Exploring the limits of 21st century educational change discourses

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the discourses surrounding an ambitious high-school transformation project in a large Canadian city that sought to reimagine education for 21st century learning. It was grounded in a broad review of the latest educational research. While an initial eight schools signed on, by the end of the second year all had left the project. Drawing upon Gee's ([2005]. An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York, NY: Routledge; [2014]. How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge) tools for analyzing ‘Knowledge Building’ discourses, we explore how the project's communications produced tensions and contradictions, which reflect similar ones within the global research discourses on educational change. Key elements include strong branding, inconsistent messaging over objectives and ownership, centralized control and external sources of authority, a ‘start fresh’ ethos, and unfamiliar educational values from systems and design thinking. Ultimately, neoliberal assumptions about the means and ends of schooling embedded in the 21st century change discourses undermined the collaborative and teacher driven stated aims of the project.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• discourse analysis
• 21st century learning
• school change
• design-thinking
• branding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is a pseudonym for the actual project, as are other terms throughout the paper that could be used to identify it.

2 The initiative is being relaunched with two partner schools in the Fall of 2021, informed by the lessons from its first iteration.

3 In response, educators in the K12Lab in Stanford's d.school have developed a model for ‘liberatory design’. The re-imagined design process for ‘equity-centered design’ now adds an initial Notice phase to design-thinking's cyclical stages, in which designers develop a ‘practice of self-awareness of your own identity, values, emotions, biases, assumptions and situatedness’ (n.p.). It also includes an ongoing Reflect phase in which team members take the ‘the time to notice, focus and reflect on your actions, emotions, insights and impact as designer(s) and human(s) within your user's context’, including taking ‘equity pauses’ to evaluate the impact on equity and inclusion of the evolving work (n.p., https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/equity-centered-design-framework).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Development Grant (2019), Principal Investigator: Lisa Starr. Co-Applicants: Bronwen Low, Lynn Butler-Kisber, Joseph Levitan.