Implementing Educational Innovations: A Staff Perspective of Personal Development Planning

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study has been to explore and understand the implementation of PDP as an educational innovation in a single institutional context. Adopting a Sartrean ontology in which the subjective individual takes precedence over the systems within which that same individual exists, an interview process sought to understand the attitudes of educational members of staff to PDP and the ways in which those attitudes impacted on the innovation process. As an innovation based around the concepts of academic and professional identity, and the ability of a Community of Practice to shape and drive the implementation process, the key barrier to the implementation process proved to be a failure to account for difference at a fundamental level. This was not found to be just socio-political difference but a psychological incongruence between the notions underpinning the concept of PDP and the multitude of worlds through which those notions were to be promoted. In Sartrean terms by focusing on a systems model of change management significant power relationships between self and context had been lost, and yet these ultimately proved highly influential on the behaviours and consequences of the implementation process itself and the willingness of practitioners to engage with it.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• PDP
• Sartre
• community
• identity
• barriers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Tymms

Mark Tymms is a Senior Lecturer in Education at De Montfort University, UK, where he lectures predominantly in the psychology of education and research methods. His primary research focus is on personal centred learning and the relationship between individual learners and practitioners and the educational systems within which they act.