MANAGEMENTUL PROCESULUI DE NVMNT

(- Design instructional 1 - )
[Link]. dr. ION NEGRE-DOBRIDOR

CUPRINS
gne Theo of Instruction Robert Gagne's Nine Learning Events De l' "Educational Technology" la technologie pour l'ducation Robert Mager Gilbert de Landsheere From tests to current evaluative research Zece mituri privind evaluarea cadrelor didactice Teacher Evaluation Modernism, Postmodernism, After-Postmodernism

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

I. Gagnes Theory of Instruction

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prepared by Michael Corry Robert Gagnes theory of instruction has provided a great number of valuable ideas to instructional designers, trainers, and teachers. But is it really useful to everyone at all times? During this paper, I will assume the position of a teacher educator (something I have done formally for several years now) while examining the strengths and weaknesses of Gagnes theory of instruction. Driscoll (1994) breaks Gagnes theory into three major areas the taxonomy of learning outcomes, the conditions of learning, and the events of instruction. I will focus on each of these three areas while briefly describing the theory of instruction. Once this brief introduction of the theory is completed, I will attempt to turn this theory back upon itself while examining the strengths and weaknesses of its various assumptions. Gagnes Theory of Instruction As previously explained Gagnes theory of instruction is commonly broken into three areas. The first of these areas that I will discuss is the taxonomy of learning outcomes. Gagne s taxonomy of learning outcomes is somewhat similar to Blooms taxonomies of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor outcomes (some of these taxonomies were proposed by Bloom, but actually completed by others). Both Bloom and Gagne believed that it was important to break down humans learned capabilities into categories or domains. Gagnes taxonomy consists of five categories of learning outcomes verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, attitudes, and motor skills. Gagne, Briggs, and Wager (1992) explain that each of the categories leads to a different class of human performance. Essential to Gagnes ideas of instruction are what he calls conditions of learning. He breaks these down into internal and external conditions. The internal conditions deal with previously learned capabilities of the learner. Or in other words, what the learner knows prior to the instruction. The external conditions deal with the stimuli (a purely behaviorist term) that is presented externally to the learner. For example, what instruction is provided to the learner. To tie Gagnes theory of instruction together, he formulated nine events of instruction. When followed, these events are intended to promote the transfer of knowledge or information from perception through the stages of memory. Gagne bases his events of instruction on the cognitive information processing learning theory. The way Gagnes theory is put into practice is as follows. First of all, the instructor determines the objectives of the instruction. These objectives must then be categorized into one of the five domains of learning outcomes. Each of the objectives must be stated in performance terms using one of the standard verbs (i.e. states, discriminates, classifies, etc.) associated with the particular learning outcome. The instructor then uses the conditions of learning for the particular learning outcome to determine the conditions necessary for learning. And finally, the events of instruction necessary to promote the internal process of learning are chosen and put into the lesson plan. The events in essence become the framework for the lesson plan or steps of instruction.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Theory and its Assumptions

As a teacher educator who has employed Gagnes theory into real life, I have some unique insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the theory and its assumptions. I will again structure my comments following the three areas of the theory as described by Driscoll (1994). I will first examine the domains of learning outcomes. As a teacher the domains of learning have helped me to better organize my thoughts and the objectives of the instructional lesson. This proved to be very beneficial to me as a teacher, because I was always looking for a good way to put more structure into the objectives of my lesson plans. Additionally, the domains of learning helped me to better understand what types of learning I was expecting to see from my students. One of the greatest weakness that I experienced with Gagnes theory was taking the goals I had for my students, putting them into the correct learning outcome category, and then creating objectives using Gagnes standard verbs. I would like to break this problem into two parts. First, as I began to use the theory, it quickly became apparent that some goals were easy to classify into the learning outcome categories, but that many were not as easy to categorize. As a teacher, I spent a great deal of time reading and studying Gagne s categories in an attempt to better understand how certain goals fit in the different categories. This was good in the sense that it forced me to really understand what I wanted my students to do. But, on the other hand, it always caused me a great deal of uneasiness about whether or not I was fouling up the whole process by putting the goal into the wrong learning outcome category. The second half of this weakness has to do with creating objectives using Gagnes standard verbs. After the experience with categorizing the goal into the proper learning outcome, I was faced with changing my goal into a performance objective using one of the standard verbs. This always bothered me as a teacher because I felt like I couldnt always force my objectives into the form that the theory needed. I do believe that writing down objectives is very important, but the standard verbs made the process so rigid that I felt like I was filling in the blanks. I always felt like I had no creativity in writing the objectives I felt pigeonholed. Along with this feeling came the fact that all objectives had to be written in performance terms. This also made me feel a little uneasy because I felt that some of the overriding objectives I had for my students could not be expressed in performance terms. This objectives were more process oriented than product oriented. It was always very difficult to put these processes into performance terms using the standard verbs. As a teacher educator I found that the conditions of learning proposed by Gagne were very beneficial. I saw them as guidelines to follow. I didnt take them to be algorithmic in nature but more heuristic. They seemed to make logical sense and in fact I think they helped me better structure my lesson plans and my teaching. Once again however, even though I viewed the conditions as heuristics, I did feel that I was somewhat of a robot carrying out commands. I always felt as though I was being driven by the conditions. This leads directly to a discussion of the events of instruction. I felt that the events of instruction really helped me the most as a teacher. The events gave me the skeleton on which I could hang my lesson. The events not only provided me with a road map to follow, but also a way to look at my lesson plans in a more holistic nature. I was able to see how the parts of the lesson fit together to achieve the ultimate goal. This part of Gagnes theory seemed to be the least rigid to me because you did not have to follow it as rigorously as other parts of the theory. For example, Gagne explains that most lessons should follow the sequence of the events of instruction, but that the order is not

absolute. While I appreciated the fact that this was less rigid than other parts of the theory, I always had one important question. If the events of instruction follow the cognitive learning process, then why would it be advisable to change the sequence of the events or to leave events out? Wouldnt this have a great impact of the learning process? Would learning still take place? This leads me to the learning theory upon which Gagne bases his instructional theory. As a teacher early in my career who was very enamored with computers, cognitive information processing theory seemed like a great explanation of the learning process (I am not sure I still feel the same way). However, those who do not understand or agree with cognitive information processing theory might not feel the same. For those people, I believe that Gagnes theory might not work very well for them. Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to summarize the points I have tried to cover in this paper. First of all, Gagnes theory does provide a great deal of valuable information to teachers like myself. I believe it is mostly appealing to those teachers who may be early in their teaching careers and are in need of structure for their lesson plans and a holistic view of their teaching. The theory is very systematic and rigid at most points. It is almost like a cookbook recipe to ensure successful teaching and ultimately learning by the students. However, the systematic nature of the theory may be a turn-off for many teachers, particularly those who like to be creative, dont like rigidity, and who dont believe in a cookbook approach to ensure learning. An additional point to cover is that the theory is not always easy to implement. I am sure I am not alone in my feeling that many times it is difficult to take the goals I had for my students, put them into the correct learning outcome category, and then create objectives using Gagnes standard verbs. The final point I would like to cover deals with the learning theory upon which Gagne bases his theory. First of all, if the events of instruction really match up with the learning process, then I do not believe it would be advisable to change the sequence of the events or to leave certain events out of the sequence altogether. Second, cognitive information processing is not acceptable to all teachers. Many teachers would not agree with this idea of how learning takes place. For those who disagree with cognitive information processing, Gagnes theory of instruction would not fit their needs. Bibliography Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Gagne, R. M., Briggs, L. J., & Wager, W. W. (1992). Principles of instructional design. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

II. Robert Gagnes Nine Learning Events: Instructional Design for Dummies
This page originally designed by Linda Stollings (2007)

Robert M. Gagnes nine learning events (or events of instruction) have been in use by instructional designers since their introduction in the 1960s. Originally, Gagne worked extensively in developing the field of military training, however these events have been adopted by educators and designers as one of the key theories in both training and educational contexts. Many teachers and trainers have used them as a structure for lesson planning. Someargue that Gagnes nine events are dated and dull, however they still offer a rational framework which beginning instructional designers can use to shape meaningful learning spaces. While these nine events are based on behaviourist and cognitive/information processing learning theories, their simplicity provides a design framework that can apply to a variety of educational contexts. As well, with some imagination they can also be conceptualized to incorporate components of constructivist and sociocultural theories to create an eclectic learning environment. Background Instruction has been defined as a set of events external to the learner designed to support the internal processes of learning (Gagne, Wager, Golas & Keller, 2005, p.194). As a cognitive psychologist, Gagne first proposed nine events of intruction and conditions of learning in 1965 as means to activate and support the processes of information processing. Interestingly, in 1959, Gagne and Jerome Brunerworked on parallel working groups borne out a conference in Cape Cod on science education (Bruner, 1963). Bruners earliest work is echoed in Gagnes learning events, especially in terms of concepts such as readiness, structure and transfer. Each of Gagnes learning events was originally designed to produce an output that acts as an input for the next stage in the sequence. However, Gagne was open to the influence of many other educational theorists, which lead him to suggest that these events in their entirety should be regarded as one form of instructional strategy. Further, he noted that the order of events can be altered and not all events need be present in every lesson (Gagne et al., 2005). In the end, the nine events are useful in that they represent repeatedly validated key stages in the instructional process (Richey, 2000). The key question designers need to ask themselves is, What does the learner need at this point in the task? The Nine Learning Events

Cognitive

Stuff

The following table outlines Gagnes Nine Events and the corresponding cognitive process it fuels.
INSTRUCTIONAL EVENT Gaining attention Informing the learner of the objective Stimulating recall of prerequisite learned capabilities Presenting the stimulus material Providing learning guidance Eliciting performance Relation to Learning Process Reception of patterns of neural impulses Activiating a process of executive control Retrieval of prior learning to working memory

Emphasizing features for selective perception Semantic encoding; cues for retrieval Activating response organization

Providing feedback about performance Establishing reinforcement correctness Assessing the performance Activating retrieval; making reinforcement possible Providing cues and strategies for retrieval

Enhancing retention and transfer

(Gagne et al., 2005, p. 195)

Practice Makes it Perfect?

Researchers found that when altering the presence of each of the events during computerbased instruction, the inclusion of practice (eliciting performance), combined with feedback was consistently effective for enhancing student achievement. Furthermore, it was noted that students had a more positive attitude toward instruction that included practice and examples throughout the program (Martin, Klein & Sullivan, 2004).

Reframing the Old into the New The following table suggests some examples of how the nine events might be applied to the design of three different technology-supported learning environments.

Event

Games

Learning Objects

CMS/LMS See also VLE

incorporate email utilize quality Gaining attention video clips and audio in the setup utilize animation and audio invitations provide space for introductions/bios (faculty and students) utilize graphics Informing the learner of the objective provide background and description of how to win relate past module leverage the Stimulating recall use of background information and levels incorporate pre-tests leverage information from previous stages content to new material provide module reviews incorporate pre-tests provide material that provide material that clear, up-todate and accurate present material in a way that is present material Presenting the material that is encouraging and challenging have important information pop up provide animation and 3D models when applicable user-controlled and easy navigable clear, up-to-date and accurate provide paper based support material provide current links to online resources (articles, videos, audio etc.) leverage multiliteracies provide email offer optional Providing learning guidance hints, pop-ups with alternate choices and suggestions provide Help sections, user guides and tutorials contacts set-up chat-rooms and threaded discussions offer answers to FAQ provide overview, rules, and tasks/quests provide an overview of the module goals

include links to supporting references/glossaries assign meaningful tasks and activities give clear and concise instructions incorporate group Eliciting performance incorporate and encourage interactivity assign tasks/quests/challenges/problem s work leverage social software provides means for posting work include aspects of individual responsibility include Youve now tally scores provide rewards Providing feedback for achieving each level incorporate animated rewards for plan for written and/or audio feedback provide corrective feedback correct answers completed... tally scores provide for written and verbal feedback messages and encouragement encourage instructor use of discussion threads incorporate assignment drop-off box/feedback tools incorporate ensure Assessing performance achievement is assessed in a timely and meaningful way skills can be transferable between levels and games note transferable information in feedback provide websites for further information track scores/best scores incorporate score reporting (via email) ePortfolios See also allow for monitoring and tracking of student participation Enhancing retention and transfer provide further readings provide real-world examples and

knowledge can be transferable across genres

provide sequenced material

optional tasks make connections with other coursework/networks

(Becker, 2005 ; Gagne et al., 2005) Utilizing the Nine Instructional Ingredients to Create an eClectic Learning Stew

While the nine events do have their roots in behaviourism, cognition and information processing, they can still provide a guiding hand in the development and design of learning environments that include elements of constructivist and sociocultural theories. The following provides some suggestions on how to leverage the events to ensure a well-rounded learning environment. Of course not all entries will be included in any given learning event; this merely shows where designers can situate their choices.

Gaining attention
stimulate learners curiousity with questions present meaningful and relevant challenge

Providing learner with objective

this can be a general goal that is then personalized by the learner utilize problem based learning

Stimulating recall
students can tie new learning to past constructions of knowledge incorporate the use of concept maps

Presenting the material

facilitate student ownership of learning material have students create authentic material ie. Web-sites, blogs, hypertexts provides spaces for students to construct knowledge provide models create Microworlds incorporate games

Guiding the learning

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provide guiding questions utilize zones of proximal development See also provide for scaffolding set up communities of learners incorporate knowledge building networks provide authentic problem-based tasks around existing software packages and forms of Edutainment provide spaces for inquiry

Eliciting performance
incorporate Wikis encourage interactivity through the use of social software like Skype

Providing feedback
set up chat rooms for peer feedback/collaboration allow students to reflect on their own learning

Assessing the performance

monitor students progress have students self-assess their progress incorporate ePortfolios

Enhance transfer and retention

once students become experts have them coach/scaffold others
References Becker, K. (2005). How are games educational? Learning theories embodied in games. Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference. Retrieved February 15, 2007 from [Link] Bruner, J. (1963). The process of education. New York, NY: Random House. Constructivist theory (J. Bruner). [On-line]. Retrieved February 20, 2007 from [Link] Gagne, R.M., Wager, W.W., Golas, K.G. & Keller, J.M. (2005). Principles of instructional design. Toronto, ON: Thomson Wadsworth. Martin, F., Klein, J. & Sullivan, H. (2004). Effects of instructional events in computer-based instruction. Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED484984). [1]

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Richey, R.C. (Ed.). (2000). The legacy of Robert Gagne. Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Research and Improvement. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED445674).

III. De l Educational Technology la technologie pour lducation

European Medi@Culture-Online [Link] Auteurs: Lebrun, Marcel. Titre: De l Educational Technology la technologie pour lducation. Source: [Link] La publication est faite avec laimable autorisation de lauteur. Marcel Lebrun

AVANT-PROPOS Les outils et les produits des technologies nouvelles de linformation et de la communication sont chaque jour plus nombreux, plus rapides, plus performants. A lorigine de linterpellation dont le texte qui suit est le fruit, il y a la recherche des raisons et du sens dune telle course effrne ; nous nous posions ces questions en tant que citoyens du monde, en tant que chercheurs universitaires, en tant quenseignants luniversit aussi. Loin des ternelles dichotomies entre hommes et techniques, relations sociales et machines, recherche de sens et recherche defficience, notre regard initial sur la problmatique de la technologie pour lducation sera volontairement cosmopolite au sens que P. Levy (1990) lui donne; lide dducation que nous ajoutons son propos dcologie cognitive et que nous souhaitons enrichir par nos propositions ne peut saccomoder dun point de vue troit ou fragmentaire; lide dducation que nous ajoutons son propos dcologie cognitive et que nous souhaitons enrichir par nos propositions ne peut saccomoder dun point de vue troit ou fragmentaire. Nous souhaitons nous interroger sur le pourquoi, le comment et le pour-quoi de lutilisation des outils des technologies nouvelles de linformation et de la communication dans lenseignement et surtout dans lapprentissage.

Sagit-il dun besoin command par une socit plus avide des produits que soucieuse des processus et des acteurs ? Sagit-il seulement de prparer nos tudiants, nos futurs professionnels, nos chercheurs, nos enseignants piloter ces outils ? Sagit-il dune aubaine relle pour la formation si ce nest pour lducation de nos tudiants ? En rinscrivant ces diffrentes questions (Pourquoi ? Comment ? Pour-quoi ?) dans le contexte large dont nous ne pouvions, comme universitaires, faire lconomie, il nous est apparu que linteractivit de ces outils pouvait contribuer lacquisition de comptences transversales (organisation des connaissances, dmarches de rsolution de problmes, participation et gestion dun travail en collaboration, dveloppement de projets personnels ...) et plus loin lautonomie des tudiants 2 . Le dveloppement de ces comptences devient imprieux pour lpanouissement des savoir-tre et savoir-devenir des tudiants et plus largement des personnes dans une socit en complexification croissante

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3 . Dans une premire partie, nous retracerons ce chemin parcouru la recherche du rle, de la fonction et des finalits des outils que la science dposa progressivement sur les marches dune humanit en devenir. Dhorizons dpasss en tierces places dcouvrir, de connaissances matrises en possibles dfier, la technologie propose un esquif au nageur, ce tiers-instruit dont M. Serres nous parle 4 . A ce voyageur ainsi qu notre lecteur nous proposons une boussole ducation est son nom pour sorienter dans la mer des Sargasses de la socit complexe. Notre propos de rintgrer lhomme dans l educational technology, tout comme celui de rintgrer lhomme dans la science est une exploration difficile et prilleuse dont les sentiers ne sont pas encore baliss : Nul nest plus dsarm que le scientifique pour penser sa science 5 . Ce regard largi et ardu mais ncessaire que nous proposons au lecteur na pour seule ambition que de tenter de rconcilier ces ples, ces dichotomies de la science et de la conscience que nous avons pingls plus haut. Dans une deuxime partie, nous proposerons une srie dexemples dont le fond (le contenu scientifique) et la forme (le feu dartifice dont la technologie lorne) ont t maintenus dans un cadre aussi simple que possible afin que les considrations pdagogiques et didactiques, que nous avons voulu mettre en vidence dans la premire partie, transparaissent le mieux possible. V) INTRODUCTION Ds son origine, lhomme a cherch une rponse ses besoins par la cration doutils ; ces outils et les savoirs lis leurs crations et utilisations ont progressivement modifi les relations entre les individus, les groupes dindividus. Il est loin le temps o quelques rgles transmises par la tradition orale suffisaient maintenir la cohsion et organiser la vie de la tribu nolithique. Ce caractre immdiat et local des relations humaines sest rapidement complexifi ... Des caractristiques qui dpassaient souvent la fonction de loutil se sont cumules autour de loutil mme : nous nous rfrons, par exemple, aux techniques de construction de loutil, aux modalits sociales de partage de loutil, son efficacit dans le contexte conomique, son ergonomie sur le lieu de travail, son dveloppement, la transmission des savoirs et des savoir-faire associs , etc. Il ne nous appartient pas de reconstruire ici lvolution des socits et des savoirs, mais nous pouvons facilement imaginer que les outils invents ont permis lhomme daugmenter son pouvoir sur la nature, de multiplier ses contacts avec dautres hommes, tout en rendant son savoir et ses relations sociales de plus en plus complexes. En augmentant son savoir sur la nature, il sest sans doute aussi progressivement extrait du contexte naturel ; en augmentant son emprise par son savoir, il sest sans doute galement singularis dans le contexte social. Plus de savoir ... plus doutils ... plus de pouvoir ... plus de relations ... mais surtout une complexification progressive de tous ces facteurs et de leurs interactions.

Par consquent, la fonction assume par les outils et plus tard par le savoir propos des outils devient de plus en plus cruciale dans les relations interpersonnelles. Ce savoir est

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devenu son tour de plus en plus complexe : il se multiplie, se spcialise, sloigne souvent du lien direct avec les besoins auxquels il cherchait rpondre, de son lieu dorigine, de sa fonction initiale. Matriser ce savoir devient bientt laffaire de spcialistes ... lhomme de la rue y a de moins en moins accs ; dune certaine faon, le savoir finit par graviter autour de luimme ... les spcialistes du savoir parlent entre eux et la rfrence aux besoins des hommes devient de moins en moins vidente. Reste loutil, devenu instrument ou mdia, mais que peut en faire lhomme ... ? Une perspective interpellante et inquitante se dgage tout au long du chemin que nous avons rapidement parcouru : Le paradigme dominant de la socit actuelle est celui de la complexification, indiquant en mme temps la richesse et la multiplication des facteurs intervenants mais aussi la perte progressive en termes de finalit et de responsabilit de lhomme comme lment central de la socit et du savoir. Cest par rapport ce constat que nous dresserons quelques considrations au sujet de la socit complexe et des savoirs complexes. Notre intention est dy reprer des lments de rflexion qui pourront nous permettre de construire solidement le cadre dans lequel nous situons nos proccupations spcifiques : celui de lenseignement et de lapprentissage et en particulier la question du rle des nouvelles technologies de linformation et de la communication dans le processus de formation et nous insistons sur ce point dducation de nos jeunes. Dans les points 2 et 3 qui suivent, nous accomplirons le chemin qui nous a conduit de considrations propos de la socit complexe aux savoirs complexes quelle produit, quelle ncessite et qui la caractrisent.

2. DE LA SOCIETE COMPLEXE ... Notre question concerne la nature et le sens signification et direction de cette complexit : celle-ci qualifie-t-elle un contexte o la pluralit et la diffrenciation des lments et de leurs interactions actuelles et potentielles sont telles que la dsorientation, le relativisme, le mal--ltre en sont les consquences invitables? Ne serait-il pas possible et ncessaire de valoriser plutt les opportunits que cette mme socit offre afin de construire une soi-disant utopie de plante des hommes ? Sagirait-il dune entropie inluctable du systme 6 (social, ducatif ...) ou alors dune abdication ou dune dresponsabilisation des acteurs concerns ? Grer une telle complexit ne pourra se faire par des lois et des rgles dictes du contexte que nous qualifions dextrieur car il a quelque part ject lhomme. Tenter de rduire les diffrences au sein dun mme modle normatif ne fera soit que les niveler soit que les exacerber. Les outils actuels de linformation et de la communication nous permettent dexploiter ces richesses et ces diffrences ; cela ne pourrait-il pas aider lhomme, notre tudiant, mieux se reconnatre dans la socit complexe et mieux la grer ? Mais une information et une communication toujours plus sophistiques, plus performantes aussi, pourrontelles seules permettre lhomme de se retrouver dans une telle dialectique didentification et de diffrenciation ? Pour permettre lhomme de se retrouver dans cette complexit, de se retrouver dans limage que les mdias lui envoient, il est bien sr ncessaire quil puisse disposer dune information large et accessible. La multiplication, la circulation et la gestion des

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connaissances sont des besoins importants pour nos socits. Est-ce suffisant ? Cette seule perspective nous laisse en fait perplexes. Savoir plus, savoir mieux, savoir comment, savoir pourquoi peut-tre ... mais quen-est il du savoir pour-quoi ? Ny a-til pas l le danger dune illusion fondamentale, qui croit pouvoir raffirmer la centralit de lhomme uniquement par la puissance des moyens sa disposition, en vacuant ainsi la question prioritaire qui est celle concernant les finalits et les responsabilits parlesquelles ces mmes moyens doivent tre orients ? Notre rflexion sur ces objectifs ducatifs rechercher complte les propositions de P. Lvy (1990) pour lequel les dveloppements techniques ne dterminent pas ncessairement les dveloppements de la socit mais fournissent plutt des occasions pour ce dveloppement : En cologie cognitive, il ny a pas de causes et deffets mcaniques, mais des occasions et des acteurs 7 . Ds lors, le savoir-tre et le savoir-devenir de nos socits ne dcoulent pas de faon automatique de laugmentation des savoirs. Pour en revenir au contexte rsolument pdagogique dans lequel nous avons souhait inscrire notre propos, croirait-on que les grand-messes du savoir de nos auditoires ou encore lintroduction massive des ordinateurs dans les classes pourraient suffire, elles seules, dvelopper le savoir-tre et le savoir-devenir de nos tudiants ? De telles ambitions demandent un recentrage plus essentiel ; le devenir-orient de notre socit complexe ne pourra se construire qu partir dune rgulation encore plus fondamentale. Celle-ci implique : une r-actualisation des raisons dtre et des rles des tres qui sont origines et moteurs de la socit mme ; une pro-motion de ces raisons et rles par la confrontation critique des produits du progrs avec les besoins de la socit complexe (scientifiques, conomiques, sociaux ... mais aussi ducatifs). En dautres termes, nous croyons quil est possible dviter la drive conduisant de la complexification la fragmentation jusqu labsolu des individualismes, par la recherche dun terrain dentente et de coopration possible sans pour cela y dissoudre les diffrences. O pourrions-nous, hommes de la socit complexe, trouver ce qui peut permettre notre devenir, souvent erratique et fragment, de se muer en un devenir-orient tout en valorisant la richesse de la pluralit et des diversits ? 3. ... AUX SAVOIRS COMPLEXES Besoins gnrant des outils, outils ncessitant et gnrant des savoirs, savoirs gnrant eux-mmes de nouveaux besoins, de nouveaux outils, de nouveaux savoirs ... que de risques encourus dy perdre lhomme, que de risques dasservissement tenter de le rinscrire dans des modles qui nont t rendus possibles quen lexcluant. Des rsistances sont toutefois encore bien prsentes : que lon se souvienne du toll provoqu par la tentative dintgrer la culture (peut-tre plus fidle notre image que la science) dans les accords conomiques du Gatt ! Les outils de la technologie que les savoirs complexes nous renvoient comme un juste retour sont-ils mme de permettre lhomme daccder ces savoirs complexes que ncessite la socit complexe ? Aprs avoir dcrit la socit complexe et son risque entropique mais aussi son opportunit dhumanit et avant de rpondre la question du rle mdiateur ventuel de loutil technologique, cest le statut mme du savoir, de la science et de la technique

