason (1990) reported ‘a predictable failure’ lies deep in the managed system, a prevailing misconception about the meaning of educational, and societal change. I maintain that this is no longer sustainable, there are too many externally pressing challenges for business as usual to prevail. It presents us with some significant questions. One being whether we really need schools in their current form any more if their capacity to make the leap to a new paradigm is a practical impossibility? A second being the ways that we might think about how to act, given the need to touch both deep and surface structure. A third being the need to provide some examples of this happening.
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