Introduction: The Growth of Educational Change as a Field of Study: Understanding its Roots and Branches

Abstract

In twenty five years of teaching graduate students about schools and ways of improving them — for both students and their teachers — I have sent many of them to “review the literature on change”. Inevitably, faced with the confusion of selecting from hundreds of books ranging from theories of planned change to the history of particular movements in education, dealing with problems of leadership, school culture or attempts to define the “meaning” of educational change, and even offering a variety of organizational strategies to effect change — they ferret industriously through this literature struggling to make some sense of it all. What is the genesis of these ideas? Where do they come from? How can students come to understand the development of this field of educational change from its seminal “roots” to its contemporary questions — many of which are branches of trees that were planted long ago and that have, in seemingly erratic and unsystematic ways, grown up over time? Perhaps this modest collection of essays will help them — and us — to gain a more incisive understanding of this field, a field that has its roots in “history and biography and their intersections within . . . society” (Mills, 1959, p. 6).