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qui retiendra notre attention. Lhistoire du dveloppement social (et aussi conomique et politique) des collectivits humaines prsente bien souvent des ngligences sur le plan de lattention la personne humaine ; un phnomne analogue et intrinsquement li cette dynamique de complexification semble avoir caractris aussi le dveloppement du savoir, de la science. Nous avons vu quaux besoins de lhomme ont rpondu, de manire intentionnelle ou incidente, des outils qui ont prolong son emprise sur la nature, sa sphre dinfluence sur dautres territoires, sur dautres hommes. A ces extensions progressives, se sont greffs des savoirs de plus en plus complexes. Mais ce savoir, cr par lhomme, garde-t-il sa vocation originelle dun savoir pour lhomme ? Une lecture critique de lhistoire de ce savoir, invent par lhomme, rvle que celui-ci quil soit thorique ou pratique sen est de plus en plus loign ; comme le clame E. Morin commentant la tche aveugle dHusserl, la science sest fonde sur lexclusion du sujetet nous ajoutons que sa complexit croissante nen a rendu que de plus en plus hypothtiques les retombes pour lhomme. Nest-ce vraiment que pour pouvoir se cuire, sans beurre, un oeuf sur le plat que lhomme a t sur la lune ? Nous pourrions parler de la science fondamentale, ce gigantesque atlas des savoirs conceptuels dont les frontires sont sans cesse repousses, de cette science qui quelque part anticipe les possibles au dpart de ses modles. Lhomme invente, lhomme anticipe ... . Il sagit moins dun savoir ontologique ou encore extrieur qui serait accessible lhomme par la dcouverte et lobservation de la nature que dune construction effectue par lhomme lui-mme. La question des finalits (le pour-quoi , le pour-qui ?) de la science fondamentale nous amne au plan de la science applique et de la technique. La technique devrait sans doute utiliser le grand livre des connaissances pour rsoudre les problmes qui se posent dans la socit en y trouvant des rponses concrtes . Par exemple, le CD-Rom, extraordinaire vhicule dinformations, nous amne sur un disque de quelques grammes un savoir encyclopdique qui illuminera lcran vido de notre ordinateur domestique ; quelques clic et le monde est notre porte nous disent dallchantes publicits. Rpond-t-il un rel besoin, sommes-nous capable dutiliser ce formidable potentiel sans nous assoupir, gavs dinformations ? La technique ne rsoudrait-elle ds lors moins les problmes existants quelle ne susciterait de prtendus problmes en fonction des solutions dont elle dispose ? Avec J. Neirynck (1990) nous posons la question : La technique est la rponse, mais quelle est la question ? La technique poserait-elle donc elle-mme les questions ? Ou alors, qui devrait poser les questions ? Larbre de la connaissance est profondment enracin dans lhomme mais ses fruits ne lui appartiennent plus. Les produits de la science semblent tre le rsultat dune fuite en polytechniques et universitaires romandes. avant, dune auto-justification, dune volont de crer le besoin sans tre mme de rencontrer les besoins des hommes. Nous retrouvons ainsi les questions du pour-quoi et du pour-qui que nous avons voques. Cet effort de r-actualisation et de pro-motion auquel nous attachions le futur de nos socits trouve son complment dans une analogue prise en charge que lhomme doit mettre en oeuvre en tant quacteur et producteur responsable de son savoir. A contre courant dune science dtemporalise, dpersonnalise, dshumanise, et des grandes parades de la technique, des voix se lvent de plus en plus frquemment afin

15

de retrouver lhomme dans le monde que ces sciences et techniques dcrivent et dans lequel elles projettent leurs produits 10 . La nouvelle alliance recherche affirme comme un problme en soi lappartenance de lhomme ce monde ; cest une interpellation fconde dont la science et la technique ne peuvent faire abstraction sans risquer de devenir les cathdrales du dsert dun savoir qui masque par son culte sa perte de sens. Il y a, nous semble-t-il, bien longtemps que la science a renonc son paradigme dterministe qui faisait craindre un rductionnisme mcaniste du fonctionnement humain ; de la mcanique quantique la gntique, la reconnaissance et la gestion des possibles ont supplant la rigidit des quations. Que nos considrations ne soient pas prises comme lapologie dune philosophie du retour aux origines ou du mythe dune innocence perdue qui alimente les rves dune humanit se rsignant dsormais son alination. A aucun moment, notre intention nest celle de nier les mrites de la science et des nouvelles technologies et surtout lnorme potentiel que celles-ci mettent notre disposition. Ce que nous avons voulu mettre en relief par lanalyse que nous avons trace dans ces pages est labondance, linflation des rponses existantes et possibles pour lesquelles les hommes ne connaissent pas ou plus les questions et ne savent pas toujours les poser. La question essentielle que nous posons est celle de la possibilit dune nouvelle alliance entre lhomme et l educational technology : une technologie pour lducation des hommes. En synthse des propos prcdents : Ce que nous suggrons la rflexion critique des lecteurs est notre refus de la spirale inluctable de dissolution du got dtre et dextriorisation des responsabilits et notre raffirmation de la possibilit et de la responsabilit dtre acteur de son devenir et du devenir de la socit. Ce que nous proposons est de voir comment et quelles conditions les outils de la technologie de linformation pourraient contribuer une rappropriation de la science par lhomme (pour-qui ?) pour vivre dans une socit complexe (pour-quoi ?). Au-del de linformation, de linstruction, de la formation aux outils mmes, notre propos est celui dune possible ducation ; notre cadre sera celui de lenseignement, notre lieu celui de lcole au sens large. Les technologies peuvent-elles ds lors nous suggrer une nouvelle ducation? Dans les points 4 et 5 suivants, nous rechercherons dfinir le rle de la technologie et sa contribution potentielle lducation. 4. DE LA TECHNOLOGIE ... En inscrivant notre problmatique dans le lieu de lcole, creuset de la socit, nous la resituons galement dans un contexte de relations. A quelles conditions donc les outils de la technologie de linformation et de la communication pourraient-ils contribuer une nouvelle relation aux savoirs en larticulant dans une relation entre les personnes ? Lexprience antrieure nous le montre : les mthodes du retour de la technologie dans un contexte donn, de surcrot sil est ducatif, ne sont pas indiffrentes. Limmersion des outils de la technologie (rtroprojecteur, audiovisuel, ordinateur ...) lcole na pas toujours tenu ses promesses douverture et defficacit ; il sagissait bien souvent dun contenu (comment utiliser loutil, ses fonctionnalits ...) qui venait se greffer, se juxtaposer un programme dj surcharg. Lenthousiasme des pionniers du LOGO, langage dexploration et de dcouverte de linformatique, sest mouss par le peu de cas que les apprentissages ultrieurs, gnralement cloisonns et normatifs, en faisaient.

16

Cependant des recherches nous montrent le rle catalyseur de lordinateur lorsquil est inscrit dans des mthodes pdagogiques organises autour de modles de lapprentissage coopratif et autour de modles constructivistes de lappropriation des savoirs 11 . Une mta-recherche mene par E. Bialo et J. Sivin, couvrant les annes 1986 1990, sur lefficacit de lutilisation des ordinateurs lcole, montre limpact positif de ceux-ci sur la motivation des apprenants et leurs attitudes envers lapprentissage et les savoirs et envers eux-mmes aussi. Cette motivation et ces attitudes contribueraient toutes deux lamlioration de leurs performances 12 . Si de nombreuses recherches saccordent avec la recherche prcdente qui nous informe sur les effets de lutilisation des ordinateurs lcole, plus rares sont celles qui tentent de dnicher les causes circonstances ou variables caches qui expliquent ces effets. Dj en 1985, R. E. Clark et S. Leonard approfondissent ainsi la mta-analyse (128 rfrences) de J. Kulik et ses collaborateurs 13 et dmontrent limportance des facteurs personnels et surtout relationnels et mthodologiques qui supplantent les caractristiques intrinsques de loutil mme. Nous laissons parler les auteurs dans leurs conclusions : Computers make no more contribution to learning than the truck which delivers groceries to the market contributes to improved nutrition in a community. Purchasing a truck will not improve nutrition just as purchasing a computer will not improve student achievement. Nutrition gains come from getting the correct groceries to the people who need them. Similarly, achievement gains result from matching the correct teaching methods to the student who needs it 14
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Utiliser les produits technologiques du savoir pour dvelopper une nouvelle relation aux savoirs de la socit complexe est possible si nous nous dgageons de la seule apparence de loutil et de son signifiant, le mdia per se, pour atteindre le signifi quil peut rvler en linscrivant au coeur mme de la relation didactique. M. J. Atkins (1993) dans son analyse critique de recherches rcentes tmoigne des avantages didactiques du substrat offert par les mdias au niveau de lapport de linformation, de la simulation de micro-mondes, de la transparence dont ils tapissent les murs de la classe ... ; elle souligne cependant les lacunes videntes au niveau de la description du contexte pdagogique dans lequel les outils sinsrent, au niveau des rles attribus aux enseignants et aux apprenants, au niveau aussi des valeurs qui mobilisent et sous-tendent la volont ducative des concepteurs de logiciels, des chercheurs, des dcideurs de curriculum : lintrt pour la socit est-il de nature acceptation / reproduction ou challenge / transformation ? Comme nous lavons vu, dans les systmes dinstruction et de formation de nos socits, le savoir a progressivement assum un caractre transcendant sur les besoins, les outils, les machines, les relations humaines ; cette caractristique en a fait dune faon croissante la cl de vote, presque exclusive, du systme de formation mme. Au fur et mesure que certains outils (le livre, laudiovisuel ...) se rendaient de plus en plus disponibles et performants, on vit dans ceux-ci lopportunit de rapprocher le savoir et lhomme. Ces outils firent bien souvent labstraction ou lconomie du tissu relationnel

17

dans lequel ils auraient d sinscrire, se r-inscrire. Cependant, lamplification des savoirs complexes de la socit complexe et de ses machines allait elle-mme faire resurgir de manire plus aigu ce substrat relationnel latent. Bard de diplmes, le jeune universitaire dans sa recherche dun emploi se voit interrog sur sa tte bien faite plutt que sur sa tte bien pleine. Cette approche critique que nous avons dveloppe au sujet des produits de la technologie et de leur utilisation orientera nos rflexions : nous ne parlerons ici ni dune technologie de linstruction soucieuse de la planification optimale des oprations mettre en place pour laborer un produit dit ducatif, ni encore dune technologie de la formation visant structurer le droulement dune leon afin den tirer la plus grande efficacit : les manuels de l educational technology ou de l instructional design regorgent de ces conseils 16 . Sans minimiser limportance de ces connaissances, nos proccupations se situent plutt dans une perspective pdagogique et didactique. Nos considrations concernent une possible technologie pour lducation. Les produits (que les destinataires nont pas voulu, qui nont pas ncessairement t labors dans une optique ducative ...) que le savoir nous lgue, ces outils technologiques de et pour la socit complexe peuvent-ils se prtendre dune quelconque utilit pour lducation ? Mais quest-ce donc que la technologie ? Parmi dautres dfinitions, nous pinglons celle de Galbraith (1979) : La technologie serait lapplication systmatique des connaissances scientifiques ou autres connaissances organises la rsolution de problmes pratiques
17

Ainsi la technologie de linformation viserait rsoudre un problme pratique dinformation. Une partie de la rponse, une partie seulement eu gard notre problme ducatif, rsiderait dans les outils que cette technologie nous propose : le livre et surtout lcrit, la radio et surtout la parole et le son, le tlviseur et surtout le visage et limage, linformatique et enfin le multimdia qui marie ces diverses composantes scripto-audiovisuelles. Outre les connaissances scientifiques requises pour construire et faire fonctionner loutil et que nous avons choisi de ne pas retenir ici, dautres connaissances savrent pour le moins pertinentes dans le contexte o nous voulons intgrer loutil : elles ont pour noms communication, ergonomie, convivialit, design dcran, ... . Dans les faits, elles visent principalement rorganiser ou vulgariser les savoirs, transformer le savoir savant en savoir () enseign(r) en se souciant peu, semble-t-il, des personnes (quen ferontelles ici et aprs ?) et des contextes quelles vivent, quelles dterminent et avec lesquels elles interagissent. En amont des questions concernant les contenus, les supports qui matrialisent ou vhiculent ces contenus, les caractristiques concernant les individus qui apprennent ou qui enseignent et concernant les activits qui les runissent apprentissage et enseignement doivent tre prises en compte : les connaissances pdagogiques et didactiques constituent des champs relativement loigns des proccupations immdiates des technologues. Cependant des ouvrages rcents 18 manifestent le souci dancrer mieux l instructional design dans les perspectives traces par les thories de lapprentissage. Enfin lcrit, le son et limage sont maris ... enfin on peut interagir avec le savoir ... enfin le Power-PC est plus humain quun Macintosh.

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Est-on sr que quelques boutons de plus sur lcran de lordinateur (qui na pas rellement envahi nos coles au contraire de ce que nous annonaient les futurologues des annes 60) peuvent, eux seuls, transformer notre relation au savoir de la socit complexe des hommes ? Il nous semble ds lors important de rflchir limpact des mdias non pas seulement comme une manifestation tangible des connaissances dans lunivers de lhomme mais comme une occasion dappropriation du savoir par lhomme : le mdia peut-il nous provoquer explorer le savoir, lucider les processus qui lont labor, nous reconstruire le savoir, poser enfin nous-mmes les questions ... ? Si les mdias vhiculent des rponses des questions que nous, perptuels apprenants, ne nous sommes pas encore poses, pouvons-nous les utiliser pour interroger les savoirs ? Cette dmultiplication des savoirs, des points de vue sur le savoir, des voies daccs au savoir ne pourrait-elle constituer le substrat fcond sur lequel pourraient se dvelopper les savoir-faire, savoir-tre et savoir-devenir 19 requis pour grer mieux et pour vivre mieux la socit complexe, pour finalement mieux sy mettre en projet. Cette ducation pour tre et devenir avec la socit complexe nous suggre-t-elle une technologie pour lducation ? 5. ... LEDUCATION A laube de la socit complexe, la tradition orale suffisait pour la transmission des savoirs ncessaires : lapprentissage loutil par loutil dans le contexte local (nous dirions sur le terrain) et relationnel se faisait naturellement dans le cadre de communauts restreintes. Lextension de lemprise de lhomme sur la nature mais aussi sur le territoire et sur les relations, par les outils et surtout par les savoirs progressivement dvelopps autour des outils, allait donner une place de plus en plus prpondrante aux savoirs par rapport aux savoir-faire. De spcialisations en spcialisations, les savoirs se complexifiaient et se distanciaient des besoins locaux et immdiats. Le contexte relationnel allait lui aussi ncessiter de nouveaux savoirs qui se manifestrent, par exemple, dans la lecture et lcriture : des lieux nouveaux (lcole), des mdiateurs (lenseignant) savraient ainsi indispensables pour lapprentissage de ces savoirs. Dabstractions en abstractions, le regard du savoir sur loutil allait donner lieu de nouveaux savoirs, de nouveaux outils. Si les premiers outils correspondaient de faon immdiate aux besoins des hommes, les nouveaux, revisits par le savoir, sen loignrent parfois pour mieux les anticiper, parfois aussi pour les crer. Les savoirs issus de la ncessaire gestion des socits allaient progressivement sabstraire et se techniciser eux aussi en assujettissant parfois les individus et en normalisant souvent leurs relations. Les techniciens qui tentaient de rintgrer ces savoirs dans la sphre de lhomme en proposant des outils pour rpondre aux nouveaux besoins devaient rapprendre et faire rapprendre grer linformation, grer les diffrences ... Linformatique et les tlcommunications se pointaient lhorizon porteuses de nouveaux concepts : information, communication, interaction, ouverture sur le monde des techniques ... des hommes aussi ? Au besoin de formation, polarise sur le savoir, va-t-il se substituer un besoin dducation : comment tre dans la socit complexe avec ces outils, ces savoirs, ces outils dorganisation du savoir que sont les ordinateurs ? Loutil qui nous parle de relations, de rseaux, dinteractivit nous permettra-t-il de dpasser linteractivit fonctionnelle que propose le clavier ou lcran pour atteindre une interactivit relationnelle permettant daccder de nouveaux savoirs au travers des tres qui les construisent, qui les vivent ?

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Nous relions notre concept dinteractivit fonctionnelle ceux dinteractivit ractive et proactive cits par R. A. Schwier et E. R. Misanchuk (1993) : dans linteractivit ractive, lordinateur attend de lapprenant une rponse prcise un stimulus quil lui propose (logiciels de type drill and practice, tutoriels ...) ; dans linteractivit proactive, lapprenant entreprend une construction personnelle face un contexte que lordinateur lui propose (logiciels de type simulation, modlisation ...). Ces auteurs compltent ces deux modes par celui dinteractivit mutuelle dans laquelle lapprenant et le systme informatique intelligent sadaptent mutuellement (intelligence artificielle, systmes experts ...) 20 ; nous largissons ce dernier mode dans un concept dinteractivit relationnelle qui lenrichit par les perspectives interpersonnelles auxquelles lordinateur convie les apprenants dans le cadre de travaux coopratifs. La figure ci-dessous organise ces concepts dinteractivit : linteractivit constitue pour nous un tat potentiel dynamis par les situations pdagogiques et didactiques dans lesquelles les savoirs, et surtout les apprenants et les enseignants entrent en interaction. Les trois niveaux dinteraction que nous prsentons scandent un chemin le long duquel la place et linitiative de lapprenant sont de plus en plus fortes ; cest aussi un chemin qui nous conduit dun ple centr sur loutil, prsentant des contenus spcifiques et des situations relativement fermes, un ple centr sur lapprenant et son projet autour de situations complexes et ouvertes. Ce chemin, fond sur lintgration progressive des savoirs (S) et des savoir-faire (SF), souvre de plus en plus vers des savoir-tre (SE) et savoir-devenir (SD) ; ces derniers sexercent dans les relations interpersonnelles suscites par des mthodes ducatives qui mettent en place des occasions de dvelopper les comptences transversales requises par la socit complexe. A titre dexemple, nous voyons que le mode interpersonnel (case en bas droite) sappuie sur les quatre dimensions du savoir en les intgrant et contribue dvelopper (les quatre flches sortantes) harmonieusement ces dimensions. Des descriptions de logiciels prsentes dans la seconde partie de cet article illustreront davantage notre propos. Comment parvenir et faire accder cette ducation, laquelle nous attribuons la tche de rduire le dcalage entropique entre savoir(s), savoir(s)-faire, savoir(s)-tre et savoir (s)-devenir des hommes ? Pouvons-nous, dans le cadre de lenseignement, rellement chercher recomposer ce puzzle, ralimenter une intgration dynamique et progressive entre ces dimensions, actualiser cette utopie de la plante des hommes ? La rponse ne se trouve dans aucune dfinition illusoirement dfinitive de lducation que nous pourrions injecter cette tape de nos rflexions. Le dbat ternel sur la nature de lducation nest pas non plus ce qui peut effectivement nous aider matriser mieux cette complexit dans laquelle nous avons dcel les symptmes dun mal ltre diffus. Plutt, reconnaissons ce besoin pragmatique dducation qui, tout en intgrant linstruction et la formation mais les dpassant par une porte proactive bien plus puissante, peut rpondre aux besoins et aux aspirations des hommes de la socit complexe. Ces interrogations sur le comment de lducation conduisent notre attention sur les mthodes denseignement dans lesquelles linstruction, la formation et lducation devraient trouver leurs articulations mutuelles et dans lesquelles aussi enseignants et apprenants se retrouvent. Notre propos nest pas de nous joindre ceux qui chantent le requiem de lcole, au nom de son inefficacit endmique, de son retard chronique face aux commandes du

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monde professionnel et conomique, de sa lourdeur sadapter aux rythmes de la modernit ou, encore, de son encyclopdisme qui toufferait la crativit et la richesse potentielle des tudiants (mais aussi des enseignants ...). Nous sommes bien conscients que les institutions ducatives, de lcole maternelle luniversit, foisonnent dinitiatives pdagogiques innovantes qui tmoignent de la vitalit de ceux qui y oeuvrent, de leur exigence, de leur volont et de leur capacit de changement. Nanmoins, nous assistons encore souvent des cours qui ne donnent quun savoir dtemporalis, dcontextualis, dpersonnalis, un savoir aseptis qui fait abstraction du cheminement humain souvent fait dhsitations, derreurs, de questionnements multiples, de longues priodes dobscurit par lequel il a t progressivement labor. Les situations didactiques ressemblent trop souvent de prestigieux monologues o le savoir savant est dlivr tout au long de voies royales, sans que les expriences de la vie concrte quotidienne puissent le questionner, le mettre en rupture mais aussi le faire retrouver. Il est l, prt tre donn plutt que rellement enseign cest--dire mis en tat dtre appris, prt tre redit plus qu tre vcu. Nous retrouvons dans le cadre de lenseignement et de lapprentissage cette mme disjonction artificielle entre savoir, savoir-faire et savoir-tre : laccumulation des savoirs reste gagnante sur lintgration de ceux-ci dans le dveloppement des comportements et des attitudes des tudiants. Cette mise en vitrine de contenus singuliers et de savoirs fossiliss laquelle lenseignement est trop souvent rduit peut-elle vraiment se prtendre ducative ? Ce savoir qui vient den haut, dtach du tissu relationnel et du contexte des besoins, des attentes, des contraintes et des aspirations qui lont gnr peut-il encore prendre sens, faire sens, tre sens ? Ltudiant risque de se trouver en prsence dune multitude de pices de quelque vague puzzle : chaque spcialiste lui explique en long et en large sa pice de prdilection mais personne ne laide reconstituer limage densemble permettant de situer chacune des diffrentes pices dans le tout o elle sinsre. La spcialisation ne suffit pas, ne suffit plus , ... elle serait plutt un poids gnant sur sa nuque quune aile qui lui permettrait de slever 21 . La faillite dun certain type dducation qui laisse nos jeunes avec lme dsarme 22 , incapables daffronter les ralits de la vie et les diversits des cultures qui deviennent de plus en plus difficiles saisir et grer est sous nos yeux. Des fleuves dencre, de mots et dimages nous parlent de la crise des valeurs, de la me-generation, dune adolescence ternelle de beaucoup de jeunes qui repoussent de plus en plus la transition critique vers lge adulte o ils devraient se prendre en charge ; ou encore, ils nous parlent des exigences ambigus du monde professionnel pour des meneurs dides, de projets, dhommes et pas seulement pour des excuteurs de consignes, mme hypercomptents ; ou encore, ils dvoilent les statistiques tragiques de la criminalit juvnile, du suicide des adolescents, de la recherche de paradis artificiels, ... encore une fuite face un mal dtre auquel on ne trouve pas dautres rponses. Littrature. Sommes-nous trop ambitieux (ou peut-tre trop pdagogues ...) en affirmant que le rarmement de lme pourrait tre soutenu par un enseignement, une ducation qui puisse concrtement aider les tudiants sapproprier des connaissances et

