ANDY HARGREAVES

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF’S INTRODUCTIONREPRESENTING EDUCATIONAL CHANGE

What better time could there be than the opening months of a new Millen-nium to launch a major new educational journal on the subject of change?A new Millennium signals new beginnings, new hopes, new visions foreducation and those who might benefit from it. The turn of this centuryis a time when the informational society is taking a more mature shape,when the campaign to pay down Third World debt gives a glimmer ofbetter prospects for educational reform in developing countries, and whenacross the world, educational reform is itself a huge priority.

In effect, educational change is a worldwide Millennium project in thesymbolic and substantive ways of investing in the generations of the future.Nations, districts, leaders and sometimes teachers themselves are rushingto be on the leading edge of changes engineered by governments, fash-ioned by districts or financed by charitable foundations. As Michael Fullanargues in this first issue of theJournal of Educational Change, large scalereform in education appears to be back in a big way.

Those on the leading edge of change can find the push towardsthe future to be an energizing, optimistic experience. Historian GaryMcCulloch (1997: 89) notes that transformative millennial images “canbe used constructively in order to develop coherent and inspiring visionsfor radical, holistic reform. At the same time though, “they are prone toidealize the future, to build castles in the air that contrast starkly withthe intractable dilemmas of the imperfect present” (89). Downtown, in theCanadian city of Montreal, English artist Raymond Mason has created asculpture ‘Illuminated Crowd,’ the leading members of which are drawn,enthralled towards a bright light. As one moves back through the crowdhowever, one encounters darker conditions of anger, violence, sicknessand death. This sculpture, which represents the flow of human emotionsthrough space, could equally well represent flows of human responses tochange.

Change puts some people in the spotlight and others in the dark. Someteachers are on the leading edge of change; others are on the sharp edgeof it. Change can be novel, original, unique; it can also retread well worn

Journal of Educational Change1: 1–3, 2000.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

2 INTRODUCTION

patterns of the past. The practice and the theory of educational change andreform comprise all these varying forces and possibilities.

The study of educational change is no longer new. Since the 1960s,the launch of Sputnik and the proliferation of innovations and curriculumpackages in science and technology, educational change theory hasexplored the development, implementation and diffusion of change. Asthese innovations failed to prise open the classroom door and there waslittle progression from teachers being aware of changes to practisingthem, then initiatives in inservice training, effective teaching, school-basedcurriculum development, whole school curriculum development, and thefirst forays into classroom action research all emerged during the 1970s.In the 1980s, in many countries, the call of efficiency then returned with avengeance as more localized school-initiated changes proved to be isolatedand sporadic and did not spread beyond their own walls. Change becamea calculative science – something you could plan and manage throughmodels of effective schooling, planned cycles of managed change andpredictable stages of implementation. At the turn of the century, the scienceof school effectiveness is now being complemented by the process ofschool improvement; large scale systemic reform stands alongside avantgarde chaos theory; futuristic embracements of change are countered bysobering histories of continuity; and alongside optimistic advocacies ofchange and improvement processes are telling empirical studies of thefollies and failures of change efforts.

Taken together, these developments point to a field of study that hasnow come of age – a field that is multidisciplinary and methodologicallydiverse in nature. This journal is designed to represent that field and thetraditions on which it draws by describing and inquiring into the causes,configurations and consequences of educational change from the smallestclassroom to the broadest level of world systems. The journal does notadvocate one set of perspectives or paradigms but is a place for evidence,argument, inquiry and debate.

The structure of the journal represents this goal. The opening sectioncontains empirical and conceptual papers from scholars working indifferent traditions and from different parts of the world. The secondsection – Big Change Questions – takes controversial issues in educa-tional change, and brings together writers who take different contrastingpositions in relation to this question. Finally, in the book review section,we review just one key book per issue, but from different theoretical andinternational perspectives.

It is the hope of myself and my editors that this journal will become aprime place to discuss the leading edge of thinking and research on educa-

INTRODUCTION 3

tional change, to look for the most recent evidence and research knowledgeon change patterns and their implications, and to reflect more deeplyabout the fundamentals of educational change and its moral and politicalpurposes. We very much hope you will enjoy this very first issue of thejournal and that you might come to see yourself as an active subscriber andperhaps contributor to the educational community the journal represents inthe future.

REFERENCE

McCulloch, G. (1997). Marketing the millennium: Education for the twenty-first century.In A. Hargreaves & R. Evans (eds),Beyond Educational Reform. Buckingham: OpenUniversity Press.

EDITOR’ S BIO

Andy Hargreaves is Director of and Professor in the International Centre forEducational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Beforemoving to North America in 1987, he taught primary school and lectured inseveral English universities.

The author and editor of more than twenty books and monographs in educa-tion, he has established an international reputation as a leading authority andinnovative thinker in the fields of teacher development, the culture of the schooland educational reform. His book Changing Teachers, Changing Times receivedthe 1995 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Collegesfor Teacher Education. Among his other recent books are Schooling for Change(with Lorna Earl and Jim Ryan) and Teachers’ Professional Lives (edited withIvor Goodson). He is also the invited editor of the 1997 ASCD Yearbook, PositiveChange for School Success.

ANDY HARGREAVES

Director and ProfessorInternational Centre for Educational ChangeTheory and Policy Studies in EducationOISE/UT, 252 Bloor Street WestToronto, Ontario M5S 1V6CanadaE-mail: ahargreaves@oise.utoronto.ca