Participant: Dai Griffiths
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis

The dominant paradigm of educational management separates planning (notably curricula and lesson plans) and enactment (interactions between teacher and learners in the classroom), while ignoring differences among learners and the dynamic processes of teaching and learning. The result is management of a surrogate system, since key interventions at the level of praxis are invisible at the institutional level. This appears dysfunctional, and would be expected to lead to disuse, or evolution to another form. Its stability therefore requires an explanation.

Bateson identified two ‘great stochastic processes’: “evolutionary change and somatic change (including learning and thought)” and maintains that a balance between genetic control and somatic variation maximises the flexibility of the individual. He also identifies mechanisms characterised by attenuation and time lag which enable the organism to “achieve by genotypic fiat those characteristics which the organism at the given time is already achieving by the uneconomical method of somatic change”.

A lesson plan is, metaphorically, a genetic pattern (relatively fixed, and prescriptive), and the lesson itself a phenotype (more variable, and in interaction with the environment).

It is argued that the dominant paradigm is successful because sufficient ‘somatic’ flexibility is available in the classroom, and that there is a sufficiently strong feedback channel from ‘somatic’ practice to ‘genetic’ structures, enabling the latter to respond to changes in the educational and wider environment. However there are two concerns:

a) the significance of these two factors is largely unrecognised and undocumented within the dominant paradigm.
b) the ubiquity of computer based educational technology enables educational managers to exercise increasing control by means of:
i. enforced use of tools and environments
ii. orchestration of learning activities by computers
iii. use of data to extend the management of learning by targets and indicators

These concerns together threaten the ‘somatic’ flexibility required by praxis, and reinforce the ‘genetically determined’ control of educational policy and planning, forcing educational praxis to correspond more closely to the surrogate world of educational management. Largely undetected, this undermines the processes which have historically facilitated educational praxis within the dominant paradigm.