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dvelopper des comptences rellement utiles et ncessaires la dfinition et laccomplissement de leur projet dtude, de leur projet professionnel et surtout de leur projet personnel dans la socit complexe ? 23 A lencontre de ces disjonctions entre personne et socit, entre savoir-tre et contenus, nous proposons leur conjonction par le dveloppement dans le cadre mme du systme denseignement de comptences transversales non seulement comme un produit atteindre mais comme un processus ouvert, planifi tout au long des tudes, sans cesse ractualis et visant la promotion des personnes. Dans les trois derniers points de cette premire partie, nous dcrirons certaines caractristiques des mthodes dducation pour la socit complexe. Cest lapprenant cependant que reviendra la tche de sexercer aux mthodes pour sduquer lui-mme. Quel rle attribuer aux mdias dans cette perspective ? 6. DES METHODES DEDUCATION ... Force nous est de constater que le dveloppement de ces comptences transversales ne constitue pas un objectif effectivement poursuivi dans nos coles. Mais o sont alors les occasions dapprendre et dexercer activement ces comptences ? Cela devrait-il se faire ailleurs ? Lcole se repose-t-elle ds lors sur un ailleurs o ces comptences seraient effectivement acquises, construites, mises en oeuvre ? Si cet ailleurs (la famille, la communaut locale...) tait autrefois le ciment qui unissait ces savoirs aux savoir-tre et aux savoir-devenir, lclatement de la socit complexe auquel nous assistons ne le permet plus. La rintgration et la relocalisation des savoirs de lcole :
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dans dautres savoirs que la socit propose de manire parallle (journaux, tlvision, mdia...) dans les besoins, problmes et relations complexes que cette socit requiert demandent aujourdhui dautres moyens, dautres mthodes. Il ne nous est pas possible dans cet article de dcrire les avantages et les inconvnients des diverses mthodes denseignement ; cependant, on met souvent en vidence la mthode du problem-solving comme une occasion dactualiser les savoirs structurs de lcole dans la structuration des dmarches requises pour rsoudre au mieux des problmes (et non des exercices) qui se posent en dehors de lcole. Woods (1987) prconise que ces dmarches ne restent pas accessoires ou latentes face lavnement de la rponse attendue et quelles soient enseignes part entire ; il ne nglige cependant pas le fait quune relle dmarche par rsolution de problmes ncessite une conjonction importante de nombreux savoirs de natures et dorigines diverses 24 . O ltudiant se les construit-il ? Des outils peuvent-ils laider manipuler, structurer les savoirs sans quun enseignement systmatique de ceux-ci ait lieu ? Pourquoi certains tudiants se dbrouillent-ils mieux que dautres plus dmunis ? Le systme ducatif ne favorise-t-il pas une caste de ceux qui ont la chance, par leur milieu, par leurs expriences dacqurir ces comptences transversales, de les construire, de les mettre en oeuvre ? Est-ce laveu dune cole qui accepte, qui se rsigne ntre que le temple du savoir ? Est-ce encore, face la complexit, une cole ? Si la question dune cole plus ducative surgit en ce moment, nest-ce pas parce quelle sest progressivement loigne de la socit, de ses besoins, de ses outils ? Les

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recherches pdagogiques que lon vante parfois sans trop y croire souvent, la publicit tapageuse des coles pour de nouvelles pdagogies, ltalage des moyens des salles dinformatique trop peu utilises ne sont-ils que le dcorum dune bonne conscience tranquille visant cacher ltouffement de la signification et du sens, sous linflation des savoirs parpills ? 7. ... AUX METHODES POUR S EDUQUER ... Une nouvelle mdiation entre les savoirs de lcole et ceux de la socit complexe, par lexercice des comptences transversales soutenues leur tour par les outils technologiques de linformation et de la communication, doit ds lors tre promue par lcole mme. Au-del des outils, le besoin dducation que nous avons dtect ncessite aussi des mthodes pdagogiques profondment ancres dans linteraction entre les tudiants, entre les tudiants et lenseignant utilisant ensemble des outils potentiel hautement interactif, des mthodes insistant plus sur les dmarches de construction des savoirs que sur la distribution de savoirs construits. Notre proposition trouve un soutien dans les conclusions de la mta-recherche dont nous avons parl plus haut : elle insiste sur le fait que ce ne sont pas tant les caractristiques propres de loutil qui sont importantes mais la manire dont il est soutenu et intgr par lenvironnement ducatif de la classe et de linstitution 25 . Il sagit de situer les mdias fruit du savoir complexe de la socit complexe dans la relation didactique, celle qui unit les enseignants et les apprenants dans la re-cration de savoirs riches de sens. Il serait illusoire de circonscrire les mthodes dducation dans des dfinitions grandiloquentes et dans des recettes passe-partout. Cela signifierait vouloir abstraire des processus qui se situent et se ralisent dans des contextes concrets. Nous retomberions ainsi dans la mme dynamique perverse que nous avons dnonce : celle dun savoir sur lducation dtach du terrain des besoins et des relations sur lequel il sancre, des finalits qui le justifient. Plutt, nous suggrerons quelques pistes qui toutes contribuent au dveloppement des tudiants au travers des situations pdagogiques interactives mises en place. En particulier, nous montrerons comment fournir aux tudiants des occasions dintgration de connaissances et des moyens permettant des clairages varis dun concept donn afin den faire ressortir la richesse, le relief, ... la complexit. Un enseignement plus inductif et plus participatif serait dun prcieux secours dans cette problmatique 26 afin dapprendre ltudiant : se poser un problme, trouver soi-mme dans larsenal des mthodes, des modles et des thories lapproche la plus pertinente, contrler soi-mme les limites et le degr de validit de lapproche choisie, vrifier ses solutions par des mthodes alternatives, simpliquer et se responsabiliser face la tche, etc. Voici quelques uns parmi les objectifs qui nous semblent les plus pertinents et les plus urgents pour lducation des hommes de la socit complexe et qui devraient catalyser les nombreux efforts produits dans le cadre des initiatives pdagogiques certes mritantes de lenseignement actuel. Les lignes qui prcdent mettent en vidence notre souci de recentration des objectifs

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ducatifs sur la personne de ltudiant en tant quacteur de son apprentissage et futur acteur dans la socit. Des critiques lgard de cette approche et des diffrentes pdagogies qui sy rapportent sont rgulirement mises : elle est sans doute plus captivante pour les tudiants mais ce nest pas ncessairement un gage defficacit ; elle suscite peut tre leur motivation mais il sagit dune implication superficielle, dune adhsion motionnelle un univers ludique plutt que dune dmarche rigoureuse dapprofondissement intellectuel. Cependant, lexprience le montre, une telle approche pose des exigences non ngligeables la fois aux tudiants et aux enseignants. Les premiers ne sont plus seulement des spectateurs, des rcepteurs passifs du savoir mais ils doivent participer activement et personnellement la construction de celui-ci : mettre des propositions, les dvelopper, les argumenter, grer des incertitudes ... voici des tches astreignantes auxquelles il nest pas facile de convier les apprenants, parfois rticents sortir des habitudes, du train-train quotidien, des routines scurisantes du savoir cl sur porte, prendre en charge des activits normalement dvolues au professeur. Les seconds manifestent parfois la crainte de perdre le contrle des oprations, de sengager dans des voies dont ils savent linopportunit, linadquation, de perdre un temps prcieux, de voir leurs certitudes chanceler ... finalement de se sentir dpossds, dsinvestis de leur fonction. Nous nous demandons, avec Ph. Marton 27 , si ces craintes et ces rsistances ne doivent pas tre attribues la faiblesse des aspects pdagogiques et mthodologiques de la formation donne ceux qui se prparaient alors encore apprenants pour la socit complexe devenir les professionnels de lenseignement. Ne sagit-il pas l, pour les uns et les autres, de ces points de rupture, de ces tierces places, dont parle M. Serres 28 , dans lesquelles lapprenant et lenseignant sexposent et sinvestissent, dans lesquelles les certitudes se dissolvent, se rgnrent ... un tiersinstruit ou encore un tiers-duqu ? Des modes dapplication ralistes et adaptables sont possibles ; titre dexemple, nous soulignons : - le rle des exercices, travaux pratiques, projets personnels ou de groupe, etc., qui offrent plus de place lapport personnel de ltudiant ; - lutilisation pdagogique de lordinateur, des multimdia, etc., et de leurs proprits dynamiques permettant la recherche par essai-erreur, le questionnement pralable et ncessaire llaboration de rponses ; - louverture des activits transversales (par exemple, lutilisation des outils bureautiques, base de donnes, traitement de textes, tableurs ...) par lesquelles ltudiant puisse aborder non seulement des contenus mais aussi faire lexprience des dmarches, des mthodes, des questionnements, des incertitudes, des va-et-vient, etc., qui accompagnent toute tentative de modlisation, toute recherche, toute construction des sciences ; - des critres et des pratiques dvaluation cohrentes avec les objectifs envisags; la promotion des comptences transversales saccorde mal avec des mthodes dvaluation qui se rduisent une mesure ponctuelle (lexamen) dun savoir redit. Si lenseignant, le mdiateur, le mdia peuvent convier lapprenant au voyage, cest lapprenant lui-mme qui va voyager, qui tt ou tard va devoir sortir de lcole. Le passage par lauto-cole savre indispensable pour apprendre loutil (la voiture), les rgles de la circulation (le code), les savoir-faire et savoirs exercs dans un contexte artificiel ou

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simul. Un des buts de cet apprentissage accompagn est aussi de permettre au conducteur de savoir-tre (le code nexclut pas la courtoisie ...) et de savoir-devenir (faire face des alas, des situations imprvues ...) sur le terrain rel de nos campagnes et de nos grandes cits. Bien au-del des connaissances sur le vhicule et sur le code, audel aussi de son savoir-faire de conducteur, lapprenant devra tre capable dexercer de multiples comptences transversales toutes significatives de la manire dont loutil, son vhicule, sest intgr dans le tissu complexe de la socit : identifier ses besoins, choisir un vhicule, accomplir les formalits pour le faire immatriculer et assurer mais aussi lutiliser rationnellement, savoir y renoncer, garder le got pour les promenades champtres et surtout prendre conscience de ses responsabilits et les assumer. Lexercice de ces comptences transversales est rendu possible par les outils interactifs qui illuminent le savoir en le faisant sortir de lcole, en le vivifiant par la mise en contraste, en contexte, en relation. Pourront-ils enfin permettre aux tres de mieux savoir, vivre et devenir, en un mot, de sduquer dans la socit complexe ? 8. ... AUX MEDIAS La dfinition usuelle de mdia tout support de diffusion massive de linformation (Petit Robert, 1991) ne peut nous satisfaire pour diffrentes raisons que nous avons dj abordes : information ne rime ni avec formation ni avec ducation, diffusion massive ne rime pas avec enseignement de qualit ; support dapprentissage ne rime pas avec apprentissage de lapprenant. Il ne sagit pas pour nous de dresser ici la liste de tous les outils existants et de leurs caractristiques techniques ; nous renvoyons le lecteur des ouvrages rcents 29 qui les dcrivent en analysant les particularits dont il est important de tenir compte dans le choix du support. Ce que nous voulons faire est de voir quelles conditions ces diffrents outils, porteurs dinformations, peuvent tre aussi des outils dducation. A ce propos, comme nous lavons dit, il est opportun de situer les mdias dans la relation didactique, en y actualisant leurs diffrentes potentialits : une possibilit de prendre en compte ou de partir des intuitions, des conceptions implicites, des expriences antrieures de lapprenant afin de les faire voluer ; un regard, une lecture et une coute pluriels et dmultiplis sur les savoirs ; une occasion de reconstruction personnelle des savoirs, des processus qui les ont fait natre, des processus quils permettent de mettre en place ; une actualisation des savoirs dans le contexte large dont ils sont issus et quils dterminent ; un exercice de comptences transversales oprant sur les multiples dimensions de ces savoirs (fonctionnelle, relationnelle ...) ; un auto-dveloppement de comportements et dattitudes permettant de mieux tre, mieux vivre, mieux devenir dans la socit complexe. Ces potentialits des mdias rejoignent des caractristiques de situations pdagogiques qui favorisent lapprentissage : la frontire des thories constructivistes, cognitivistes et dveloppementalistes, elles sont des constituants de ce qui est appel dans la littrature anglo-saxonne situated learning ou encore anchored instruction 30 Les mdias constituent ainsi un haut lieu dinteractivit potentielle entre les diverses composantes, toutes complexes, que nous avons voques : savoirs et ducation, socit et relations.

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Cependant ces potentiels ne peuvent se rvler et sactualiser par loutil seul. Les craintes dmesures exprimes par les enseignants sur le fait que lordinateur puisse les remplacer, les espoirs fous que lapprenant puisse enfin pouvoir apprendre tout seul, manifestent la puissance surfaite, quasi animiste laquelle loutil ne peut prtendre. Loin des tendances dcartlement des ples du triangle didactique savoir tout puissant, enseignant dpossd, apprenant enfin autonome nous pensons plutt aux mdias exercer, dvelopper et promouvoir des comptences transversales. Ces dernires, comme nous lavons vu, sont ncessaires pour que lapprenant puisse se re-construire larticulation dynamique des diffrents savoirs et continuer ainsi sduquer dans une comme un facteur de dialogue entre ces ples. Nous compltons ainsi le concept dinteractivit fonctionnelle de loutil par celui de linteractivit relationnelle des partenaires de la relation didactique. Le contenu dinformation issu de la socit complexe et de ses savoirs nest plus que le substrat sur lequel sappuient et se dveloppent les savoirs et savoir-faire des apprenants dans une relation ducative qui accentue les savoir-tre et savoir-devenir, porte ouverte sur le mieux-vivre dans la socit complexe. Au carrefour de ces dimensions diffrentes mais toutes prsentes dans lexprience personnelle et interpersonnelle, les mdias constituent un terrain fertile pour veiller, interaction constructive avec la socit complexe par le truchement des outils quelle lui propose. A la vision entropique de la socit complexe nous proposons ainsi une vision nguentropique de lducation. Tous les droits, en particulier le droit la reproduction et la diffusion de mme qu? la traduction, sont rservs. Aucune partie de l?ouvrage ne doit tre ni reproduite et sous aucune forme (photocopie, microfilm ou autres procds) ni modifie, diffuse ou propage par l?emploi d?un systme lectronique, sans l?autorisation crite du dtenteur des droits. NOTE I REFERINE 1 P. Lvy (1990). Les technologies de lintelligence. Lavenir de la pense lre informatique. Paris: Seuil. 2 R. Vigan, & M. Lebrun (1994). Interazione e autonomia nelle situazioni pedagogiche alluniversit. En cours de publication dans Pedagogia & Vita. 3 M. Lebrun, & R. Vigan (1994). Quality in higher education : toward a future harmony. En cours de publication dans Higher Education. 4 M. Serres (1991). Le Tiers-Instruit. Paris : Francois Bourin 5 E. Morin (1990). Science avec Conscience. Paris : Editions du Seuil, p. 20. 6 C. Levi-Strauss (1955). Tristes Tropiques. Cit par J. Neirynck (1990). Le huitime jour de la cration: Introduction lentropologie. Lausanne : Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes. 7 P. Lvy (1990). Les technologies de lintelligence. Lavenir de la pense lre informatique, p.169. 8 E. Morin (1990). Science avec Conscience. Paris : Editions du Seuil, p. 125 9 J. Neirynck (1990). Le huitime jour de la cration : Introduction lentropologie. Lausanne : Presses 10 I. Prigogine, & I. Stengers (1986). La nouvelle alliance. Paris : Gallimard

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11 K. Kubota (1991). Applying a Collaborative Learning Model to a Course Development Project. Document prsent : the Annual Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Orlando, Florida. 12 E. Bialo, & J. Sivin (1990). Report on the Effectiveness of Microcomputers in Schools. Washington, DC : Software Publishers Association. 13 J. Kulik, C. Kulik, & P. Cohen (1980). Effectiveness of Computer-based College Teaching : A Metaanalysis of Findings. Review of Educational Research, 50, 525-544. 14 R. E. Clark, & S. Leonard (1985). Computer Research Confounding. Document prsent : the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago, Illinois, p. 15. 15 M. J. Atkins (1993). Evaluating Interactive Technologies for Learning. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25, 333-342. 16 Par exemple : M. D. Merril, R. D. Tennyson, & L. O. Posey (1992). Teaching Concepts : An Instructional Design Guide (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Educational Technology Publications. 17 J. K. Galbraith (1979). The New Industrial State. New York : A mentor book, p. 11. La traduction de la dfinition est propose par J. Lapointe, & P. Gagn (1992). La savoir dexprience et le savoir intuitif en technologie de lducation : contributions dcisionnelles de savoirs ngligs. In L. Sauv (Ed.), La technologie ducative dhier demain. Actes du VIII Colloque du Conseil interinstitutionnel pour le progrs de la technologie ducative, Qubec, 1992, 275-286. 18 Par exemple : M. Fleming, & W. Howard Levie (Eds.) (1993). Instructional Message Design : Principles from the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Educational Technology Publications. 19 J.-M. De Ketele (1986). Lvaluation du savoir-tre. In J.-M. De Ketele (Ed.), Lvaluation : approche descriptive ou prescriptive ? Bruxelles-Paris : De Boeck, 179-208. 20 R. A. Schwier, & E. R. Misanchuk (1993). Interactive Multimedia Instruction. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Educational Technology Publications. 21 F. Nietzsche (1973). Sur lavenir de nos tablissements denseignement. Paris : Gallimard, p. 132. 22 R. Bloom (1987). Lme dsarme. Essai sur le dclin de la culture gnrale. Montral : Gurin littrature. Sommes-nous trop ambitieux (ou peut-tre trop pdagogues ...) en affirmant que le rarmement de lme pourrait tre soutenu par un enseignement, une ducation qui puisse concrtement aider les tudiants sapproprier des connaissances et dvelopper des comptences rellement utiles et ncessaires la dfinition et laccomplissement de leur projet dtude, de leur projet professionnel et surtout de leur

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projet personnel dans la socit complexe ? 23 R. Vigan (1991). Psicologia ed educazione in Lawrence Kohlberg : Unetica per la societ complessa. Milano : Vita & Pensiero. 24 D. R. Woods (1987). How Might I Teach Problem Solving ? New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 30, 55-71. 25 E. Bialo, & J. Sivin (1990). Report on the Effectiveness of Microcomputers in Schools, pp. 12-13. 26 M. Lebrun (1991). Possibilits et mthodologies dintgration doutils informatiques dans lapprentissage des sciences. Recherche en ducation : Thorie et pratique, 7, 15-30. 27 Ph. Marton (1992). La formation et le perfectionnement des matres aux nouvelles technologies de linformation et de la communication. In L. Sauv (Ed.), La technologie ducative dhier demain. Actes du VIII Colloque du Conseil interinstitutionnel pour le progrs de la technologie ducative, Qubec, 1992, 255-260. 28 M. Serres (1991). Le Tiers-Instruit. Paris : Francois Bourin. 29 Par exemple : R. A. Schwier, & E. R. Misanchuk (1993). Interactive Multimedia Instruction 30 D. M. Gayeski (Ed.) (1993). Multimedia for Learning : Development, Application, Evaluation. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Educational Technology Publications ; CTGV (The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt) (1993). Anchored Instruction and Situated Cognition Revisited. Educational Technology, 3, 52-70.

IV. ROBERTMAGER
Robert Mager is a long-standing and well-respected member of the educational technology community. He has written many books as well as workshop courses and instructional films. He has an engaging writing style and his books are relatively easy to read. In 1962 Mager published Preparing Instructional Objectives. This book helped popularize the use of performance objectives by educators and others. He described useful objectives as having three characteristics (Mager 1984): 1) Performance. An objective always says what a learner is expected to be able to do; the objective sometimes describes the product or the result of the doing. 2) Conditions. An objective always describes the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur. 3) Criterion. Wherever possible, an objective describes the criterion of acceptable performance by describing how well the learner must perform in order to be considered acceptable. Mager held that an important part of writing good objectives was to use doing words. These are words which describe a performance (e.g., identify) which can be observed and measured. Words to avoid are those which describe abstract states of being (e.g., know) which are difficult to observe or measure.

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Magers model is still a basic part of many approaches to writing objectives. Some other titles by Mager: Measuring Instruction Results Analyzing Performance Problems Goal Analysis Developing an Attitude Toward Learning Making Instruction Work Dr. Robert F. Mager is an accomplished author and world-renowned expert on training and human performance improvement issues. Arguably the most well-known and respected figure in his field, he is credited with revolutionizing the performance improvement industry with his groundbreaking work. Dr. Mager holds a doctorate in psychology. One of Dr. Magers most significant contributions to the performance improvement field is his work on the Criterion-Referenced Instruction (CRI) training methodology. Developed by Dr. Mager in conjunction with Peter Pipe, CRI is used to develop training guaranteed to work and has become the standard for excellence in training and performance improvement. To teach this methodology to others, Dr. Mager has authored or co-authored three train-thetrainer workshops. To date, thousands of training professionals worldwide have been trained. In addition to his work on CRI, Dr. Mager is a well-known author. He has written nine books on issues relating to training and performance improvement, and over three million copies of these classic works have been sold. He is perhaps best known for Preparing Instructional Objectives, the largest-selling book ever written on this subject. It is recognized as the standard work in its field and is the basis for many graduate level instructional design courses. Dr. Magers work has garnered him numerous honors and awards, including: Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Human Resource Development (American Society for Training and Development) Instructional Technology Ronald H. Anderson Memorial Award (American Society for Training and Development) Distinguished Professional Achievement (International Society for Performance Improvement) First-round inductee into TRAINING Magazines HRD Hall of Fame Selection as the most respected leader in the training and development field by readers of TRAINING Magazine Selected by a poll of his peers, conducted by the International Society for Performance Improvement, to be the most influential individual in the field of instructional technology

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Gilbert de LandsheereL'avenir de l'Enseignement (1) (1/2)

Gilbert De Landsheere Professeur mrite de Sciences de l'Education de l'Universit de Lige (ULg)

Alors que tous les pays industrialiss entrent dans une re nouvelle dont les bouleversements conomiques, sociaux, culturels seront historiquement aussi importants que ceux de la Renaissance ou de la premire Rvolution industrielle, notre jeunesse - idalement, toute la jeunesse - est-elle bien prpare faire face aux problmes qui l'attendent? Il importe de s'en assurer d'urgence et de prendre les dispositions qui s'imposent. La libration des tches routinires par l'informatique laisse une place prpondrante au jeu des processus mentaux suprieurs : analyse, synthse, crativit, valuation. Dans une socit qui, selon l'admirable expression de Louis Armand, est en train de s'encphaliser, l'intelligence est devenue l'une des marchandises les plus recherches. "Les changes invisibles, crit Caspar (1989, p. 2), constituent dsormais une part essentielle des changes entre pays. Le Fonds montaire international (FMI) estime que la moiti des changes se font dsormais [...] sous forme de brevets, de hautes technologies, de capacits managriales, d'informations financires ou stratgiques... bref de savoirs." Socit de l'information et de la communication. De la surinformation aussi, surinformation qui risque de dboussoler ou de paralyser ceux qui sont incapables de la trier, de la structurer. Socit du changement acclr. Le capital de connaissances de l'humanit doublerait, en moyenne, tous les sept ans. Les activits professionnelles - est-ce un hasard? - demanderaient elles aussi une reconversion au mme rythme. Changement encore dans tous les aspects sociaux. Selon des donnes rcentes, la moiti des emplois crs d'ici l'an 2000 exigeraient une formation suprieure et environ un tiers d'entre eux seraient destins des universitaires part entire. Mme pour l'excution de tches dites subalternes, les processus mentaux suprieurs joueraient un rle croissant. Les entreprises, surtout les grandes, connaissent des transformations fondamentales. Elles dcouvrent que leur essor dpend de plus en plus des investissements immatriels, c'est--dire des investissements dans l'intelligence : recherche et dveloppement, formation, affinement intellectuel et affectif des rapports d'autorit, des communications dans le travail, des relations avec la clientle. De la base au sommet, le monde du travail voit disparatre sa linarit organisationnelle et fonctionnelle au profit de processus interactifs multidirectionnels. Idalement, chaque travailleur devrait tre, son chelon, un dcideur clair, communicatif, prvoyant et flexible. L'intelligence est donc devenue l'une des marchandises les plus recherches et le savoir prend valeur stratgique. "Quel est le point commun tout cela? C'est une double conviction, autant philosophique que managriale, que n'aurait pas renie le Sicle des Lumires : l'homme constitue la ressource primordiale; la connaissance est la source du progrs." (Caspar, 1989). Qui - individu, entreprise, nation - tire le mieux et le plus vite profit de ces conditions nouvelles est un gagneur. D'o la concurrence effrne. Qui a le mieux compris ce qui arrive sait aussi que nous entrons dans l're de la mondialisation.

Si, quittant l'chelle socitale, on s'interroge sur les caractristiques individuelles requises, on s'aperoit que l'individu total

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- intellectuel, affectif, moral, social, physique - est interpell. Dou d'une bonne sant physique et mentale, ayant acquis ds le dbut, surtout ds le dbut de la scolarit, des bases solides, chacun doit idalement pouvoir : prendre et analyser l'information et conqurir la connaissance; communiquer; dtecter les problmes et avoir l'envie et le pouvoir de les rsoudre; laborer des projets; anticiper; travailler dans des conditions mouvantes, dcider et agir sans possder tous les lments d'information souhaitables. Est-il besoin de continuer pareil inventaire? Croire que chacun possdera toutes ces qualits la perfection serait naf. En revanche, considrer que nous trouvons l des caractristiques modales souhaites des populations de demain est tout simplement raliste. Il reste les susciter. Si nous le voulons, nous le pouvons. Comment? En commenant par approfondir, sans complaisance aucune, l'analyse des problmes majeurs d'ducation et de formation qui se posent. 1. Il faut d'abord dterminer de faon aussi prcise que possible notre situation relle, c'est--dire valuer le rendement de notre enseignement fondamental et voir o se situent les populations de 17-18 ans, qu'elles soient encore pleinement scolarises ou non. 2. La qualit de l'enseignement fondamental doit absolument tre amliore. A cette fin, il importe de dgager les savoirs mthodologiques les plus srs et de combattre sans merci ce qui n'est qu'idologie creuse ou fantasmes pdagogiques. Et comme les savoirs fiables restent, bien des gards, srieusement lacunaires, il faut investir dans la recherche en ducation, ce qui n'a jamais t fait significativement dans notre pays. Nous y reviendrons. Quant la formation des enseignants, elle n'a pas encore fait sa ncessaire mutation, ce qui rend d'autant plus pressante une formation continue de tout le personnel ducatif, formation dont l'ampleur doit dpasser le seuil critique partir duquel les effets du perfectionnement deviennent sensibles au niveau ducatif global, et pas seulement en quelques lieux d'exception. Le problme de la culture gnrale se repose aussi. Sans elle, l'homme deviendra esclave de la technologie au lieu de mettre cette force promthenne au service de tous. Enfin, on voudrait savoir dans quelle mesure l'Universit continue bien remplir sa mission essentielle, tout en en assumant deux nouvelles : offrir un couronnement de culture gnrale des populations qui ne se destinent pas la conqute scientifique suprieure et assurer une formation continue indispensable tous ses diplms - et ils sont nombreux - qui ne peuvent la trouver normalement ailleurs. Nous voudrions maintenant revenir sur chacun des grands points qui viennent d'tre voqus pour approfondir et prciser quelque peu la rflexion.

