Abstract
During the last decade, there has been a renewed interest in school-based reform in the United States. At the center of this emerging discourse lies the question, what are reform-minded schools actually doing to alter the education found in their buildings? This paper represents an effort to contribute to these descriptive analyses of school-based reform projects. However, rather than ethnography, this paper draws upon the field of archeology to understand the substance of recent school-based efforts in the United States. In particular, it identifies and discusses several artifacts that are used as heuristic devices to understand the nature of school-based reform projects. First, the paper briefly explores the use of archeology as a means to understand school-based reform efforts. Next, it illuminates the nature of these efforts by examining various artifacts that have emerged from several of these projects. Finally, based upon illustrations, it examines the basic nature of these recent school-based efforts and the usefulness of archeology for understanding what is happening in these schools.
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Goodman, J. Artifacts of change: An archaeology of school-based educational reform. Interchange 27, 279–312 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01807409
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01807409