A socit reconstruire, ducation nouvelle L'cole est dstabilise : elle n'est pas en crise parce qu'elle n'est pas adapte la socit, mais parce qu'elle essaie de s'y adapter (G. FOUREZ). Les hommes sont d'ingurissables apprentis sorciers. Loin de diriger en constante rationalit leur existence propre et celle de la socit, ils se laissent entraner, voire piger par les vnements. Nous sommes actuellement entrans dans deux de ces piges historiques.

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D'une part, la technologie a avanc beaucoup plus vite que la moyenne d'instruction de la population. Les rgulations ducatives indispensables ne se sont pas produites au bon moment parce que l'on n'avait pas vu venir le danger ou que les responsables avertis n'ont pas jug urgent d'y parer. Ainsi, seule une minorit s'est munie temps des comptences ncessaires et appartient une nouvelle aristocratie : celle des meilleurs, des gagneurs qui vont actuellement toutes les faveurs sur le plan individuel. Dans le pass, les privilges se transmettaient sans plus. Aujourd'hui, il faut que les classes dirigeantes soient comptentes : les parents favoriss sont prts payer le prix pour que les enfants le soient aussi. La perspective no-librale est inacceptable. Comme le souligne G. Fourez, d'aucuns poussent l'cole vers le secteur marchand, li l'organisation du march et l'optimisation des cots. Cette optimisation est, de toute faon limite, car on ne peut remplacer les enseignants par des robots ou par une main-d'oeuvre pdagogique bon march importe des pays moins favoriss. L'cole ne peut pas tre domine par la recherche du rendement conomique, car l'attention premire, elle doit la rserver aux valeurs. Comme service public, son devoir peut tre de s'opposer des parents ou des lves qui seraient prts accepter un systme scolaire "dualis". La vision de l'cole doit rester focalise sur le bien commun et donc continuer faire place aux plus faibles. D'autre part, des rgulations sociales indispensables ne se sont pas opres, soit par mpris pour les "perdants", soit parce que le danger de ractions rvolutionnaires auxquelles le dsespoir pourrait les pousser n'est pas peru. Pour redresser la barre tant qu'il en est encore temps, du moins, on l'espre, une transformation profonde des mentalits doit se produire dans le plus bref dlai. Un nouveau et grand dfi est ainsi lanc l'ducation. Collaborant avec tous ceux pour qui le respect de la dignit humaine est imprieux, elle doit contribuer de faon dcisive l'installation de valeurs et d'attitudes nouvelles. Dans son article L'Homme et l'outil, Riccardo Petrella (1987) a admirablement cern le problme. La srie des mots-cls qui caractrisent la socit innovante qui se dessine actuellement devant nos yeux est, nous dit-il : productivit, comptitivit, efficacit, rentabilit, optimisation, flexibilit, contrle, adaptabilit, mesurabilit, gestion. A cette srie, il importe d'en substituer une autre : joie, beaut, solidarit, crativit, autonomie, stabilit, espoir, coopration, identit, partage. Un ordre social nouveau doit s'instaurer, "celui de l'emploi pour tous, chmage zro en l'an 2000" ou encore "celui de la dissociation entre revenu et emploi : tablissement d'une allocation universelle de base laquelle on aurait droit non pas parce qu'on a un emploi, mais du simple fait d'exister" (Petrella). Qu'on ne s'y trompe pas! Il faut y insister, il ne s'agit pas ici d'un rve, d'une utopie de plus, mais bien du seul programme humaniste susceptible de rpondre positivement aux conditions qui, sauf cataclysme, peuvent tre les ntres dans un avenir proche.

Une culture gnrale reconstruire Une culture gnrale de bon aloi interroge les vnements naturels et les phnomnes sociaux de faon permanente, permet de dgager l'essentiel de l'accessoire et de fonder les actions. Elle doit imprgner toute formation pour l'empcher, notamment, de s'enfermer dans une vision technicienne et de s'loigner de la capacit de toujours se renouveler en un mouvement caractris par une flexibilit, une polyvalence en continuel accroissement. Si cette valence devenait universelle, la technologie et la philosophie pourraient oprer leur jonction. Qu'une rflexion nouvelle sur la culture gnrale soit l'ordre du jour n'a rien de fortuit ni de gratuit. Les grandes

32

entreprises comme les laboratoires de recherches les plus avancs savent que ce qui manquent souvent leurs membres, c'est la capacit de philosopher, de distinguer l'essentiel sous le disparate ou les particularits, de dtecter les principes gnraux qui apparentent des choses en apparence trs diffrentes, sinon trangres. La culture gnrale reconstruite, que toute ducation devrait faire acqurir, a pour mission essentielle d'offrir, aux futurs citoyens du XXIme sicle, une rfrence et un code communs, une boussole intellectuelle et morale indispensable pour tenir un cap dans le tourbillon temptueux des innovations et des changements. Il est grand temps, crit en substance Domenach, dans son rcent ouvrage Que faut-il enseigner ? (1989, p. 35), de rechercher l'essentiel dans le contemporain, de le ramener quelques rgles, quelques principes unifiants. Il importe "d'asseoir sur des bases simples et stables, une pdagogie du complexe et du mobile", tout en sachant bien "qu'entre la simplicit et la complexit, le chemin n'est pas univoque : on va de l'une l'autre", et c'est dans ce va-et-vient que se situe la dialectique de la pdagogie. On n'insistera jamais assez sur la ncessit de construire une ducation intellectuelle et morale l'chelle de notre temps. Cette tche est complexe et sa traduction en termes de programmes va demander au monde de l'ducation un norme effort de crativit et de rajustement. Simultanment, toutes les disciplines d'enseignement, qu'il ne s'agit pas de fondre en un magma informe, mais d'articuler, de "ponter", doivent tre rexamines pour dcider de leur survie, de leur place, de leur esprit et de leur contenu. Cette remise en cause s'inscrit dans la rflexion relative la culture gnrale nouvelle qui, faut-il encore le dire, ignorera l'artificielle distinction entre culture littraire et culture scientifique.

La rflexion de G. Fourez s'inscrit dans la mme ligne Un changement fondamental de la mthodologie de l'enseignement est indispensable. Une socit stable s'accommode de contenus d'enseignement figs, d'une centration disciplinaire sur les matires inscrites aux programmes. L'colier est essentiellement passif, rceptif? Mais, socit en volution, contenus d'enseignement en volution ! Pour duquer la flexibilit, au dynamisme, on ne peut plus contraindre l'lve la passivit. "Dans nos coles, on tend moins duquer en vue d'une vie autonome et adapte la socit qu' y enseigner les disciplines. Pourtant, dterminer un programme de mathmatiques, c'est avant tout rpondre la question : Qu'estimons-nous important, dans notre socit, d'imposer aux jeunes et pourquoi ?"

Dans un monde aussi complexe que le ntre, seule l'interdisciplinarit est oprationnelle "La crise du sens dans l'enseignement est profonde. On n'y apprend gure comment croiser sciences, techniques, thique, droit, cologie, conomie, politique, esthtique, etc., pour aborder l'existence individuelle ou collective. A partir du moment o les savoirs ne sont plus relis au monde et aux dcisions qu'ils essaient d'clairer, ils deviennent dogmatiques et tendent ressembler des endoctrinements idologiques (n'est-il pas caractristique que l'on enseigne aujourd'hui souvent les sciences comme des vrits qu'il faudra finalement croire, comme on le faisait de la religion, il y a quelques sicles ? [...]" L'image d'une cole o l'on ne vient que pour suivre des cours, et puis d'o l'on repart aussitt, est dommageable l'institution scolaire.

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Il s'agirait de re-politiser l'cole dans le sens noble du mot. J'entends par l que l'cole doit tre vue comme un lieu o familles, enseignants, organisations sociales, entreprises, lves, etc. ngocient les structures d'une institution dont personne ne peut se considrer comme propritaire. Mme les relations pdagogiques ne peuvent tre envisages comme purement techniques : il faut savoir promouvoir une pdagogie qui rintroduit la distinction des perspectives entre enseignants et tudiants, la ngociation, les projets ventuellement conflictuels, et, travers tout cela, le sens.

L'enseignement fondamental, le bien nomm David Weikart a beaucoup frapp les esprits lorsqu'il a tabli, aux Etats-Unis, que pour chaque dollar investi dans l'ducation prscolaire des enfants de milieux socio-culturellement dfavoriss, un bnfice de 4,75 dollars tait ralis, grce la rduction des affectations l'enseignement spcial, de l'assistance publique et des moyens dployer pour lutter contre la drogue. D'une telle observation, on retiendra simplement combien un investissement financier fait au bon moment dans le domaine de l'ducation peut tre fcond pour l'individu et la socit. Que penser, par ailleurs, de l'affirmation, qui prend souvent valeur de slogan : "Tout se joue avant huit ans" ? Elle repose d'abord sur une observation gnrale : c'est pendant les premires annes de la vie que l'individu prsente la plus grande plasticit, l'apprentissage du langage et l'effet indlbile de certaines expriences prcoces en tmoignent. Plus particulirement, Freud - pour ne citer que lui - a mis en lumire le caractre infiniment profond des effets de certaines expriences affectives prcoces, tandis que des chercheurs comme Bloom, Kraus et bien d'autres ont pu dmontrer comment les apprentissages raliss au dbut de la scolarit, commencer par celui de la lecture, dcident dans une large mesure de la russite ou des checs qui vont suivre et influencent notre vie entire. De telles considrations appelleraient bien des discussions techniques et des nuances, mais leur signification statistique incontestable intresse quiconque envisage macroscopiquement le phnomne ducatif. Quatre conclusions s'imposent, sans la moindre contestation possible : la ncessit de prparer les futurs parents leur mission, de crer des conditions d'accueil de la petite enfance ducativement positives, d'offrir la presque totalit des enfants qui le frquentent, dans notre pays, un enseignement maternel de trs grande qualit, et de confier la charge des premires annes de l'cole primaire des matres de grande comptence pdagogique et psychologique. (Nous ne nous arrtons ici qu'aux deux premiers points. Les autres relvent de la formation des enseignants dont il sera trait plus loin). 1. L'ducation des parents. Alors que l'on enseigne tant de choses d'une importance contestable dans l'enseignement secondaire et dans les Universits, notamment sous le couvert de formation gnrale, pourquoi ne prpare-t-on pas psychologiquement et pdagogiquement les parents potentiels l'une des choses les plus importantes et les plus difficiles qu'ils devront accomplir au cours de leur vie adulte? L'ducation des enfants. Cette prparation s'impose plus que jamais dans le nouveau contexte socio-culturel dont l'immense complexit vient d'tre voque. On sait, en particulier, qu' ct du curriculum scolaire explicite et implicite, il existe aussi un curriculum familial, implicite dans sa plus grande partie, mais tout aussi important. Il est porteur de valeurs et d'attitudes qui se transmettent plus par contagion que par discours de circonstance, et s'incruste ainsi profondment dans les personnalits. D'o, rptons-le, l'importance de l'ducation des futurs parents. Se rfrant divers auteurs J-P. POURTOIS et M. HOUX crivent : "L'galit des chances et par l'cole est loin d'tre chose acquise. En particulier, l'art de dvelopper des stratgies d'investissements scolaire rentable reste l'apanage des classes privilgies".

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Il apparat notamment que les parents construisent des reprsentations sociales de l'cole diffrentes, non seulement en fonction de leur appartenance socio-culturelle, mais aussi, niveau scolaire gal, en fonction de leur trajectoire professionnelle. Aux trajectoires, individuelles vient s'ajouter l'effet des trajectoires intergnrationnelles, qui contribuent dfinir les typologies familiales particulires, plus ou moins favorables l'investissement dans le jeu scolaire. Par ailleurs, une tude longitudinale montre que les pronostics de curriculum scolaire tablis pour des enfants gs de sept ans, partir de donnes individuelles et familiales, se vrifient quinze annes plus tard dans sept cas sur dix. La collaboration active entre la famille et l'cole manque surtout de propositions concrtes et prcises. En cela, elle doit l'immense majorit des parents qui ne demandent qu' bien faire. Par exemple, beaucoup de parents intelligents et de bonne volont ignorent ce qu'ils pourraient et devraient faire pour aider leur enfant au moment o il apprend lire. Donner ce propos des indications concrtes, ventuellement accompagnes de petits matriels utilisables la maison, se rvle trs efficace. Bien des suggestions de ce type sont possibles, non seulement pendant les premires annes de la scolarit, mais aussi par la suite, notamment au moment de l'adolescence, pendant laquelle les ractions des jeunes prennent si souvent les parents au dpourvu. Quand parents et professeurs russissent ainsi conjuguer leurs efforts, l'lve y gagne pratiquement toujours. L'effet de cette coopration peut tre suprieur celui du statut socio-conomique de la famille. Et se vrifie aussi bien pour les jeunes lves que pour les plus vieux. Evidemment, les enseignants doivent tre bien prpars cette collaboration.

2. L'accueil de la petite enfance. De plus en plus de femmes exercent une activit professionnelle en dehors du domicile familial et les grands-parents vivent de leur ct. D'o le besoin croissant de structures d'accueil pour les jeunes enfants, depuis les premiers mois de la vie jusqu', au moins, l'entre l'cole maternelle. Le placement se fait ou bien dans une famille ou bien dans une crche. Ces deux modalits font actuellement problmes. Selon une vrit reue qui a la vie dure, grce Freud, Bolwby et bien d'autres psychologues, l'loignement quelque peu prolong du milieu familial, spcialement de la mre, serait gnrateur de carences affectives souvent graves. Grce des ralisations comme celles de Loczi, on sait aujourd'hui que ces effets ngatifs sont loin d'tre inluctables pour autant que le milieu d'accueil soit la fois scurisant, stimulant et propice l'indpendance ou, si l'on prfre, la crativit comportementale. Malheureusement, les familles d'accueil sont rarement prpares la mission qu'elles assument et ne runissent gure l'ensemble des conditions qui viennent d'tre voques. Quant aux contrles qui peuvent tre oprs, ils ne portent gure sur la qualit ducative de ces milieux. De leur ct, les crches, dont le nombre est dramatiquement insuffisant, sont encore loin d'avoir accompli leur volution ncessaire. Surpeuples, elles travaillent dans des conditions difficiles, trs loignes de ce qui permettrait la scurisation psychologique et la stimulation pdagogique optimales. On ne semble pas encore avoir bien compris combien une amlioration quantitative et qualitative sensible des modalits d'accueil pourrait avoir des rpercussions bnfiques sur l'avenir des enfants, notamment pour leur carrire scolaire.

La reconstruction de l'enseignement secondaire Cette reconstruction est, elle aussi, urgente, car il n'est pas possible de mener de la mme manire un enseignement

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secondaire frquent par une minorit culturellement et socialement homogne, et un enseignement secondaire accueillant la quasi totalit de groupes d'ge, - ds lors forcment htrogne -, conduire effectivement au seuil des tudes suprieures. On a perdu de prcieuses dcennies a changer arguments et contre-arguments propos de ce que nous appelons l'enseignement secondaire rnov, alors qu'en fait le choix n'existe pas, si l'on s'en tient aux objectifs qui viennent d'tre voqus. Et comment ne s'y tiendrait-on pas ? On sait depuis longtemps que l'ducation ne se modle pas au gr de vues abstraites, idales, mais bien en fonction des besoins d'une socit telle qu'elle existe en un lieu et un moment donns. Et le besoin d'une valorisation massive des potentialits des jeunes existe bien. Ce qui est encore sujet de controverse chez nous depuis longtemps est tenu pour vident dans d'autres pays, qui vitent une slection prmature. Cette politique s'avre payante, condition de savoir conduire la barque ou, si l'on prfre, de ne pas faire n'importe quoi. Dans l'indispensable rnovation de l'enseignement secondaire, il importe toutefois, de ne pas rpter les erreurs commises lors de la grande rforme de ces dernires dcennies, notamment: un certain flou conceptuel chez ceux qui ont pris l'initiative de la rforme, dans les domaines de la psychologie, des sciences de l'ducation et de l'valuation; un certain laxisme confondu avec le respect de la personnalit de l'lve et avec ses besoins particuliers; une prparation psychologique et pdagogique des enseignants et des cadres pdagogiques insuffisante; un manque de moyens et d'instruments adapts, tant pour l'enseignement que pour l'valuation; une information insuffisante des politiques et de l'opinion publique. Les gnreuses professions de foi, les affirmations essentiellement idologiques ne suffisent pas. Il importe d'expliquer, d'apporter des preuves, de fournir des dossiers bien tays. Les donnes objectives, difficilement contestables, ne manquent pas. Encore faut-il les digrer et les diffuser sous des formes qui conviennent; l'absence d'un pilotage rigoureux de la rforme. Tous les intresss ont le droit de savoir avec prcision ce qu'elle produit, et o des difficults particulires se manifestent. Ils ont aussi le droit de poser des questions et d'obtenir des rponses qui ne soient pas de simples opinions. La rnovation de l'enseignement secondaire compte parmi les urgences premires de la politique de l'ducation.

L'expansion universitaire Une expansion externe des universits a t gnreusement ralise. Elle suffit largement notre petit pays et bien des rationalisations sont souhaitables. En revanche, l'expansion interne accuse un retard dramatique et en aggravation constante. Il concerne trois aspects : l'adaptation des populations nouvelles, les moyens humains et matriels de la recherche, et la formation continue. 1. La population universitaire change. Si nous russissons conduire avec succs la grande majorit des jeunes jusqu' la fin de l'enseignement secondaire suprieur, ceux-ci jouiront, selon notre lgislation, du droit d'entrer l'universit, dans la plupart des cas sans la moindre preuve de slection. Ainsi va se reproduire, avec un dcalage temporel, le problme d'htrognit qui se pose avec tant d'acuit dans

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l'enseignement secondaire. A ct des tudiants "traditionnels" slectionns de fait (selon des critres autant sociaux qu'intellectuels sur lesquels nous ne revenons plus) dans l'enseignement secondaire, tudiants qui souhaitent mener bien des tudes scientifiques du plus haut niveau, vont affluer progressivement dans les universits des lves souhaitant y trouver, soit un parachvement de la formation secondaire gnrale, soit une qualification technique valorisable le plus rapidement possible. Ces trois types de besoins sont minemment respectables et il faut y rpondre. Mais sans perdre de vue la mission premire de l'universit : former, dans les meilleures conditions possibles, des spcialistes et des chercheurs du plus haut niveau. Des rponses ces questions existent et sont bien exprimentes. Ainsi, pour la culture gnrale, on a cr aux Etats-Unis, depuis les annes 60, des instituts annexes, les Community colleges, qui offrent des cycles courts, de deux trois ans. Des dispositions institutionnelles similaires doivent voir le jour chez nous. Quant aux formations techniques ou technologiques, elles peuvent tre assez facilement ralises, soit dans l'enseignement technique suprieur, non universitaire, bien dvelopp dans notre pays, soit en coordonnant ces instituts avec des sections universitaires, solution dj pratique grce des passerelles. Tant pour les formations gnrales que pour les formations techniques, de nouvelles initiatives doivent tre prises.

2. La recherche, plus que jamais. La recherche scientifique et le dveloppement technique sont non seulement de plus en plus indispensables dans la civilisation de l'intelligence, mais leurs apports constituent aussi une part majeure des changes invisibles dont on a vu l'importance croissante sur le plan tant commercial que stratgique. Malheureusement, la recherche d'aujourd'hui cote de plus en plus cher et devient de plus en plus difficile chez nous. D'abord en raison des quipements souvent sophistiqus et de vie de plus en plus courte. Dans certains cas, des petites communauts comme la ntre devront passer des accords intercommunautaires, interrgionaux ou internationaux pour l'acquisition des matriels les plus chers. Encore faut-il que nous puissions payer notre part! Ensuite parce que les quipements les meilleurs ne prsentent aucun intrt s'il ne se trouve pas de chercheurs du plus haut niveau pour s'en servir. Or cette situation nous menace, parce que les Universits ne disposent plus d'assez de moyens pour offrir un minimum de stabilit aux plus avancs de leurs jeunes lments, et que, par consquent, ceux que nous avons forms grand prix nous sont enlevs par des pays plus aviss. 3. Organiser d'urgence la formation continue. L'attribution d'un diplme universitaire atteste deux choses : que le laurat a acquis, d'une part, une formation suprieure aussi fondamentale et donc aussi durable que possible et, d'autre part, qu' la date de dlivrance, il tait bien au fait de l'tat d'avancement de sa discipline. A une poque o la science ne progressait que trs lentement, la validit du diplme pour une vie professionnelle entire pouvait encore se concevoir, avec dj, cependant, un certain nombre de rserves. Mais, partir du moment o la totalit des connaissances, dans une discipline donne, double en quelques annes, - ce qui est le cas dans tous les domaines avancs -, la situation change radicalement. L'actualisation continue ou au moins priodique de la formation s'impose. Certaines entreprises prives l'assurent leur personnel, mais pour beaucoup d'autres professions, commencer par les professions librales, cette possibilit n'existe pas.

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C'est pourquoi nos universits doivent pouvoir organiser immdiatement et en grandeur relle la formation rcurrente pour un grand nombre de leurs diplms. Dans certains pays, les tudiants engags dans ces formations continues sont dj plus nombreux que les tudiants en formation initiale . Nous sommes encore loin d'tre dans une telle situation. Nos Universits ont pris des initiatives limites en ce sens, sans pratiquement disposer de moyens spciaux pour le faire. Pour rpondre aux besoins rels et urgents, il n'est plus possible de travailler dans ces conditions.

En conclusion: Deux mesures s'imposent sans tarder : une rationalisation rigoureuse (elle est souvent voque, mais se traduit peu dans la ralit) et l'attribution des crdits ncessaires aux nouvelles initiatives universitaires. Notes (1) Le texte de la discussion gnrale, dont l'ossature est due G. de Landsheere, intgre des apports d'A. Van Haecht, de G. Fourez, et de J-P Pourtois et Madame Houx, Assistante du Professeur Pourtois, la Facult de Psycho-pdagogie de l'Universit de Mons-Hainaut.

PROCEDURA DE OPERAIONALIZARE A LUI GILBERT DE LANDSHEERE

Cele cinci p eciz i oblig to ii le enunului 1. SUBIECTUL PEDAGOGIC 2. CAPACITATEA DE NVARE 3. PERFORMANA DE NVARE 4. SITUAIA DE NVARE 5. STANDARDUL PERFORMANEI ACCEPTABILE Exemplificare

La sfritul activitii didactice TOI elevii vor fi capabili (1. SUBIECTUL PEDAGOGIC ) s aplice (2. CAPACITATEA DE NVARE )regula de trei simpl (3. PERFORMANA DE NVARE )rezolvnd probleme dintr-o fi dat pe baza unui model de rezolvare explicat n prealabil (4. SITUAIA DE NVARE ); obiectivul va fi considerat atins atunci cnd: a)- elevul va rezolva cel puin 4 dintre cele 10 probleme existente n fia dat; b)-sunt permise cel mult 2 erori de calcul ; c)-nu este permis nici o greal de aplicare a regulii de trei simpl.

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V.

FROM TESTS TO

CURRENT EVALUATIVE RESEARCH

ONE CENTURY, THE 20TH, OF INTENSE DEVELOPMENT OF EVALUATION IN EDUCATION (Desde los tests hasta la investigacin evaluativa actual. Un siglo, el XX, de intenso desarrollo de la evaluacin en educacin) In format Article record About the authors Print this article por Toms Escudero Escorza (tescuder@[Link]) En formato Ficha del artculo Sobre los autores Imprimir el artculo

Abstract This article presents a review and state of art about development in educational evaluation in the XXth century. The main theoretical proposals are commented Keywords Evaluation, Evaluation Research, Evaluation Methods; Formative Evaluation Summative Evaluation, Testing, Program Evaluation

Resumen Este artculo presenta una revisin crtica del desarrollo histrico que ha tenido el mbito de la evaluacin educativa durante todo el siglo XX. Se analizan los principales propuestas tericas planteadas. Descriptores Evaluacin, Investigacin evaluativa, Mtodos de Evaluacin, Evaluacin Formativa, Evaluacin Sumativa, Test, Evaluacin de Programas

Introduction In any discipline, an investigation into its history tends to be a fundamental road to understand its conception, status, functions, environment, etc. This fact is especially evident in the case of evaluation because it is a discipline that has suffered deep conceptual and functional transformations throughout history and, mainly, throughout the 20th century, in which we principally concentrate our analyses. In this sense, the diachronic approach to the concept is essential. We will carry out the analysis centering our-selves on three positions that we could brand as classics in recent literature on the topic and that we use indistinctly, although we don't have the pretense of offering a synthesis position, but rather of exact use of all them, since the three positions have an impact on the same moments and key movements. A position, maybe the more used in our context (Mateo et al., 1993; Hernndez, 1993), is that which Madaus, Scriven, Stufflebeam and other authors offer that tends to establish six periods in their works, beginning its analysis in the 19th century (Stufflebeam and Shinkfield, 1987; Madaus et al., 1991). They speak to us of: a) period of reform (1800-1900),

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b) efficiency and testing period (1900-1930), c) Tyler period (1930-1945), d) innocence period (1946-1956), e) expansion period (1957-1972) and f) the professionalization period (from 1973) that connects with the current situation. Other authors like Cabrera (1986) and Salvador (1992) cite three major stages, taking as a central reference point the figure of Tyler in the second quarter of the 20th century. The stages before Tyler are referred to as precedents or antecedents, Tylers stage is referred to as the birth, and those which follow are considered development stages. Guba and his collaborators, mainly Yvonna Lincoln, highlight different generations. We would currently be in the fourth (Guba and Lincoln, 1989) which according to them is based on the paradigmatic constructivist focus and in the needs of those stakeholders, as a base to determine the information that is needed. The first generation is that of measurement that arrives up until the first third of this century, the second is that of description and the third that of the judgement or valuation. After the historical analysis, as a complement and a revision of synthesis, we offer a concise summary of the more relevant evaluative focuses of the different models and positions that, with greater or lesser force, come to mind when we try to delimit what is today evaluation research in education. 1. Precedents: before tests and measurement Since antiquity instructive procedures in which the teachers used implicit references have been created and used, without an explicit theory of evaluation, to value and, overall, to distinguish and select students. Dubois (1970) and Coffman (1971) cite the procedures that were used in imperial China more than three thousand years ago to select high officials. Other authors such as Sundbery (1977) speak of passages with reference to evaluation in the Bible, while Blanco (1994) refers to the exams of the Greek and Roman teachers. But according to McReynold (1975), the most important book of antiquity regarding evaluation is the Tetrabiblos that is attributed to Ptolomeo. Cicero and San Agustn also introduce evaluative concepts and positions in their writings. It is during the Middle Ages that the exams are introduced into the university environment with a more formal character. It is necessary to remember the famous public oral exams in presence of a tribunal, although they were only administered to those individuals with previous permission from their professors, with which the possibility of failure was practically nonexistent. In the Renaissance there are continued uses of selective procedures and Huarte of San Juan, in his Exam of geniuses for the sciences, defends the observation as a basic position of the evaluation (Rodrguez et al., 1995). In the 18th century, as the demand and the access to education increases, the necessity of verifying individual merits is accentuated and educational institutions embark on elaborating and introducing norms on the use of written exams (Gil, 1992). In the 19th century, national systems of education are established and graduation diplomas appear following the passing of exams (exams of the State). According to Max Weber (Barbier, 1993), a system of exams of a specific preparation validation arises to satisfy the needs of a new hierarchical and bureaucratized society. In the United States, in 1845, Horace Mann begins to use the first evaluative techniques in the form of written tests. They extend to the schools of Boston and begin the road toward more objective and explicit references with relation to certain reading-writing skills. However, it still is not an evaluation sustained in a theoretical focus, but rather, something that responds to routine practices, frequently based on not very reliable instruments. At the end of the 19th century, in 1897, a work of J.M. Rice appears that is usually pointed out as the first evaluative research in education (Mateo et al., 1993). It discussed a comparative analysis in American schools about the value of the instruction in the study of spelling, using as criteria the marks obtained in tests. 2. Psychometric tests

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In the previous context, at the end of the 19th century, a great interest for scientific measurement of human behaviors is awakened. This is something that is framed in the renovating movement of methodology of human sciences, when assuming the positivism of the physical-natural sciences. In this sense, evaluation receives the same influences as other pedagogic disciplines related with measurement processes, as experimental and differential pedagogy (Cabrera, 1986). The evaluative activity will be conditioned in a decisive way by diverse factors that converge in this moment, such as: a) The blossoming of the positivistic and empirical philosophical currents that supported observation, experimentation, data, and facts as sources of the true knowledge. The demand for scientific rigor as well as for objectivity in the measure of human behavior (Planchard, 1960) appears and written tests are promoted as a means of combating the subjectivity of oral exams (Ahman and Cook, 1967). b) The influence of evolutionist theories and Darwin's works, Galton and Cattel, supporting the measurement of the characteristics of individuals and the differences among them. c) The development of the statistical methods that favored decisively the metric orientation of the time (Nunnally, 1978). d) The development of the industrial society that empowered the necessity to find some accreditation and selection mechanisms of students, according to their knowledge. Consequently with this state of things, in this period between the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, an intense evaluative activity known as testing is developed that is defined by the following characteristics: . Measurement and evaluation were interchangeable terms. In the practice it was only referred to as measurement. . The objective was to detect and establish individual differences, inside the pattern of trait and attribute that characterized the psychological development of the time (Fernndez Archers, 1981), that is to say, the discovery of differential punctuations to determine the subject's relative position inside the reference group. . The performance tests, synonym of educational evaluation, were developed to establish individual discriminations, forgetting in great measure the representativeness and consistency with educational objectives. In the words of Guba and Lincoln (1982), evaluation and measure had little relationship with the school curriculum. The tests showed results about the students, but not about the curriculums with which they had been educated. Within the educational field, some instruments of that time are highlighted, such Ayres and Freemans writing scales, Hillegas writing, Buckingans spelling, Woods mathematics, Thorndike and McCalls reading, and Wood and McCalls arithmetic (Planchard, 1960; Ahman and Cook, 1967; Ebel, 1977). However, it was in the psychological tests where the efforts had a larger impact, being most likely the work of Thorndike (1904) that had most influence during the beginning of the 20th century. In France the works of Alfred Binet stand out, later revised by Terman at the Stanford University, on tests of cognitive capacities. Now we speak of the Stanford-Binet, one of the most well-known tests in the history of the psychometry. Years later, with the recruitment necessities in the First World War, Arthur Otis directs a team that builds collective tests of general intelligence (Alpha for readers-writers and Beta for illiterate) and inventories of personality (Phillips, 1974). After the war, the psychological tests are put to the service of social ends. The decade between 1920 and 1930 marks the highest point in testing due to the development of a multitude of standardized tests to measure all kinds of school abilities with relating external and explicit objectives. They are based on procedures of intelligence measurement to use with large numbers of students.

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These standardized applications are welcomed in educational environments and McCall (1920) proposes that the teachers construct their own objective tests, to not find themselves at the mercy of the proposals made exclusively by external specialists. This movement was effective in parallel to the improvement process of psychological tests with the development of statistical and factorial analysis. The fervor for testing began to decline at the start of the 40s and there even began to arise some hypercritical movements with these practices. Guba and Lincoln (1989) refer to this evaluation as the first generation that can rightfully be called the generation of measurement. The role of the evaluator used to be technical, as supplier of measurement instruments. According to these authors, this first generation still remains alive because texts and publications that use indissoluble evaluation and measure still exist (Gronlund, 1985). 3. The bi th of t ue educ tion l ev lu tion: The g e t T le i n efo m Before the revolution promoted by Ralph W. Tyler arrived, an independent current known as docimology started during the 1920s in France (Pieron, 1968 and 1969; Bonboir, 1972) that supposed a first approach to true educational evaluation. Mainly the split between that which is taught and the goals of the instruction was criticized. The evaluation was left in the hands of the completely personal interpretation of the teacher. As a solution the following was proposed: a) the elaboration of taxonomies to formulate objectives, b) diversification of information sources, exams, academic files, test re-taking techniques, and tests, c) unification of correction criteria beginning with the agreement between the correctors of the tests and d) revision of value judgments by means of such procedures as double correction, or the means of different correctors. As can be seen, we are dealing with criteria of good and valid measurement, in some cases, even advanced. Nevertheless, Tyler is traditionally considered the father of educational evaluation (Joint Committee, 1981), for being the first in giving it a methodical vision, going beyond behaviorism, a trend of the time, the mere psychological evaluation. Between 1932 and 1940, in his famous Eight-Year Study of Secondary Education for the Progressive Education Association, published two years later (Smith and Tyler, 1942), he outlines the necessity of a scientific evaluation that serves to perfect the quality of education. The synthesis work is published some years later (Tyler, 1950), explaining in a clear way his idea of curriculum, and integrating in it his systematic method of educational evaluation, as the process emerged to determine in what measure the previously established objectives have been reached (sees you also Tyler, 1967 and 1969). The curriculum comes defined by the four following questions: a) What objectives are desired? b) With what activities can they be reached? c) How can these experiences be organized efficiently? d) How can it be proved that the objectives are reached? And the good precise evaluation of the following conditions: a) Clear proposal of objectives. b) Determination of the situations in those that should show the expected behaviors. c) Election of appropriate instruments of evaluation. d) Interpretation of the test results.

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e) Determination of the reliability and objectivity of the measures. This evaluation is no longer a simple measurement because it supposes a value judgement of collected information. It alludes to, without further development, the decision making regarding the success or failure of the curriculum according to students results. This theme is one that important evaluators such as Cronbach and Sufflebeam would take up some years later. For Tyler, the central reference in the evaluation is the preestablished objectives which should be carefully defined in behavioral terms (Mager, 1962), keeping in mind that they should mark the student's individual development, but inside a socialization process. The object of the evaluative process is to determine the change in the students, but its function is wider than making explicit this change to the very students, parents and teachers; it is also a means of informing about the effectiveness of the educational program and also about the teacher's continuing education. According to Guba and Lincoln (1989), it refers to the second generation of evaluation. Unfortunately, this evaluative global vision was not sufficiently appreciated, neither exploited, for those that used its works (Bloom et al., 1975; Guba and Lincoln, 1982). In spite of the above-mentioned issues and that the tylerianan reforms were not always applied immediately, Tylers ideas were well received by the specialists in curricular development and by the teachers. Their outline was rational and it was supported by a clear technology, easy to understand and apply (Guba and Lincoln, 1982; House, 1989) and it fit perfectly in the rationality of the tasks analysis that began to be used with success in military educational environments (Gagn, 1971). In Spain, the positions of Tyler extended with the General Law of Education of 1970. After the Second World War, a period of expansion and optimism occurs that Stufflebeam and Shinkfield (1987) have not doubted to qualify as social irresponsibility, due to the great consumer waste after a time of recession. It is the wel lknown stage as that of the innocence (Madaus et al., 1991). Many institutions and educational services of all types are extended, a large quantity of standardized tests are produced, there are advances in measurement technology and in the statistical principles of experimental design (Gulliksen, 1950; Lindquist, 1953; Walberg and Haertel, 1990) and the famous taxonomies of educational objectives appear (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl et al., 1964). However, at this time, the contribution of evaluation to the improvement of education is scarce due to the lack of coherent plans of action. Much is written about evaluation, but with scarce influence in the improvement of the instructional work. The true development of the tylerianan proposals came later (Anklebone, 1962; Popham and Baker, 1970; Fernndez de Castro, 1973). Ralph W. Tyler died February 18th of 1994, having lived more than ninety years, and after seven decades of fruitful contributions and services to evaluation, research, and to education in general. Some months before, in April of 1993, Pamela Perfumo, a graduate student of Stanford University, interviewed Tyler with the purpose of knowing his thoughts about the current development of evaluation and of the controversial topics surrounding it. This interview, conveniently prepared, was presented April 16, 1993 in the AERA Conference in Atlanta. Horowitz (1995) analyzes the content and the meaning of the mentioned interview, highlighting, among other things, the following aspects of Tylers thoughts at the end of his days: a) Necessity to carefully analyze the purposes of the evaluation before beginning to evaluate. The current positions of multiple and alternative evaluations should be adjusted to this principle. b) The most important purpose in evaluation of the students is to guide their learning, this is, to help them to learn. A comprehensive evaluation of all the significant aspects of their performance is necessary; it is not enough to make sure that they regularly do their daily work. c) The portfolio is a valuable evaluation instrument, but it depends on its content. In any event, it is necessary to be cautious with the preponderance of a single evaluation procedure, including the portfolio, for its inability of

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embracing the whole spectrum of evaluable aspects. d) True evaluation should be idiosyncratic, appropriate for the student's peculiarities and the center of learning. In rigor, the comparison of centers is not possible. e) Teachers should report to parents on their educational action with students. To do this it is necessary to interact with them in a more frequent and more informal way. Half of a century after Tyler revolutionized the world of educational evaluation, one can observe the strength, coherence, and validity of his thoughts. As we have just seen, his basic, conveniently up-to-date, ideas are easily connected to the most current trends in educational evaluation. 4. The development of the sixties The sixties would bring new airs to educational evaluation, among other things because people began to lend interest to Tylers calls for attention, related with the effectiveness of the programs and the intrinsic value of evaluation for the improvement of education. At that time a certain conflict arises between the American society and its educational system, mainly because Russia got ahead in the space program, after the launching of Sputnik for the USSR in 1957. A certain disenchantment appears with public schools and pressure grows for accountability (MacDonald, 1976; Stenhouse, 1984). In 1958 a new law of educational defense is promulgated that provides many programs and means to evaluate them. In 1964 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is established by the National Study Committee on Evaluation and, creates a new evaluation not only of students, but to have an impact on programs and global educational practice (Mateo et al., 1993; Rodrguez et al., 1995). To improve the situation and to recapture the scientific and educational hegemony, millions of dollars of public funds were dedicated to subsidize new educational programs and initiatives of American public schools personnel guided to improve the quality of teaching. (Popham, 1983; Rutman and Mowbray, 1983; Weiss, 1983). This movement was also strengthened by the development of new technological means (audiovisual, computers...) and that of programmed teaching whose educational possibilities awoke interest in education professionals (Rosenthal, 1976). In the same way that the proliferation of social programs in the previous decade had impelled the evaluation of programs in the social field, the sixties would be fruitful in demand for evaluation in the field of education. This new dynamic into which evaluation enters, though centered on the students as individuals that learn with the object of valuation being their performance, will vary in its functions, focus, and interpretation according to the type of decision being sought after. To a great extent, this strong American evaluator impulse is due to the before-mentioned approval of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 (Berk, 1981; Rutman, 1984). With this law started the first significant program for educational organization in the federal environment of the United States, and it was specified that each one of the projects carried out with federal economic support should be evaluated annually, in order to justify future grants. Along with the disenchantment of public school, it is necessary to point out the economic recession that characterized the final years of the sixties, and, mainly, the decade of the seventies. This caused that general population, as taxpayers, and the legislators themselves to worry about the effectiveness and the yield of the money that was used in improving the school system. At the end of the sixties, and as a consequence to the above-mentioned, a new movement enters the scene, the era of Accountability (Popham, 1980 and 1983; Rutman and Mowbray, 1983) that is fundamentally associated with the teaching personnel's responsibility in the achievement of established educational objectives. In fact, in the year 1973, the legislation of many American states instituted the obligation of controlling the achievement of educational objectives and

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the adoption of corrective measures in negative cases (MacDonald, 1976; Wilson et al., 1978). It is comprehensible that, outlined this way, this movement of accountability and school responsibility, gave way to a wave of protests on the part of educational personnel. Popham (1980) offers another dimension of school responsibility, when he refers to the school decentralization movement during the last years of the sixties and beginning of the seventies. Large school districts were divided into smaller geographical areas, and, consequently, with a greater direct civic control on what happened in the schools. As a consequence of this focusing of influence, the phenomenon of educational evaluation was expended considerably. The direct subject of evaluation continued being the student, but also included all those factors that converge in the educational process (the educational program in a wide sense, teacher, means, contents, learning experiences, organization, etc.), as well as the educational product itself. As a result of these new necessities of evaluation, a period of reflection and of theoretical essays with spirit of clarifying the multidimensionality of the evaluative process was initiated during this time. These theoretical reflections would decisively enrich the conceptual and methodological environment of evaluation that together with the tremendous expansion of program evaluation that occurred during these years, will give way to the emergence of the new modality of applied research that today we refer to as evaluation research. As landmarks of the time, it is necessary to highlight two essays for their decisive influence: Cronbachs article (1963), Course improvement through evaluation, and that of Scriven (1967), The methodology of evaluation. The wealth of evaluative ideas exposed in these works forces us to refer to them briefly. Regarding the analysis that Cronbach makes of the concept, functions and methodology of evaluation, we highlight the following suggestions: a) Associate the concept of evaluation with decision making. The author distinguishes three types of educational decisions which the evaluation serves: a) about the improvement of the program and instruction, b) about the students (necessities and final merits) and c) about administrative regulation over the quality of the system, teachers, organization, etc. In this way, Cronbach opens the conceptual and functional field of educational evaluation far beyond the conceptual framework given by Tyler, although he follows his line of thought. b) Evaluation that is used to improve a program while it is being applied, contributes more to the development of education than evaluation used to estimate the value of the product of an already concluded program. c) Put in question the necessity that evaluative studies be comparative. Among the objections to this type of study, the author highlights the fact that frequently the differences among the average grades are lower in intergroups than in intra-groups, as well as others concerning the technical difficulties that present comparative designs in the educational framework. Cronbach pleads for some absolute criteria of comparison, outstanding the necessity of an evaluation with reference to the criteria when defending the valuation with relation to some very well-defined objectives and not comparison with other groups. d) Great scale studies are questioned, since the differences among their treatments can be very large and prevent the clear discernment of the results causes. Defended are the more well-controlled analytic studies that can be used to compare alternative versions of a program. e) Methodologically Cronbach proposes that evaluation should include: 1) process studies - facts that take place in the classroom-; 2) measure of performance and attitudes - changes observed in the students - and 3) follow-up studies, that is, the later path continued by the students that have participated in the program. f) From this point of view, evaluation techniques cannot be limited to performance tests. Questionnaires,

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interviews, systematic and non-systematic observation, essays, according to the author, occupy an important place in evaluation, in contrast to the almost exclusive use that was made of tests like techniques of information collection. If these reflections by Cronbach were shocking, they were not less than those in Scrivens essay (1967). His prolific terminological distinctions vastly enlarged the semantic field of evaluation, and at the same time clarified the evaluative chore. Below we highlight the most significant contributions: a) Definitively established is the difference between evaluation as a methodological activity, that which the author names the goal of the evaluation and the functions of the evaluation in a particular context. In this way evaluation as a methodological activity is essentially the same, whatever it may be that we are evaluating. The objective of evaluation is invariant, its main aim is the process with which we estimate the value of something that is evaluated, while the functions of the evaluation can be vastly varied. These functions are related with the use that is made of the collected information. b) Scriven points out two different functions that evaluation can adopt: the formative and the summative. He proposes the term of formative evaluation to describe an evaluation of a program in progress with the objective of improving it. The term of summative evaluation is the process oriented to check the effectiveness of the program and to make decisions about its continuity. c) Another important contribution of Scriven is the criticism of the emphasis that evaluation gives to the attainment of previously established objectives, because if the objectives lack value, one doesn't have any interest to know to what extent they have been achieved. The need for evaluation to include the evaluation of suitable objectives as well as determining the degreee to which these have been reached is emphasized (Scriven, 1973 and 1974). d) Scriven makes a clear distinction between intrinsic evaluation and extrinsic evaluation, two different forms of valuing an element of teaching. In an intrinsic evaluation, the element is valued for what it is, while in extrinsic evaluation the element is valued for the effects that it causes in the students. This distinction is very important when considering the criteria to be utilized, because in intrinsic evaluation the criteria are not formulated in terms of operative objectives, while it is done in extrinsic evaluation. e) Scriven adopts a position contrary to Cronbach, defending the comparative character that evaluation studies should present. Along with Cronbach he acknowledges the technical problems that comparative studies involve and the difficulty in explaining the differences among programs. However, Scriven considers that evaluation, as opposed to the mere description, implies to produce a judgement about the superiority or inferiority of what is evaluated with regard to its competitors or alternatives. These two commented contributions decisively influenced the community of evaluators, impacting not only studies in the line of evaluation research, to which is preferably referred, but also in evaluation orientated to the individual, in the evaluation line such as assessment (Mateo, 1986). We are before the third generation of evaluation that, according to Guba and Lincoln (1989), is characterized by introducing valuation, judgement, as an intrinsic content in evaluation. Now the evaluator doesn't only analyze and describe reality, he also assesses and judges it in relation to different criteria. During the sixties many other contributions appear that continue drawing an outline of a new evaluative conception that will be finished developing and, mainly, extending in later decades. It is perceived that the conceptual nucleus of evaluation is the valuation of the change in the student as an effect of a systematic educational situation, some well formulated objectives being the best criteria to assess this change. Likewise, one begins to pay attention not only to the desired results, but also to the lateral or undesired effects, and even to results or long term effects (Cronbach, 1963;

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Glaser, 1963; Scriven, 1967; Stake, 1967). There was criticism of the operativization of objectives (Eisner, 1967 and 1969; Atkin, 1968). Some criticism was directed at the structure of the underlying assessment. Another was about centering the assessment of learning in the most easily measurable products. Finally, other critics focus on the low attention given to the affective domain, with greater difficulty in operativization. In spite of this, Tylers evaluative model would experience great improvement in these years, with works on the educational objectives that would continue and perfect the road undertaken in 1956 by Bloom and collaborators (Mager, 1962 and 1973; Lindvall, 1964; Krathwohl et al., 1964; Glaser, 1965; Popham, 1970; Bloom et al., 1971; Gagn 1971). Among other things new ideas appeared about the evaluation of interaction in the classroom and about its effects in the achievement of the students (Baker, 1969). Stake (1967) proposed his evaluation model, the countenance model, that follows the line of Tyler. However, Stakes is more complete when considering the discrepancies among that which is observed and expected in the antecedents and transactions, and when facilitating some bases to formulate a hypothesis about the causes and the shortcomings in the final results. In his successive proposals, Stake would begin distancing himself from his initial positions. Metfessell and Michael (1967) also presented a model of evaluation of the effectiveness of an educational program in which, still following the basic pattern of Tyler, proposed the use of a comprehensive list of diverse criteria. The evaluators could keep these criteria in mind at the moment of evaluation and, consequently, not be centered merely in the intellectual knowledge reached by the students. Suchman (1967) emphasized the idea that evaluation should be based on objective data that are analyzed with scientific methodology, clarifying that scientific research is preferably theoretical and, in exchange, evaluation research is always applied. His main purpose was to discover the effectiveness, success or failure, of a program when comparing it with the proposed objectives and, in this way, trace the lines of its possible redefinition. According to Suchman, this evaluation research should keep in mind: a) the nature of the addressee of the objective and that of the objective itself, b) the necessary time in which the proposed change is carried out, c) the knowledge of if the prospective results are dispersed or concentrated and d) the methods that must be used to reach the objectives. Suchman also defends the use of external evaluators to avoid all types of misrepresentation by the teachers highly involved in the instructional processes. The emphasis on the objectives and their measurement will also bring about need for a new orientation to evaluation, the denominated evaluation of criterial reference. The distinction introduced by Glaser (1963) among measurements referring to norms and criteria would have an echo at the end of the sixties, precisely as a result of the new demands that were outlined by educational evaluation. In this way, for example, when Hambleton (1985) studies the differences among tests referring to the criteria and tests referring to the norm he points out for the first ones, in addition to the well known objectives of describing the subjects performance and making decisions regarding whether or not a particular content is known, another objective similar to that of valuing the effectiveness of a program. Since the end of the sixties, specialists have spoken decisively in favor of criterial evaluation, as soon as that is the evaluation type that gives real and descriptive information of the individual's or individuals status regarding the foreseen teaching objectives, as well as the evaluation of that status for comparison with a standard or criteria of desirable realizations, being irrelevant to the contrast effect, namely the results obtained by other individuals or group of individuals (Popham, 1970 and 1983; Mager, 1973; Carreo, 1977; Gronlund, 1985). In the evaluative practices of this decade of the sixties, two performance levels are observed. We can qualify one as evaluation orientated toward individuals, fundamentally students and teachers. The other level is that of evaluation orientated to decision making on the instrument or treatment or educational program. This last level, also impelled by the evaluation of programs in the social environment, will be the basis for the consolidation in the educational field of program evaluation pro and of evaluation research.

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5. From the seventies: The consolidation of evaluation research If one could characterize the theoretical contributions that specialists offer us during the 1970s, it would be with the proliferation of all kinds of models of evaluation that flood the bibliographical market, evaluation models that express the author's own points of view who proposes them on what it is and how it should behave as an evaluative process. It deals with a time characterized by conceptual and methodological plurality. Guba and Lincoln (1982) speak to us of more than forty models proposed in these years, and Mateo (1986) refers to the proliferation of models. These will enrich the evaluative vocabulary considerably, however, we share Pophams idea (1980) that some are too complicated and others use quite confusing jargon. Some authors like Guba and Lincoln (1982), Prez (1983) and in some measure House (1989), tend to classify these models in two large groups, quantitative and qualitative, but we think along with Nevo (1983) and Cabrera (1986) that the situation is much richer in nuances. It is certain that those two tendencies are observed today in evaluative proposals, and that some models can be representative of them, but different models, considered particularly, differ more by highlighting or emphasizing some of the components of the evaluative process and by the particular interpretation that they lend to this process. It is from this perspective, to our understanding, how the different models should be seen and be valued for their respective contributions in the conceptual and methodological fields (Worthen and Sanders, 1973; Stufflebeam and Shinkfield, 1987; Arnal et al., 1992; Scriven, 1994). There are various authors (Lewy, 1976; Popham, 1980; Cronbach, 1982; Anderson and Ball, 1983; De la Orden, 1985) that consider the models not as exclusive, but rather as complementary, and that the study of them (at least those that have turned out to be more practical) will cause the evaluator to adopt a wider and more understanding vision of his work. We, in some moment have dared to speak of modellic approaches, more than of models, since it is each evaluator that finishes building his own model in each evaluative research as a function of the work type and the circumstances (Escudero, 1993). In this movement of evaluation model proposals, it is necessary to distinguish two stages with marked conceptual and methodological differences. In a first stage, the proposals followed the line exposed by Tyler in his position that has come to be called "Achievement of Goals." Besides those already mentioned by Stake and Metfessell and Michael that correspond to the last years of the sixties, in this stage the proposal of Hammond (1983) and the Model of Discrepancy of Provus (1971) stand out. For these authors the proposed objectives continue being the fundamental criteria of evaluation, but they emphasize the necessity to contribute data on the consistency or discrepancy between the designed guidelines and their execution in the reality of the classroom. Other models consider the evaluation process at the service of the instances that should make decisions. Notable examples of them include: probably the most famous and utilized of all, the C.I.P.P. (context, input, process and product), proposed by Stufflebeam and collaborators (1971) and the C.S.E. (takes its initials from the University of Californias Center for the Study of Evaluation) directed by Alkin (1969). The conceptual and methodological contribution of these models is positively assessed among the community of evaluators (Popham, 1980; Guba and Lincoln, 1982; House, 1989). These authors go beyond evaluation centered in final results, given that in their proposals they suppose different evaluation types, according to the necessities of the decisions which they serve. A second stage in the proliferation of models is one represented by the concept of alternative models that, with different conceptions of evaluation and methodology, continue appearing in the second half of the seventies. Among those highlighted include Stakes Responsive Evaluation (1975 and 1976), to which Guba and Lincoln adhere to (1982), MacDonalds Democratic Evaluation (1976), Parlett and Hamiltons Evaluation as Illumination (1977) and Eisners

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Evaluation as Artistic Criticism (1985). In general terms, this second group of evaluative models emphasizes the role of the evaluation audience and the relationship of the evaluator with it. The high-priority evaluation audience in these models is not who should make the decisions, like in the models orientated to decision making, neither the one responsible for elaborating the curricula or objectives, like in the models of achievement of goals. The high-priority audience is the participants of the program themselves. The relationship between the evaluator and the audience, in the words of Guba and Lincoln (1982), should be transactional and phenomenological. We are referring to models that advocate an ethnographic evaluation, it is from here that the methodology that is considered more appropriate is that used in social anthropology (Parlett and Hamilton, 1977; Guba and Lincoln, 1982; Prez 1983). This summary of models from the proliferation period is enough to approach to the wide theoretical and methodological conceptual array that today is related with evaluation. This explains that when Nevo (1983 and 1989) tries to carry out a conceptualization of evaluation, starting with the revision of the specialized literature, attending topics such as: What is evaluation? What functions does it have? What is the purpose of the evaluation?... a single answer is not found to these questions. It is easily comprehensible that the demands that evaluation suggests of programs of a part, and evaluation for making decisions regarding the individuals of another, drive a great variety of real evaluative outlines used by teachers, directors, inspectors, and public administrators. But it is also certain that below this diversity lie different theoretical and methodological conceptions about evaluation. Different conceptions have given way to an opening and conceptual plurality in the field of evaluation in several senses (Goatherd, 1986). Next we highlight the most outstanding points of this conceptual plurality. a) Different evaluation concepts. On one hand, we have the classic definition given by Tyler exists: evaluation as the process of determining the consistency grade between the realizations and the previously established objectives, to which the models orientated toward the realization of goals correspond. This definition contrasts with the wider one that is advocated by the models orientated to decision making: evaluation as the process of determining, obtaining, and providing relevant information to judge alternative decisions, defended by Alkin (1969), Stufflebeam et al. (1971), MacDonald (1976) and Cronbach (1982). Moreover, Scrivens concept of evaluation (1967), being the process of estimating the value or the merit of something, is recaptured by Cronbach (1982), Guba and Lincoln (1982), and House (1989), with the objective of pointing out the differences that would involve value judgements in the event of estimating merit (it would be linked to intrinsic characteristics of what is being evaluated) or value (being linked to the use and application that it would have for a certain context). b) Different criteria. It is deduced from the previously noted definitions that the criterion to use for evaluation of the information also changes. From the point of view of the achievement of goals, a good and operative definition of the objectives constitutes the fundamental criterion. From the perspective of the decisions and situated inside a political context, Stufflebeam and collaborators, Alkin and MacDonald even end up suggesting the non-evaluation of the information on the part of the evaluator, being the decision maker responsible of doing it. The definitions of evaluation that accentuate the determination of merit as an objective of evaluation use standard criteria for those on which the experts or professionals agree. It deals with models related to accreditation and professional judgement (Popham, 1980). The authors (Stake, 1975; Parlett and Hamilton, 1977; Guba and Lincoln, 1982; House, 1983) that accentuate the evaluation process in the service of determining the value more than the merit of the entity or object evaluated, advocate that the fundamental criterion of valuation be the contextual necessities in those that it is

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introduced. In this way, Guba and Lincoln (1982) relate the terms of the valorative comparison; on one hand, the characteristics of the evaluated object and, on the other, the necessities, expectations and values of the group to those that it affects or with those that the evaluated object is related. c) Plurality of evaluative processes depending on the theoretical perception that is maintained over the evaluation. The cited evaluation models as well as others, too numerous to be in the bibliography, represent different proposals to drive an evaluation. d) Plurality of evaluation objects. As Nevo says (1983 and 1989), there exist two important conclusions about evaluation that are obtained from the revision of the bibliography. On one hand, anything can be an evaluation object and should not be limited to students and teachers and, on the other, a clear identification of the evaluation object is an important part of any evaluation design. e) Opening, generally recognized by all the authors, of the necessary information in an evaluative process to hold not only the desired results, but rather to the possible effects of an educational program, intended or not. Even Scriven (1973 and 1974) proposes an evaluation in which one doesn't have in mind sought after objectives, but values all the possible effects. Opening also regarding the collection of information, not only of the final product, but also of the educational process. And opening in the consideration of different results of short and long scope. Lastly, opening not only in considering cognitive results, but also the affective ones (Anderson and Ball, 1983). f) Plurality in the functions of evaluation in the educational field, withdrawing the proposal of Scriven between formative and summative evaluation, and adding others of socio-political and administrative type (Nevo, 1983). g) Differences in the role played by the evaluator, which has come to be called internal evaluation vs. external evaluation. Nevertheless, a direct relationship between the evaluator and the different audiences of the evaluation is recognized by most of the authors (Nevo, 1983; Weiss, 1983; Rutman, 1984). h) Plurality of the audience of the evaluation and, consequently, plurality in the evaluation reports. From informal narrative reports to very structured reports (Anderson and Ball, 1983). i) Methodological plurality. The methodological questions arise from the dimension of evaluation as evaluation research that comes defined, in great measure, by methodological diversity. The previous summary identifies the contributions made to evaluation in the 1970s and 1980s, a time period that has been named the time of professionalization (Stufflebeam and Skinkfield, 1987; Madaus et al., 1991; Hernndez, 1993; Mateo et al., 1993). In addition to the countless models of the seventies, it was deepened in the theoretical and practical positions and consolidated evaluation as evaluation research in the term previously defined. In this context appear many new specialized magazines such as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Studies in Evaluation, Evaluation Review, New Directions for Program Evaluation, Evaluation and Program Planning, Evaluation News, etc. Scientific associations related to the development of evaluation are founded and universities are beginning to offer courses and programs in evaluation research, not only in graduate degrees and doctorate programs, but also in study plans for undergraduate degrees. 6. The fourth generation, according to Guba and Lincoln At the end of the 1980s, after this whole before-described development, Guba and Lincoln (1989) offer an evaluating alternative that they call fourth generation, seeking to overcome that which, according to these authors, are deficiencies of the three previous generations, such as a manager point of view of the evaluation, a scarce attention to the pluralism of values, and an excessive attachment to the positivist paradigm. The alternative of Guba and Lincoln is called responsive

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and constructivist, integrating somehow the responsive focus proposed originally by Stake (1975), and the postmodern epistemology of constructivism (Russell and Willinsky, 1997). The demands, the concerns and the matters of the individuals involved or responsible (stakeholders) serve as the organizational focus of evaluation (as a base to determine what information is needed) which is carried out within the methodological positions of the constructivist paradigm. The use of the demands, concerns, and matters of those involved is necessary, according to Guba and Lincoln, because: a) They are risk groups with regard to evaluation and their problems should be adequately contemplated, so that they are protected in the face of such a risk. b) The results can be used against those involved in different senses, mainly if they are outside of the process. c) They are potential users of the resulting evaluation information. d) They can enlarge and improve the range of evaluation. e) A positive interaction is produced among the different individuals involved. These authors justify the paradigmatic change because: a) Conventional methodology doesn't contemplate the necessity of identifying the demands, concerns, and matters of the individuals involved. b) To carry out the above-mentioned, a discovery posture is needed more than verification, typical of positivism. c) Contextual factors are not kept sufficiently in mind. d) Means are not provided for case by case valuations. e) The supposed neutrality of conventional methodology is of doubtful utility when value judgements are looked concerning a social object. Leaving these premises, the evaluator is responsible for certain tasks that he/she will carry out sequentially or in parallel, building an orderly and systematic work process. The basic responsibilities of the evaluator of the fourth generation are as follows: 1) To identify all individuals involved with risk in the evaluation. 2) To bring out for each group involved their conceptions about what was evaluated and their demands and concerns about this matter. 3) To provide a context and a hermeneutic methodology in order to be able to keep in mind, understand, and criticize the different concepts, demands, and concerns. 4) To generate the maximum possible agreement about the said concepts, demands, and concerns. 5) To prepare an agenda for the negotiation of topics not in consensus. 6) To collect and to provide the necessary information for the negotiation. 7) To form and mediate a forum of involved individuals for the negotiation. 8) To develop and elaborate reports for each group of involved individuals on the different agreements and resolutions about their own interests and of those of other groups (Stake, 1986; Zeller, 1987). 9) Redraft the evaluation whenever there are pending matters of resolution. The proposal of Guba and Lincoln (1989) extends quite a bit in the explanation of the nature and characteristics of the constructivist paradigm in opposition with those of the positivist.

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When one speaks of the steps or phases of evaluation in this fourth generation, their proponents mention twelve steps or phases, with different subphases in each one of these. These steps are the following: 1) Establishment of a contract with a sponsor or client. . Identification of the client or sponsor of the evaluation. . Identification of the object of the evaluation. . Purpose of the evaluation (Guba and Lincoln, 1982). . Agreement with the client over the type of evaluation. . Identification of the audiences. . Brief description of the employed methodology. . Guaranty of access to records and documents. . Agreement to guarantee the confidentiality and anonimity to where it is possible. . Description of the report type to elaborate. . Listing of technical specifications. 2) Organization to redraft the research. . Selection and training of the appraisal team. . Attainment of facilities and access to the information (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). 3) Identification of the audiences (Guba and Lincoln, 1982). . Agents. . Beneficiaries. . Victims. 4) Development of conjunct constructs within each group or audience (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1978; Lincoln and Guba, 1985). 5) Contrast and development of the conjunct constructs of the audiences. . Documents and records. . Observation. . Professional literature. . Circles of other audiences. . Ethical construct of the evaluator. 6) Classification of the demands, concerns, and resolved matters. 7) Establishment of priorities in the unresolved topics. 8) Collection of information. 9) Preparation of the agenda for negotiation. 10) Development of the negotiation. 11) Reports (Zeller, 1987; Licoln and Guba, 1988).

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12) Recycling/review. To judge the quality of the evaluation, we are offered three focuses called parallel, the linked to the hermeneutic process and that of authenticity. The parallel criteria are named this way because they try to be parallel to the criteria of rigor used for many years inside the conventional paradigm. These criteria have been: internal and external validity, reliability and objectivity. However, the criteron should be in agreement with the fundamental paradigm (Morgan, 1983). In the case of the fourth generation, the criteria that are offered are those of credibility, transfer, dependence, and confirmation (Lincoln and Guba, 1986). The credibility criteria are parallel to that of internal validity, so that the isomorphism idea between the findings and reality is replaced by the isomorphism among the realities built by the audiences and the reconstructions of the evaluator appointed to them. To achieve this, several techniques exist, among them the following are highlighted: a) prolonged compromise, b) persistent observation, c) contrast with colleagues, d) analysis of negative cases (Kidder, 1981), e) progressive subjectivity and f) control of the members. The transfer can be seen as parallel to the external validity, the dependence is parallel to the reliability criterion and the confirmation can be seen as parallel to the objectivity. Another way to judge the quality of evaluation is through an analysis of the process itself, something that fits with the hermeneutic paradigm, through a dialectical process. However, these two classes of criteria, although useful, are not completely satisfactory for Guba and Lincoln that also defend with more insistence the criteria that they call of authenticity, also of the constructivist basis. These criteria include the following: a) impartiality, justice, b) ontologic authenticity, c) educational authenticity, d) catalytic authenticity and e) tactical authenticity (Lincoln and Guba, 1986). We can complete this analysis of the fourth generation with the characteristics with which Guba and Lincoln define evaluation: a) Evaluation is a sociopolitical process. b) Evaluation is a combined process of collaboration. c) Evaluation is a teaching/learning process. d) Evaluation is a continuous process, recursive and highly divergent. e) Evaluation is an emergent process. f) Evaluation is a process with unpredictable results. g) Evaluation is a process that creates reality. In this evaluation the characteristics of the evaluator are a result of the first three generations, namely that of the technitian, the analyst, and the judge. However, these should be expanded with skills in order to gather and interpret qualitative data (Patton, 1980). These skills include those of a historian and enlightener and those of a mediator of judegements which serve to create a more active role as an evaluator in the concrete socio-political concontext. Russell and Willinsky (1997) defend the potentialities of the fourth generations position to develop alternative formulations of evaluating practice among those individuals involved, increasing the probability that evaluation serves to improve school teaching. This requires, on the part of the faculty, the recognition of other positions, besides his own, the implication of all since the beginning of the process and, on the other hand, the development of more pragmatic approaches of the conceptualization of Guba and Lincoln, adapted to the different school realities. 7. The new impulse around Stufflebeam

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To finish this analytic-historical journey from the first attempts of educational measurement to current evaluation research in education, we want to gather the recommendations that come to us more recently from one of the figures of this field in the second half of the 20th century. We are referring to Daniel L. Stufflebeam, proposer of the CIPP model (the most used) at the end of the sixties, president of the Joint Committee on Standars for Educational Evaluation from 1975 to 1988, and current director of the Evaluation Center of Western Michigan University (headquarters of the Joint Committee) and of CREATE (Center for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation), a center favored and financed by the Department of Education of the American Government. Gathering these recommendations (Stufflebeam, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001), into those that have been integrating ideas of diverse notable evaluators, we don't offer just one of the lastest contributions to the current conception of evaluation research in education; we complete in good measure the vision of the current, rich and plural panorama, after analyzing the fourth generation of Guba and Lincoln. Stufflebeam parts from the four principles of the Joint Committee (1981 and 1988), that is, from the idea that any good work of evaluative research should be: a) useful, that is, to provide timely information and to influence, b) feasible, this is, it should suppose a reasonable effort and should be politically viable, c) appropriate, adequate, legitimate, this is, ethical and just with those individuals involved, and d) sure and precise when offering information and judgements on the object of evaluation. Also, evaluation is seen as transdisciplinary, because it is applicable to many different disciplines and many diverse objects (Scriven, 1994). Stufflebeam invokes the responsibility of the evaluator that should act according to principles accepted by the society and to professionalism criteria, to form judgements regarding the quality and educational value of the evaluated object that should assist the involved individuals in the interpretation and use of its information and judgements. However, it is also their duty, and their right, to be on the margin of the fight and the political responsibility for the decision-making process and eventual conclusion. To evaluate education in a modern society, Stufflebeam (1994) suggests that some basic approaches of reference should be taken, such as the following: . Educational necessities. It is necessary to ask oneself if the education provided covers the necessities of the students and their families in all areas in view of basic rights, in this case, inside a democratic society (Nowakowski et al., 1985). . Fairness, Equity. It is necessary to ask oneself if the system is fair and equal when providing educational services, access, the achievement of goals, development of aspirations, and the coverage for all sectors of the community (Kellagan, 1982). . Feasibility. It is necessary to question the efficiency of the use and distribution of resources, the adaptation and viability of the legal norms, the commitment and participation of those individuals involved, and everything that makes it possible for the educational effort to produce the maximum of possible fruits. . Excellence as a permanently sought after objective. The improvement of quality, starting from the analysis of the past and present practices is one of the foundations of the evaluation research. Considering the reference point of these criteria and their derivations, Stufflebeam summarizes a series of recommendations to carry out good evaluative research and to improve the educational system. These recommendations consist of the following: 1) Evaluation plans should satisfy the four requirements of utility, feasibility, legitimacy and precision (Joint Committee, 1981 and 1988).

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2) Educational entities should be examined for their integration and service to the principles of democratic society, equality, well-being, etc. 3) Educational entities should be valued in terms of their merit (intrinsic value, quality regarding general criteria) as much as their value (extrinsic value, quality and service for a particular context) (Guba and Lincoln, 1982; Scriven, 1991), as well as for their significance in the reality of the context in which it is located. Scriven (1998) points out that using other habitual denominations, merit has fairly good equivalence with the term quality, value with that of cost-effective relationship, and significance with that of importance. In any event, the three concepts depend on the context, specially the one refers to significance, meaning that understanding the difference between dependence on the context and arbitrariness is part of the understanding of the evaluations logic. 4) Evaluation of teachers, educational institutions, programs, etc, should always be related to their duties, responsibilities, and professional or institutional obligations, etc. Maybe one of the challenges that educational systems should tackle is the clearest most precise definition of these duties and responsibilities. Without it, the evaluation is problematic, even in the formative field (Scriven, 1991a). 5) Evaluative studies should have the ability to value to what measure teachers and educational institutions are responsible and they account for the execution of their duties and professional obligations (Scriven, 1994). 6) Evaluative studies should provide direction for improvement, because it is not enough to simply form a judgement about the merit or the value of something. 7) Collecting the previous points, all evaluative study should have formative and summative components. 8) Professional self-evaluation should be encouraged, providing the educators with the skills needed and favoring positive attitudes toward it (Madaus et al., 1991). 9) Evaluation of the context (necessities, opportunities, problems in an area,) should be used in a prospective way, to locate the goals and objectives and to define priorities. Also, evaluation of the context should be used retrospectively to adequately judge the value of the services and educational results, in connection with the necessities of the students (Madaus et al., 1991; Scriven, 1991). 10) Evaluation of the inputs should be used in a prospective way, to assure the use of an appropriate range of approaches according to the necessities and plans. 11) Evaluation of the process should be used in a prospective way to improve the work plan, but also in a retrospective way to judge to what extent the quality of the process determines the reason for why the results are at one level or another (Stufflebean and Shinkfield, 1987). 12) Evaluation of the product is the means of identifying the desired and not desired results in the participants or affected by the evaluated object. A prospective valuation of the results is needed to guide the process and to detect areas of need. A retrospective evaluation of the product is needed to be able to gauge as a whole the merit and value of the evaluated object (Scriven, 1991; Webster and Edwards, 1993; Webster et al., 1994). 13) Evaluative studies should base themselves on communication and the substantive and functional inclusion of stakeholders with the key questions, criteria, discoveries, and implications of the evaluation, as well as in the promotion of the acceptance and the use of their results (Chelimsky, 1998). Moreover, evaluative studies should be conceptualized and used systematically as part of the long-term process of educational improvement (Alkin et al., 1979; Joint Committee, 1988; Stronge and Helm, 1991; Keefe, 1994) and as grounds for action against social discriminations (Mertens. 1999). Empowerment Evaluation which Fetterman defends (1994), is a procedure, of democratic base, of involved individuals participating in the evaluated program, to promote their autonomy in

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the resolution of their problems. Weiss (1998) alerts us that participative evaluation increases the probability that the results of the evaluation are used, but also that it is conservative in its conception, because it is difficult to think that those responsible for an organization put in question its foundation and the system of power. Their interest is generally the change of small things. 14) Evaluative studies should employ multiple perspectives, multiple measures of results, and quantitative as well as qualitative methods to collect and analyze the information. The plurality and complexity of the educational phenomenon makes the use of multiple and multidimensional approaches in evaluative studies necessary (Scriven, 1991). 15) Evaluative studies should be evaluated, including formative metaevaluations to improve their quality and use as well as summative metaevaluations to help users in the interpretation of their findings and to provide suggestions for the improvement of future evaluations (Joint Committee, 1981 and 1988; Madaus et al., 1991; Scriven, 1991; Stufflebeam, 2001). These fifteen recommendations provide essential elements for an approach of the evaluative studies that Stufflebeam calls objectivist and that is based on the ethical theory that moral kindness is objective and independent of personal or merely human feelings. Without entering in debate concerning these final evaluations of Stufflebeam, or initiating a comparative analysis with other proposals, for example with those of Guba and Lincoln (1989), we find it to be evident that the conceptions of evaluation research are diverse, depending on the epistemologic origin. However, there appear some clear and convincing common elements within all the perspectives such as contextualization, service to society, methodological diversity, attention, respect and participation of those involved, etc., as well as a greater professionalization of the evaluators and a wider institutionalization of the studies (Worthen and Sanders, 1991). Stufflebeam (1998) recognizes the conflict of the positions of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation with those of the present trends in evaluation denominated postmodernist. Besides Guba and Lincoln, this conflict is represented additionally by other recognized evaluators such as Mabry, Stake and Walker, but he doesn't accept that reasons exist for attitudes of scepticism and frustration with the current evaluative practice, because many domains of approximation exist and the development of evaluation standards is perfectly compatible with the attention given to the diverse group of involved individuals and their values, social contexts and methods. Stufflebeam defends a larger collaboration in the improvement of evaluations, establishing standards in participative way, because he believes that the approach of positions is possible, with important contributions from all points of view. Weiss (1998) also takes similar positions when she suggests that constructivist ideas should cause us to think more carefully when using the results of the evaluations, synthesizing them and establishing generalizations. However, she doubts that everything has to be interpreted in exclusively individual terms, as many common elements exist among people, programs and institutions. 8. To conclude: synthesis of model and methodological approache of ev lu tion nd Sc iven fin l pe pective After this analysis of the development of evaluation throughout the 20th Century, it seems opportune, as a synthesis and conclusion, to gather and emphasize those that are considered the main models, methodological positions, designs, perspectives and current visions. His analysis, in a compact manner, is a necessary complement for such a historic vision that, due to its lineality, runs the risk of offering an artificially divided disciplinary image. During the seventies and the surrounding years, we have seen an appearance of evaluative proposals that traditionally have been called models (Castle and Gento, 1995) and in some cases designs (Arnal et al., 1992) of evaluation research. We know that several dozens of these proposals existed in the above-mentioned decade, though were very concentrated in

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the time. In fact, the issue of those proposed models for evaluation seems to be a practically closed topic for nearly twenty years. New models or proposals no longer arise, except for some exceptions that we see later on. In spite of that said, models, methods and designs in specialized literature, mainly looking for their agreement classification with diverse approaches, paradigmatic origin, purpose, methodology, etc. continued being discussed. Also in the classifications, not only in the models, exists diversity, which proves that, besides academic dynamism in the area of evaluation research, certain theoretical weakness still exists in this respect. We have previously pointed out (Escudero, 1993) that we agree with Nevo (1983 and 1989) in the appreciation that many of the approaches to the conceptualization of evaluation (for example, the responsive model, the goal-free model, and the model of discrepancies, etc.) have been denominated unduly as models although none of them has the grade of complexity and globality that the previously-mentioned concept should carry. That which a classic text in evaluation (Worthen and Sanders, 1973) designates as contemporary models of evaluation (to the well-known positions of Tyler, Scriven, Stake, Provus, Stufflebeam, etc), Stake himself (1981) says that it would be better to call it persuasions while House (1983) refers to metaphors. Norris (1993) notes that the concept model is used with certain lightness when referring to conception, approach or even evaluation method. De Miguel (1989), on the other hand, thinks that many of the so-called models are only descriptions of processes or approaches to evaluation programs. Darling-Hammond et al. (1989) use the term model due to habit, but they indicate that they don't do it in the precise meaning of the term in social sciences, this is, basing it on a structure of supposed theory-based interrelations. Finally, we will say that the very author of the CIPP model only uses this denomination in a systematic way to refer to his own model (Stufflebeam and Shinkfield, 1987), using the terms approach, method, etc., when referring to the others. For us, perhaps the term evaluative approaches is the most appropriate, even if we continue speaking of models and designs simply due to academic tradition. Our idea is that when conducting evaluative research, we still don't have a selected handful of well-based, defined, structured and complete models, from which to choose one in particular. However, we do indeed have distinct modellic approaches and ample theoretical and empirical support that allow the evaluator to respond in an appropriate manner to the different matters that the research process outlines, helping to configure a global plan, a coherent flowchart, and a model scientifically robust to carry out its evaluation (Escudero, 1993). Which are the necessary matters to address in this process of modellic construction? Leaning on in the contributions of different authors (Worthen and Sanders, 1973; Nevo, 1989; Kogan, 1989; Smith and Haver, 1990), they should address and define their answer while building a model of evaluation research in the following aspects: 1) Object of the evaluation research. 2) Purpose, objectives. 3) Audiences/participants/clientele. 4) High-priority or preferential emphasis/aspects. 5) Criteria of merit or value. 6) Information to collect. 7) Methods of information collection. 8) Analysis methods. 9) Agents of the process. 10) Sequenciation of the process.

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11) Reports/utilization of results. 12) Limits of the evaluation. 13) Evaluation of evaluation research itself / metaevaluation. To define these elements it is logically necessary to look for the support of the different modellic approaches, methods, procedures, etc., that evaluation research has developed, mainly in recent decades. Returning to the denominated models of the seventies and to their classifications, we can gather some of those that appeared in the last decade in our academic field, based on different authors. In this way, for example, Arnal and others (1992) offer a classification of what they denominate designs of evaluation research, revising those of diverse authors (Patton, 1980; Guba and Lincoln, 1982; Prez, 1983; Stufflebeam and Shinkfield, 1987). The classification is as follows:

Chart 1 - Types of designs of educational research Guba and Patton (1980) Lincoln (1982) Objectives Empiricalanalytic System analysis Objectives Stufflebeam and Shinkfield (1987) Objectives

Perspective

Prez (1983) Objectives System analysis

Creating authors Tyler (1950) Rivlin (1971) Rossi and et al (1979)

Scientific method CIPP Artistic criticism Liable to complementarity Adversary proceedings UTOS Responsive Illumination Goal-free Goal-free Democratic UTOS Responsive Cronbach (1982) Responsive Illumination Responsive Illumination Goal-free CIPP Artistic criticism CIPP Artistic criticism Adversary proceedings

Suchman (1967) Stufflebeam (1966) Eisner (1971)

Wolf (1974)

Stake (1975) Parlett and Hamilton (1977) Scriven (1967) MacDonald (1976)

Humanistic interpretive

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For their part, Castillo and Gento (1995) offer a classification of methods of evaluation within each one of the paradigmas that they call conductivist-efficientist, humanistic and holistic. The following is a synthesis of these classifications: Chart 2 - Model behaviorist-efficientist Method / author Achievement objectives Tyler (1940) CIPP Stufflebeam (1967) Evaluative purpose Measurement of achieved objectives Information for making decisions Dominant paradigm Quantitative Content of evaluation Results Role of the evaluator External technician

Mixed

C (context) I (input) P (process) P (product)

External technician

Countenance Stake (1967)

Valuation of results and process

Mixed

Antecedents, transactions, results

External technician

CSE Alkin (1969)

Information for determination of decisions

Mixed

Centered in achievements of necessities

External technician

Educational planning Cronbach (1982)

Valuation of process and product

Mixed

U (evaluation units) T (treatment) O (operations)

External technician

Chart 3 Humanistic model Method / Evaluative Dominant Content of Role of the

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author Customer service Scriven (1973) Opposition Owens (1973), Wolf (1974)

purpose Analysis of the clients necessities

paradigm Mixed

evaluation All the effects of the program

evaluator External evaluator of necessities of the client External referee of the debate

Opinions for consensus decision

Mixed

Any aspect of the program

Artistic Critical criticism interpretation Eisner (1981) of educational actions

Qualitative

. Context . Emergent processes . Relations of processes . Impact on context

External stimulator of interpretations

Chart 4 Holistic model Method / author Responsive Evaluation Stake (1976) Evaluative purpose Valuation of answer to necessities of participants Domi nante paradigm Qualitative Content of evaluation Result of total debate on program Role of the evaluator External stimulator of the interpretation for individuals involved External stimulator of the interpretation for individuals implied External

Holistic evaluation MacDonald (1976)

Educational interpretation for improvement

Qualitative

Elements that configure educational action

Evaluation as

Illumination

Qualitative

System of

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Illumination Parlett and Hamilton (1977)

and understanding of the programs components

teaching and means of learning

stimulator of the interpretation for individuals involved

Scriven (1994) also offers a classification of the previously-mentioned models, before introducing his transdisciplinary perspective which will be commented on later. This author identifies six visions or alternative approaches in the explosive phase of the models, in addition to others that he refers to as exotic that range from models of jurisprudence to expert models. Next we succinctly comment on these visions and the models that are attributed to them. The strong decision-making vision (Vision A) provides the researching evaluator with the objective of reaching evaluative conclusions that help he/she that should make decisions. Those that support this approach worry if the program will reach its objectives, but they continue questioning if such objectives cover the necessities that they should cover. This position is maintained, although not made explicit by Ralph Tyler and is extensively elaborated in the CIPP model (Stufflebeam et al., 1971). According to the Tylerian position, the decisions regarding a program should be based on the degree of coincidence between the objectives and the results. The degree of change in students, which is usually the pursued objective, is the evaluation criteria in this case. Contrary to Tyler, Stufflebeam offers a wider perspective of the contents to be evaluated. The following are the four dimensions that identify his model, context (C) where the program takes place or the location of the institution, inputs (I) elements and initial resources, process (P) that is necessary to continue toward the goal and the product (P) that is obtained. Also, it is established that the fundamental objective of evaluation research is improvement, decision-making for the improvement of each of the four before-mentioned dimensions. Scriven (1994) tells us that Stufflebeam has continued developing his perspective since the development of the CIPP. However, one of his collaborators, Guba, took a different direction later on, just as we have seen when analyzing the fourth generation of evaluation (Guba and Lincoln, 1989). The weak vision of decision-making (Vision B) provides the evaluator with relevant information for the making of decisions, but doesn't force him to produce critical or evaluative conclusions for the objectives of the programs. The most genuine theoretical representative is Marv Alkin (1969) that defines evaluation as a factual process of collection and generation of information at the service of the individual who makes the decisions, but it is this person that has to make the evaluative conclusions. This position is logically popular among those that think that true science shouldnt or cannot enter into questions of value judgements. Alkins pattern is known as CSE (Center for the Study of Evaluation), outlining the following phases: valuation of the necessities and fixation of the problem, planning of the program, evaluation of the instrumentization, evaluation of progresses and evaluation of results. The relativist vision (Vision C) also maintains the distance of the evaluative conclusions, but using the frame of the clients' values, without a judgement on the part of the evaluator about those values or some reference to others. This vision and the previous one have been the road that has allowed to many social scientists, integration without problems in the car of evaluative research. In fact, one of the most utilized texts of evaluation in the field of social sciences (Rossi and Freeman, 1993), utilizes this perspective. Visions B and C are the positions of scientists connected to a free conception of scientific values. On the other hand,

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those that subscribe vision A come from a different paradigm, probably due to their academic connection with history, philosophy of education, compared education and educational administration. Some years ago Alkin (1991) revised her positions from two decades ago, but continued without including the terms of merit, value, or worth. He finishes defining a System of Information for the Administration (Management Information System-MIS) for the use of the individual that makes decisions, but he doesn't offer valuations in this respect. The simplest form of the relativist vision (Vision C) is the one developed in Malcolm Provus discrepancy model of evaluation (1971). The discrepancies are the divergences with the sequence of projected tasks and the foreseen temporization. This model is closely related to program control in the conventional sense; it is a type of simulation of an evaluation. The vision of the fertile, rich, complete description (Vision D) is that which understands evaluation like an ethnographic or journalistic task in which the evaluator reports on what he/she sees without trying to produce valorative statements or to infer evaluative conclusions, not even in the frame of the client's values as in the relativist vision. This vision has been defended by Robert Stake as well as by many British theorists. It is a kind of naturalistic version of vision B, having something of relativist flavor and sometimes appears to be a precursor of the vision of the fourth generation. It is based on observation, in the observable, more than in inference. Recently it has been denominated as a vision of the solid, strong description, to avoid the rich term that seems more evaluative. In his first stage, Stake is tylerian in regard to evaluative conception centered on the outlined objectives, proposing the countenance model (Stake, 1967), as a total image of the evaluation. This tour around the three components, antecedents, transactions and results, elaborates two matrices of data, one of description and another of judgement. In that of description, intentions are gathered from one side and the observations from the other and in the judgement matrix, the norms, which are approved and the judgements, which are believed to be appropriate, are collected. During the mid-seventies, Stake moves away from the tylerian tradition of concern for the objectives and revises his evaluation method toward a position that he qualifies as responsive (Stake, 1975 and 1975a), assuming that the objectives of the program can be modified over time with the purpose of offering a complete and holistic vision of the program and to respond to the problems and real questions that are posed by those involved in the program. According to Stufflebeam and Shinkfield (1987), this model made Stake the leader of a new school of evaluation that demands a model that is pluralistic, flexible, interactive, holistic, subjective, and orientated to service. This model suggests customer service proposed by Scriven (1973), valuing their necessities and expectations. In a graphic way, Stake (1975a) proposes the phases of the method through a comparison of the hours on a clock, putting the first one at twelve oclock and continuing with the following phases in clockwise direction. These phases are the following: 1) Speak with the clients, those responsible, and audiences, 2) Scope of the program, 3) Panorama of activities, 4) Purposes and interests, 5) Questions and problems, 6) Data to investigate the problems, 7) Observers, judges and instruments, 8) Antecedents, transactions and results, 9) Development of topics, descriptions and case studies, 10) Validation (confirmation), 11) Outline for the audience and 12) Gathering of formal reports. The evaluator can also follow the phases in a counterclockwise direction or in any other order. In the responsive method the evaluator must interview the participants to know their points of view and to look for the convergence of the diverse perspectives. The evaluator will interpret the opinions and differences in points of view (Stecher and Davis, 1990) and present a wide range of opinions or judgements, instead of presenting his/her personal conclusions. The vision of social process (Vision E) that crystallized more than two decades ago around a group from Stanford University, directed by Lee J. Cronbach (1980), plays down the importance of the summative orientation of evaluation

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(external decisions about the programs and accountability), emphasizing the understanding, planning and improvement of social programs to those that it serves. Their positions were clearly established in ninety-five theses that have had an enormous diffusion between the evaluators and the users of the evaluations. As for the contents of the evaluation, Cronbach (1983) proposes that the following elements are planned and controlled: . Units (U) that are subjected to evaluation, individuals or participant groups. . Treatment (T) of the evaluation. . Operations (O) that the evaluator carries out for the collection and analysis of data, as well as for the elaboration of conclusions. . Context in which the program and its evaluation takes place. In one specific evaluative research, several units, treatments, and operations can be given, that is, several (uto), inside a (UTO) universe of acceptable situations. Ernie House (1989), a theorists y practitioner of evaluation, quite independent of the latest trends in fashion, also marked the social connection of the programs, but he was distinguished mainly for his emphasis of the most ethical and argumentational dimensions of evaluation, perhaps motivated by the absence of these facets in Cronbachs approaches and his collaborators. The constructivist vision of the fourth generation (Vision F) it is the last of these six visions that Scriven describes (1994), being maintained by Guba and Lincoln (1989) and continued by many American and British evaluators. We have already seen that this vision rejects an evaluation guided by the search for quality, merit, value, etc., and favors the idea that it is the result of the construction by individuals and the negotiation of groups. According to Scriven this means that all types of scientific knowledge are suspicious, debatable and non-objective. The same thing happens to all analytic work, including his philosophical analysis. Scriven notes that Guba himself has always been aware of the potential selfcontradictions of his position. From this revision made by Scriven, there are some evaluative positions traditionally gathered and delt with by analysts. In this way, for example, Schuman (1967) offers an evaluative design based on the scientific method or, at least, in some variation or adaptation of it. Owens (1973) and Wolf (1974 and 1975) propose an opposition method or discussion that through a program, cause the emergence of two groups of evaluators, partisans and adversaries, to distribute pertinent information for decision makers. Eisner (1971, 1975 and 1981) outlines the evaluation in terms similar to the process of artistic criticism. Scriven himself (1967 and 1973) proposed years ago to base evaluation on customer service and not so much on the foreseen goals, given that the unforeseen achievements are frequently more important than those that figure in the planning of the program. Because of this, he tends to denominate his focus as evaluation without goals. The evaluator determines the value or merit of the program to inform the users; it is something similar to an informative middleman (Scriven, 1980). Evaluation as illumination (Parlett and Hamilton, 1977) has a holistic, descriptive and interpretive approach, with the pretense of illumination on a complex range of questions that they are given in an interactive way (Fernndez, 1991). MacDonalds democratic evaluation (1971 and 1976), also denominated holistic, supposes the collaborative participation of those individuals involved, and contrast of opinions of the participants is presumed to be the fundamental evaluative element. Scriven (1994) critically analyzes the six visions and shows himself to be closest to vision A, the strong vision on decision-making, represented fundamentally by the CIPP model of Stufflebeam and his positions. He claims that it is the

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one that comes closest to the common sense vision which is the one that working evaluators use in their own programs, in the same way that doctors work with patients, making it the best thing possible, independently of the type and of the patient's general state. Scriven wants to extend this vision with a vision or model that he denominates transdisciplinary and that he qualifies as significantly different from the previously-mentioned vision A and radically different from the others. In the transdisciplinary perspective, evaluation research has two components: the group of application fields of the evaluation and the content of the discipline itself. Something similar to what happens to disciplines as the statistic and the measurement. Definitively, evaluation research is a discipline that includes its own contents as well as those of many other disciplines; its concern for analysis and improvement extends to many disciplines, making it transdisciplinary. This vision is objectivist like vision A and it defends that the evaluator determines the merit or the value of the program, of the personnel or of the researched products. In such a sense, it should be established in an explicit way and defend the logic used in the inference of the evaluative conclusions, starting from the definitional and factual premises. Likewise, the argumentational fallacies of the doctrine free of values should also be pursued (Evaluation Thesaurus, 1991). Secondly, the transdisciplinary perspective is centered on the consumer rather than the agent or intermediary. The perspective is not exclusive to the consumer, but it does consider the consumer first as a justification of the program. In addition, it considers common good a primacy of evaluation. Beginning here, valuable information is also produced for the agent who decides and can analyze the results of a particular program or institution in relation to its initial objectives. This position not only lends legitimacy to the researcher when generating evaluative conclusions, but also creates a necessity to perform such an analysis in the majority of cases. It is also a widespread vision, though not exactly a general vision, that includes the generalization of concepts in the field of knowledge and practice. From this perspective, evaluation research is much more than the evaluation of programs, processes, and institutions and impacts in many other objects. In a more detailed way, this widespread vision means that: a) The distinctive application fields of the discipline are the programs, personnel, achievements, products, projects, administration, and the metaevaluacin of everything. b) Evaluation research impacts in all types of disciplines and the resulting practices. c) Evaluation research is conducted on levels, from practical to conceptual. d) The different fields of evaluation research have many levels of interconnection and overlapping. The evaluation of programs, personal, centers, etc., have many aspects in common. The fourth distinct element of the transdisciplinary perspective of evaluation is that it concentrates on a technical vision. Evaluation not only requires technical support from many other disciplines, but it includes its own unique methodology. To conduct a proper evaluation, it probably is not necessary to be a great specialist in auxilliary techniques and their processes of results synthesis, consequences, and their placement in the evaluation process as a whole; however, it is a necessity to have a thorough general understanding. This transdisciplinary perspective of Scrivens evaluation research (1994), coincides in great measure with the positions that we have defended in other moments (Escudero, 1996). We don't have positions contrary to the other visions in the same measure that Scriven does and, in fact, we consider from a pragmatic position that all the visions have strong points and that in any event, they contribute something useful to the conceptual understanding and the development of evaluation research. However, we do think that this modern vision of Scriven is solid and coherent and broadly accepted at the present time.

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A critique could be made of this position of Scriven concerning the excessive relative emphasis placed on client orientation, that is in the user in the strict sense. We think that this orientation should be integrated inside an orientation to individuals involved, where different types and different audiences exist and, of course, the users in the sense of Scriven is one of the most important, but it seems to us that evaluative research today has a more plural high-priority orientation than that which is defended by this author. Bibliographic references Ahman, S. J. y Cook, M. D. (1967). Evaluating Pupil Growth. Principles of Tests Measurement. Boston, Ma.: Allyn and Bacon Alkin, M. (1969). Evaluation theory development. Evaluation Comment, 2, 1, 2-7. Alkin, M. (1991). Evaluation theory development: II. En M. McLaughlin, y Phillips (Eds.), Evaluation and education at quarter century (pp.91-112). Chicago: NSSE/ University of Chicago . Anderson, S. B. y Ball, S. (1983). The profession and practice of program evaluation. San Francisco, Ca: Jossey-Bass. Arnal, J.; Del Rincon, D. y Latorre, A. (1992). Investigacin educativa. Fundamentos y Metodologa. Barcelona: Labor Atkin, J. M. (1968). Behavioral Objectives in curriculum design: A cautionary note. The Science Teacher, 35, 27-30. Baker, L. R. (1969). Curriculum evaluation. Review of Educational Research, 39, 339-358. Barbier, J. M. (1993). La evaluacin en los procesos de formacin. Barcelona: Paidos. Berk, A. R. (Ed.) (1981). Educational evaluation methodology: The state of the art. Baltimore: The Hopkins University Press. Blanco, F. (1994). La evaluacin en la educacin secundaria. Salamanca: Amas Ediciones. Bloom, B. S., Engelhaut, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H. y Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives Handbook I; Cognitive domain. New York: Davis, McKay. Bloom, B. S., Hastings, J. Th. y Madaus, F. (1971). Handbook on formative and summative evaluation of student learning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bloom, B.S., Hastings, T. y Madaus G. (1975). Evaluacin del aprendizaje. Buenos Aires: Troquel. Bonboir, A. (1972). La Docimologie. Paris: PUF. Cabrera, F. (1986). Proyecto docente sobre tcnicas de medicin y evaluacin educativas. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona. Carreo, H. F. (1977). Enfoques y principios tericos de la evaluacin. Mexico: Trillas. Castillo, S. y Gento, S. (1995). Modelos de evaluacin de programas educativos. En [Link] y L. M. Willar (Coord.), Evaluacin de programas educativos, centros y profesores (pp.25-69). Madrid: Editorial Universitas, S. A.. Chelimsky, E. (1998). The role of experience in formulating theories of evaluation practice. American Journal of Evaluation 19, 1, 35-55. Coffman, W. E. (1971). Essay examinations. En R.L. Thorndike (Ed.) Educational Measurement. Washington , DC: American Council on Education. Cronbach, L. J. (1963). Course improvement through evaluation. Teachers College Record, 64, 672-683. Cronbach, L. J. (1982). Designing evaluations of educational and social programs. Chicago: Jossey-Bass. Cronbach, L. J., Hambron, S.R., Dornbusch, S.M., Hess, R.D., Hornick, R.C., Phillips, D.C., Walker, D.F. y Weiner, S.S. (1980). Towards reform in program evaluation: Aims, methods and institutional arrangements. San Francisco: JosseyBass. Cronbach, L. J. y Suppes, P. (1969). Research for tomorrow's schools: Disciplined inquiry for education. New York: MacMillan. Darling-Hammond, L., Wise, AE, & Pease, SR (1989). Teacher evaluation in the organizational context: A review of the

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Scriven, M. (1967). The methodology of evaluation. En Perspectives of Curriculum Evaluation, (pp. 39-83). AERA Monograph 1. Chicago : Rand McNally and Company. Scriven, M. (1973). Goal-free evaluation. En E. R. House (Ed.), School evaluation: The politics and process,(pp. 319328). Berkeley, CA.: McCutchan. Scriven, M. (1974). Prose and cons about goal-free evaluation. Evaluation Comment, 3, 1-4. Scriven, M. (1980). The logic of evaluation. Inverness , Ca.: Edgepress Scriven, M. (1991, Evaluation Thesaurus. Newbury Park , Ca.: Sage Scriven, M. (1991a). Duties of the teacher. Kalamazoo, Mi.: Center for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation. Scriven, M. (1994). Evaluation as a discipline. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 20, 1, 147-166. Scriven, M. (1998). Minimalist theory: The least theory that practice require. American Journal of Evaluation 19, 1, 5770. Smith, E. R. y Tyler, R. W. (1942). Appraising and recording student progress. New York: Harper & Row,. Smith, N. L. y Haver, d. M. (1990). The applicability of selected evaluation models to evolving investigative designs. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 16, 3, 489-500. Stacher, B. M. y Davis, W. A. (1990). How to Focus on Evaluation. Newbury Park, Ca.: Sage. Stake, R. E. (1967). The countenance of educational evaluation. Teacher College Record, 68, 523-540. Stake, R. E. (1975a). Program evaluation: particularly responsive evaluation. Occasional Paper, 5. University of Western Michigan. Stake, R. E. (1975b). Evaluating the arts in education: A responsive approach. Ohio: Merril . Stake, R. E. (1976). A theoretical stament of responsive evaluation. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 2 , 19-22. Stake, R. E. (1981). Setting standars for educational evaluators. Evaluation News, 22, 148-152. Stake, R. E. (1986). Quieting reform. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stenhouse, L. (1984). Investigacin y desarrollo del curriculum. Madrid: Morata. Stronge, J. H. y Helm, V. M. (1991). Evaluating professional support personnel in educational settings. Newbury Park, Ca: Sage. Stufflebeam, D. L. (1966). A depth study of the evaluation requeriment. Theory into Practice, 5, 3, 121-134. Stufflebeam, D. L. (1994). Introduction: Recommendations for improving evaluations in U. S. public schools. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 20, 1, 3-21. Stufflebeam, D. L. (1998). Conflicts between standards-based and postmodernist evaluations: Toward rapprochement. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 12, 3, 287-296. Stufflebeam, D. L. (1999). Using profesional standards to legally and ethically release evaluation findings. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 25, 4, 325-334. Stufflebeam, D. L. (2000). Guidelines for developing evaluation checklists. Consultado en [Link]/evalctr/checklists/ el 15 de Diciembre de 2002. Stufflebeam, D. L. (2001). The metaevaluation imperative. American Journal of Evaluation, 22, 2, 183-209. Stufflebeam, D. L., Foley, WJ, Gephart, WJ, Guba, EG, Hammond, RL, Merriman, HO & Provus, MM (1971). Educational Evaluation and Decision-making, Itasca, Illinois : F. E. Peacock Publishing. Stufflebeam, D. L. y Shinkfield, A. J. (1987). Evaluacin sistemtica. Gua terica y prctica. Barcelona: Paidos/MEC. Suchman, E. A. (1967). Evaluative Research: Principles and Practice in Public Service and Social Action Programs. New York : Russell Sage Foundation. Sunberg, N. D. (1977). Assessment of person. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

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Taba, H. (1962). Curriculum development. Theory and practice. New York: Harcourt Brace . Thorndike, E. L,. (1904). An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements. New York: Teacher College Press, Columbia University . Tyler, R. W. (1950). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press . Tyler, R. W. (1967). Changing concepts of educational evaluation. En R. E. Stack (Comp.), Perspectives of curriculum evaluation. AERA Monograph Series Curriculum Evaluation, 1. Chicago: Rand McNally,. Tyler, R. W., (Ed.) (1969). Educational evaluation: New roles, new means. Chicago: University of Chicago Press . Walberg, H. J. y Haertel, G. D. (Ed.) (1990). The International Encyclopedia of Educational Evaluation. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Webster, W. J. y Edwards, M. E. (1993). An accountability system for school improvement, Paper presented at the annual meeting (April) of the AERA. Atlanta, GA. Webster, W. J., Mendro, R.L. y Almaguer, T.O. (1994). Effectiveness indices: A value added approach to measuring school effect. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 20, 1, 113-137. Weiss, C. H. (1983). Investigacin evaluativa. Mtodos para determinar la eficiencia de los programas de accin. Mxico: Trillas,. Weiss, C. H. (1998). Have we learned anything new about the use of evaluation?. American Journal of Evaluation, 19, 1, 21-33. Wilson, A. R. J. (1978). La evaluacin de los objetivos. En J. A. R. Wilson (Ed.), Fundamentos psicolgicos del aprendizaje y la enseanza (pp. 549-578). Madrid: Anaya.. Wolf, R. L. (1974). The citizen as jurist: A new model of educational evaluation. Citizen Action in Education, 4. Wolf, R. L. (1975). Trial by jury: a new evaluation method. Phi Delta Kappa, 57, 185-187. Worthen, B. R. y Sanders, J. R. (1973). Educational Evaluation: Theory and Practice. Worthington, Ohio: Charles a. Jones Publishing Company. Worthen, B. R. y Sanders, J. R. (1991). The changing face of educational evaluation, Theory into Practice, XXX, 1, 3-12. Zeller, N. C. (1987). A rethoric for naturalistic inquiry. Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana University.

VI. EVALUAREA CADRELOR DIDACTICE THE TEN MYTHS (AND TRUTHS) OF TEACHER EVALUATION
Myth 1: The central purpose of teacher evaluation is to improve teachers and teaching. The truth is that there is scarce research to suggest that evaluation causes teacher growth. Rather, teachers will improve if you give them enough TIME to work on good ideas: uninterrupted time with students, time to plan and implement what is already known, and sufficient discretionary time to be full human beings. There are other very good reasons to evaluate: to document current good practice, reassure teachers of a needed and effective job, reassure audiences, identify good teaching practices for emulation, and prevent bad evaluation practices.

Myth 2: Better teacher evaluation is just a better rating instrument or framework of teacher behaviors. The truth is that educators do not agree on what should be included in any single catalog of teacher performances or competencies, none could encompass all of what the open-ended nature of teaching should have, teachers are effective using different sets of small numbers of behaviors, and teachers work in varied contexts which call for different competency sets. Comprehensive

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frameworks, descriptions, systems analysis, and lists of duties (e.g., Danielson, 1996; Heath & Nelson, 1974; Scriven, 1988) help build understanding of good teaching, but they don't cause good evaluation.

Myth 3: Excellent teaching is accomplished by strong performance of 22 (or 27 or 60) components of teaching. Rather, a good teacher performs three or four components extremely well, adequately performs some others, and (to be honest) poorly or spottily performs many other things that a teacher is "supposed" to do. Doing a few things well at the moment carries the entire performances of teaching and learning; the other possible performances simply don't matter at the given time in the real human world of a classroom. It is a misleading strategy to try to assess every possible component, duty, competency, or element of a teacher performance at a point in time in order to understand the overall quality of that teaching.

Myth 4: Specific a priori goals (unique to individual or from a general framework) are needed to evaluate a teacher. Rather, good teaching can be documented after the teaching has been done by highlighting the actual specific outcomes, performances, or preparations that played a role in that specific teacher performance.

Myth 5: A uniform system of teacher evaluation is essential: all teachers should be evaluated the same way. The reality is that teachers are good for different constellations of reasons. They work in quite different settings, with different kinds of demands and criteria for quality. Also, we just cannot get all the information we might want for each instance of teacher evaluation. Fairness demands that all teachers have an equal opportunity to document their quality in the ways most appropriate to them.

Myth 6: Pupil achievement data cannot be used in teacher evaluation, or they can be used for all teachers. Rather, we can get good pupil achievement data for some but not all teachers in a district; and the teacher evaluation system should reflect the state-of-the-art of data availability.

Myth 7: Teacher quality can be objectively measured and known by using a sufficiently accurate checklist and rating scheme, or by comparing pupil achievement test scores. Rather, all evaluation is subjective. However, there is good subjectivity and bad subjectivity. Good subjectivity is (a) based on the best objective evidence available, (b) controlled for individual bias, (c) involves the interested audiences, and (d) employs some public logic.

Myth 8: Teacher Evaluation and Staff Development are inextricably bound together. The reality is that these are two important, but independent, programs.

Myth 9: The principal is the only and best evaluator. Rather, others can provide information or opinion, and should be involved. Peer teachers, clients, and comparative norms all play a role.

Myth 10: Bad teachers cannot be dismissed. The reality is that action on unsatisfactory teachers is a principal duty which is widely expected by lay public, parents, teachers, the legal system, and some school districts. It is difficult (and expensive), and should be, to badly dismiss a deficient teacher or to dismiss a good teacher. However, principals can effectively team with other district personnel to act on the small number of deficient teachers. SOCIOLOGY

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AND TEACHER EVALUATION

Although technical questions of teacher evaluation are the most frequently addressed by researchers, still other concerns need to be examined. The most technically excellent teacher evaluation system can be installed in a school district, but be doomed to failure if the sociological dynamics are not addressed. Sociological problems concern the effects of the larger social structure (e.g., expectations, norms, power) on the behavior of individuals and subgroups within that structure (Goodman, 1992; Homans, 1950, 1961; Larsen, 1962; Parsons, 1937, 1964). Sociological dynamics often describe the real world fate of teacher evaluation programs better than a systems analysis flow chart, theoretical formulations about effective teaching behavior or duties, or exhortations to increased professional behavior. Educational sociologists, such as Cusick (1973), Jackson (1968), Lortie (1975), and Johnson (1990), have shown how workplace culture powerfully shapes educational and evaluation practice. Sociological interventions in teacher evaluation largely determine whether the organizational structure elicits compliance and support for the technical procedures, or actions contrary to the goals of the organization and participant efforts to defeat the evaluation program itself. Sociological perspectives are under represented in most research and development in teacher evaluation.

Selected Sociological Constructs Having Implications and Applications for School Teacher Evaluation Alienation Control Expectation Anomie Culture Function Approval Emergent Gemeinschaft/ Author/Pawn phenomenon Gesellschaft Authoritative Endemic Information reassurance uncertainty Influence Authority Energy Innovation Charisma Entrepreneurship Investment Coercion Equilibrium Justice Contract Exchange Leadership Norm Power Relationship Reward Role Sanction Sentiment Status Symbol Value

POLITICS OF SCHOOL QUALITY: A NATIONAL CONTROVERSY WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EVALUATION

The politics of teacher evaluation is largely a matter of local controversy (Kimbrough, 1964). However, one national level political debate concerning education does have implications for teacher evaluation practice. The charge that schools are declining in quality makes a difference in how teachers should be evaluated. For example, a true crisis in quality would call for more use of mandatory techniques, and fewer options for teachers as recommended at this website.

A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) began a series of national policy documents that claimed that the performance of U.S. schools was in great decline. The complaints of these influential reports included

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falling achievement as evidenced by lower standardized test scores, unfavorable international comparisons, and inadequate performance of U.S. public school graduates in the workplace. The role of teachers in these critiques varied, but in no case was the teacher seen as a well functioning, valuable contributor. This negative view of U.S. schools and teachers became generally accepted in the lay public, media, and government (Lind, 1997; Schrag, 1997).

The Sandia Report (Carson, Huelskamp, & Woodall, 1993) was the first academic analysis of the question of school and graduate quality. The findings of this research group were quite unequivocal: the evidence for decline in quality simply does not exist. Rather, the data point to either constant levels, or even slight increase in some subgroups. Other studies began to confirm this more optimistic view (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). Finally, popular journalists began to take up the corrections (Applebome, 1995; Schrag, 1997).

If the critiques of school and teacher quality were not based upon a preponderance of the data, what reasons can be advanced for their sudden and widespread appearance? Lind (1997), a political journalist, called these controversies "an intersection of scholarship and politics" (p. 158), rather than rational analysis. Further, he presented evidence that the "sacrifice of objectivity to political expediency has gone beyond the normal tendency of partisans of all persuasions to stack evidence in favor of policies they prefer" (p. 157). Lind suggested that partisan politics were behind the critiques, rather than scholarly, rational, or objective decision-making politics. For example, the interests of organizations or officeseeking candidates can be advanced by diatribes against public schools. Spring (1997), a political scientist, added that a sense of crisis serves the interests of many points of view in the process of educational policy making. For example, liberals interested in securing more money for schools can use the sense of crisis as justification. Others interested in private schools or vouchers use the claim of crisis as backing for their preferred changes. Table 1 summarizes reasons for partisan critiques of education, rather than objective, scholarly, or rational debate. TABLE 1 Reasons for "Partisan" Rather than "Objective," "Scholarly," or "Rational" Debate on School Quality Justify government financial support for private schools where religious and political expressions can be made (e.g., creationism, prayer) Acquire votes for candidates of certain political groups, parties Acquire financial contributions for certain political groups, parties, organizations Advocate school control centralization vs. local control Advocate large scale standardized testing Emphasize school curriculum for work preparation, international competition, economic development Advocate Standards-based education Sense of crisis important to stimulate educational reform Sense of crisis important to increase school resources

Political debate and decision-making concerning the quality of U.S. schools directly affects teacher evaluation thinking and practice. If schools, and by association their teachers, are declining in quality then emphasis should be given to goals and procedures which halt the erosion. Table 2 shows issues at stake in the debate.

TABLE 2: Differences in Teacher Evaluation if Quality is Declining or Stable

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If Teacher Quality is Declining Goal: Improve teachers Goal: Identify incompetent teachers Discriminate among teachers Reward best teachers Mandate evaluation practices

If Teacher Quality is Stable or Improving Goal: Document current effectiveness Goal: Identify incompetent only minor goal Highlight effective practice Acknowledge best practices, best evidence Give teachers choices

GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF AN EDUCATOR EVALUATION SYSTEM The System should: 1. Conform to state statutes concerning educator evaluation. 2. Be understood, credible, valued, and used by District personnel, Board, and community. 3. Supply information about educator quality for accountability, educator planning, retention decisions, and public and professional dissemination. 4. Recognize and acknowledge good teaching, reassure practitioners and audiences, highlight exemplary practices for emulation, inform hiring practices, and foster improvement. 5. Include formative, summative, and monitoring functions. 6. Be based upon the best objective evidence available, control bias, and involve the interested audiences. Value the use of multiple and variable data sources. 7. Promote equality of opportunity for student learning. 8. Include the central involvement of individual educators and their responsi-bility for their own professional evaluation. Promote equality of opportu-nity for professional practice and documentation of merit, value, and impact. 9. Be based on role expectations derived from national professional standards.1 10. Meet professional standards for sound evaluation, including propriety (ethical and legal), utility (useable and effective), feasibility (practical, effi-cient, and cost-effective), and accuracy (valid and reliable).2

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11. Support fairness and the rights of both educators and the institution.3 12. Include all categories of personnel, and be supported by assessment of other educational components that influence student achievement (e.g., curricu-lum, facilities, materials, technology, resources, community support). The District should show balance in assessing students, staff, and programs, and reciprocity and parallelism in rigor and frequency of assessment. 13. In cases of poor practice, to supply specific information for effective remediation, or to make a case for dismissal. 14. Be subject itself to evaluation, validation, refinement, and updating. ________________________________________ 1National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1996). What teachers should know and be able to do. Detroit, MI: NBPTS. 2Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation (1988). D.L. Stufflebeam (Chair),The personnel evaluation standards. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. 3 Strike, K. & Bull, B. (1981). Fairness and the legal context of teacher evalua-tion. In J. Millman (Ed.), Handbook of teacher evaluation (pp. 301-343). Beverly Hills: Sage.

VII. TEACHER EVALUATION

An evaluation of each instructor is to be done on a regular basis, both announced and unannounced, but no less than once a year. It is an opportunity for the director to become acquainted with the teachers instructional style and abilities. It may result in suggestions for improvement, as well as commendations for specific strengths. It is also an opportunity for the instructor to provide feedback on the evaluation and to develop dialog between the director and the instructor. An awareness of the quality of instruction in your institution may assist in preventing problems in the classroom. An evaluation of each instructor is to be done on a regular basis, both announced and unannounced, but no less than once a year. It is an opportunity for the director to become acquainted with the teachers instructional style and abilities. It may result in suggestions for improvement, as well as commendations for specific strengths. It is also an opportunity for the instructor to provide feedback on the evaluation and to develop dialog between the director and the instructor. An awareness of the quality of instruction in your institution may assist in preventing problems in the classroom. An evaluation of each instructor is to be done on a regular basis, both announced and unannounced, but no less than once a year. It is an opportunity for the director to become acquainted with the teachers instructional style and abilities. It may result in suggestions for improvement, as well as commendations for specific strengths. It is also an opportunity for the instructor to provide feedback on the evaluation and to develop dialog between the director and the instructor. An awareness of the quality of instruction in your institution may assist in preventing problems in the classroom.

TEACHER EVALUATION SCHOOL NAME SCHOOL LOCATION Teacher __________________________ Course ________________

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No. of Students _____ Length of Visit ___________________ Date of Visit____________________ Mark each item according to the following scale: G=Good I=Improvement Desired N=Not Observed U=Unsatisfactory A. Teaching Techniques 1. Utilizes notebook and/or other guides effectively. __________ 2. Demonstrates sufficient mastery of content. __________ 3. Makes effective use of a variety of available materials. __________ 4. Makes clear, practical demonstrations. __________ 5. Provides for student participation. __________ 6. Uses logical, purposeful and though-provoking questions. __________ 7. Provides interesting and adequate reinforcement. __________ 8. Varies procedures in working with pupils of varying abilities. __________ 9. Provides motivation. __________ B. Effective Planning 1. Displays evidence of teacher preparation. __________ 2. Directions to students are clearly thought out and well stated. __________ 3. Materials for class are organized and available. __________ 4. Provides enrichment and/or remediation where needed. __________ 5. Is aware of adequate pacing. __________ 6. Carefully plans student assignments. __________ C. Student/Teacher Relationships 1. Maintains student interest and attention. __________ 2. Works constructively with individual or group. __________ 3. Manages routine so as to avoid confusion. __________

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4. Exhibits poise, voice control, and tact. __________ 5. Graciously accepts less than "right" response with slow students. __________ 6. Uses positive statements to students. __________ 7. Makes supportive statements to students. __________ 8. Maintains a friendly and respectful teacher-student relationship. __________ D. Classroom Environment 1. Environment is generally neat and attractive. __________ 2. Teacher is aware of proper heat, light, and ventilation. __________ E. Commendable Features

F. Suggestions for Improvement

G. In t ucto Comment

Director Instructor

Date Date

EXEMPLIFICARE

2008-09 Teacher Evaluation

( For Spring 2009, Fall 2009, or Spring 2010 Enrollment ) p
Female

p
Male

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TO THE APPLICANT

After completing all the relevant questions below, give this form to a teacher who has taught you an academic subject (for example, English, foreign language, math, science, or social studies). Please also give that teacher stamped envelopes addressed to each institution that requires a Teacher Evaluation. Legal name ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Last/Family (Enter name exactly as it appears on official documents.) First/Given Middle (complete) Jr., etc. Birth date __________________________________________________________________ Social Security # _____________________________________ mm/dd/yyyy (Optional) Address ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Number & Street Apartment # City/Town State/Province Country ZIP/Postal Code School you now attend ________________________________________________________ CEEB/ACT code _____________________________________ Please detach along perfora tion TEACHER EvALUATION 1 TE-1 / 2008-09 TO THE TEACHER The Common Application membership finds candid evaluations helpful in choosing from among highly qualified candidates. A photocopy of this reference form, or another reference you may have prepared on behalf of this student, is acceptable. You are encouraged to keep the original of this form in your private files for use should the student need additional recommendations. Please return it to the appropriate admission office(s) in the envelope(s) provided to you by this student. Please submit your references promptly. Be sure to sign below. Teachers name (Mr./Ms./Dr., etc.) ________________________________________________ Subject taught _________________________________ ______ Please print or type Signature _________________________________________________________________________________________________ Date _____________________ mm/dd/yyyy Secondary school _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ School address ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Number & Street City/Town State/Province Country ZIP/Postal Code Teachers phone (_______) ____________________________________________________ Teachers e-mail _____________________________________ Area Code Number Ext. Background Information How long have you known this student and in what context? _______________________________________________________________________________ What are the first words that come to your mind to describe this student? _____________________________________________________________________ List the courses you have taught this student, noting for each the students year in school (10th, 11th, 12th; first-year, sophomore; etc.) and the level of course difficulty (AP, IB, accelerated, honors, elective; 100-level, 200-level, etc.). _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ No, I do not waive my right to access, and I may someday choose to see this form or any other recommendations or supporting documents submitted by me or on my behalf to the institution at which I'm enrolling, if that institution saves them after I matriculate. Signature _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Date ___________________

Evaluation Please write whatever you think is important about this student, including a description of academic and personal characteristics, as demonstrated in your classroom. We welcome information that will help us to differentiate this student from others. (Feel free to attach an additional sheet or another reference you may

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have prepared on behalf of this student.) Academic achievement Intellectual promise Quality of writing Creative, original thought Productive class discussion Respect accorded by faculty Disciplined work habits Maturity Motivation Leadership Integrity Reaction to setbacks Concern for others Self-confidence Initiative, independence OVERALL No basis Below average Average Good (above average) One of the top few Ive encounte ed (top 1%) Excellent (top 10%) very good (well above average) Ratings IMPORTANT PRIvACY NOTICE: Under the terms of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), after you matriculate you will have access to this form and all other recommendations and supporting documents submitted by you and on your behalf after matriculating, unless at least one of the following is true: 1. The institution does not save recommendations post-matriculation (see list at [Link]/FERPA).

2. You waive your right to access below, regardless of the institution to which it is sent: p Yes, I do waive my right to access, and I understand I will never see this form or any other recommendations submitted by me or on my behalf. p No, I do not waive my right to access, and I may someday choose to see this form or any other recommendations or supporting documents submitted by me or on my behalf to the institution at which I'm enrolling, if that institution saves them after I matriculate. Signature _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Date ___________________

Compared to other students in his or her class year, how do you rate this student in terms of: Outstanding (top 5%) TEACHER EvALUATION 1 TE-2 / 2008-09

Implementing Teacher Evaluation Systems: How Principals Make Sense of Complex Artifacts to Shape Local Instructional Practice
Richard Halverson Carolyn Kelley Steven Kimball University of Wisconsin-Madison
This study examines how local school leaders make sense of complex programs designed to evaluate teachers and teaching. New standards-based teacher evaluation policies promise to

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provide school leaders and teachers with a common framework that can serve as a basis for improving teaching and learning in schools (Danielson & McGreal, 2000; Odden & Kelley, 2002). However, implementation research suggests that the ways in which local actors make sense of and use such policies determines the nature of the changes that actually occur in schools (Desimone, 2002; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). In this paper, case studies of schools in a large school district are used to examine school-level implementation of a standards-based teacher evaluation system. Specifically, we examine the ways in which school and district leaders emphasize and select from the many features of a teacher evaluation framework in the implementation process. We then discuss the ways in which key features of the process were co-opted, ignored, or adapted in accordance with school context, and we point to how the resulting teacher evaluation practices help to create conditions for more substantive conversations about reforming teaching practice. To appear in Educational Administration, Policy and Reform: Research and Measurement Research and Theory in Educational Administration, Volume 3. W.K. Hoy and C. G. Miskel (Eds.) Greenwich, CT.: Information Age Press. 2004

While it is generally acknowledged that teachers exert great influence over the improvement of student learning (Darling-Hammond & Ball, 1997; Wright, Horn & Sanders, 1997), the role that school leaders play in shaping system capacity for successful teaching and learning is often underappreciated (Murphy, 1994; Hallinger & Heck 1996; Elmore 2002). For the most part, principals affect instruction indirectly, through practices such as the acquisition and allocation of resources, supporting and encouraging staff, enforcing rules for student conduct, or taking personal interest in the professional development process (Berends, et. al., 2002; Peterson, 1989). However, principals can also affect teaching practice directly through teacher supervision and evaluation. Evaluation is a formal means for school leaders to communicate organizational goals, conceptions of teaching, standards, and values to teachers (Wise, Darling-Hammond, McLaughlin & Bernstein, 1984). Teacher Evaluation Frameworks Teacher evaluation is a common, often mandatory practice in schools. The traditional programs and practices of teacher evaluation, however, are based on limited or competing conceptions of teaching (Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Klein, 1999), and are often characterized by inaccuracy, lack of support (Peterson, 1995) and insufficient training (Loup, Garland, Ellett, & Rugutt, 1996). Traditional teacher evaluation practices tend to preserve the loose coupling between administration and instructional practices, consequently limiting the ability of principals to foster improvements in teaching and learning (Weick, 1976; 1996; Rowan 1990). Rather than being used as tools for instructional leadership, traditional evaluation programs are often seen as perfunctory and treated by both teachers and principals as an administrative burden. Teacher assessment has frequently been used to weed out the poorest performing teachers rather than to hold all teachers accountable or to improve the performance of all teachers (Darling-Hammond et al., 1999; Haney, Madaus & Kreitzer, 1987). Because of these traditional limits on scope and efficacy, teacher evaluation has had a limited impact on teacher performance and learning (Peterson, 1995; Darling-Hammond, Wise & Pease, 1983). A number of districts developed evaluation systems based on teaching standards to address these concerns. These new systems focus evaluation on a common vision of teaching elaborated across broad domains of practice, comprehensive standards and rubrics, and multiple-sources of evidence (Kimball, 2003; Milanowski & Heneman, 2001; Davis, Pool, & Mits-Cash, 2000). One such model, Danielsons (1996) Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, develops standards to assess and promote teacher development across career stages, school levels, subject matter fields, and performance levels. The framework is organized into four domains of planning and preparation, the classroom

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environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. These domains include 22 components spelled out by 66 elements to specify a range of appropriate behaviors. Each element includes rubrics to assess unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and distinguished performance. The framework is also intended to foster teachers development by specifying techniques for assessing each aspect of practice, a program of evaluator training, and emphasis on using the framework to include formative as well as summative evaluation (Danielson & McGreal, 2000). Prior research on the implementation of this type of standards-based teacher evaluation system has examined the initial perceptions of teacher and administrator acceptance (Milanowski & Heneman, 2001; Davis, Pool, & Mits-Cash, 2000), the nature of feedback, enabling conditions and fairness perceptions (Kimball, 2003) and the relationship of these evaluation systems to student achievement (Gallagher, 2002). Yet we know relatively little about how local school leaders actually use such systems in practice, which features they select from the frameworks to emphasize in their evaluations, and how they adapt the systems to existing evaluation practices. In this paper, we use sensemaking theory as a lens to examine how local school leaders use the framework to shape teaching practices in schools. This knowledge will help policy makers and school leaders to better understand both obstacles and opportunities afforded by comprehensive teacher evaluation frameworks. Sensemaking Sensemaking theory addresses the cognitive dimensions of change in people and organizations (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002; Weick, 1996). Sensemaking begins with the constructivist assumption that learning is shaped by prior experience (Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996; Confrey, 1990). Through experience, people build mental models to anticipate regular patterns of action in the world (Gentner & Stevens 1983; Hammer & Elby 2002). Mental models act as perceptual filters that help to determine both what we notice, and how it is interpreted (Starbuck & Milliken, 1988). Our models shape what we notice in new experiences, and can override the potential of new ideas to transform behavior (Cohen & Barnes, 1993). The impact of new ideas can be either marginalized or co-opted by preexisting practices and ideas (Chinn & Brewer, 1993; Keisler & Sproull, 1982). The tendency to interpret the new in terms of the old may lead people to attend to the surface similarities of new concepts and practices instead of attending to the deeper, structural differences (Gentner, Ratterman & Forbus, 1993; Ross, 1987). People also tend to retain practices they value, and value the practices they retain. The sense we make of new information is also shaped by our social and situational context (Greeno, 1998). Organizations and institutions routinize existing models through policies, programs, and traditions. Thus, the intended effects of innovations are not necessarily altered by the malice or laziness of implementers, but instead by the best efforts of local actors seeking to satisfice conflicting goals (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer 2002, Fischoff 1975; March & Simon, 1958). Actors make sense of new practices within their existing social and situational context, and often adjust the meaning of the new in terms of their established context of meaning. Our cognitive models, however, are not rigid structures that determine what we notice and name. Rather, our models interact with our perceptions and experience in an iterative process through which new experiences can come to shape our existing models. Successful learning requires an active process of readjusting mental schema to what we already know (Carey, 1985; Schank & Abelson, 1977). The tenacious hold our existing ideas have on what we notice and name can require an experience of expectation failure to jolt us into reconstructing our network of assumptions (Schank, 1982). In organizations, new policies and programs can provide this jolt to existing practice, encouraging practitioners to reframe their practice in terms of the new expectations. The ways that practitioners make sense new

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initiatives in terms of pre-existing models make the implementation of new, complex programs a far from linear and predictable process. Artifacts as a Window on Sensemaking Because of its iterative and transitory nature, the sensemaking process has proven to be difficult to research. One way to access sensemaking is to identify occasions when existing models are perturbed by interventions (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Leaders and policymakers introduce policies and programs into organizations to reshape existing practices. In these cases, policies and programs can be understood as sophisticated artifacts intended to shape or reform existing practices in an institutional context (Pea, 1993; Norman, 1993; Wartofsky, 1979; Halverson & Zoltners, 2001). Organizational artifacts originate from different locations. Artifacts such as district policies, state and federal programs, and teacher professional networks originate outside the local school context, whereas other artifacts originate within the school as locally designed efforts to resolve emergent and/or recurrent problems of practice (Halverson, 2002). Taken together, the network of received and locally designed artifacts composes a local situation that both facilitates and constitutes local leadership and teaching practice (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2001). Artifacts have several features important for understanding sensemaking. First, artifacts are designed in order to shape practice in certain ways. The consequent effect on practice, however, is not a direct translation of artifact features to desired outcomes. Those who use artifacts perceive certain features as affordances (Gibson, 1986; Norman, 1993) that support a certain range of actions. Affordances are an actors perception of the ways the artifact can be used in practice. The actual use of a complex artifact, such as a teacher evaluation policy, depends not only on the features built into the design of the artifact, but also on affordances of artifact use perceived by actors. The affordances perceived by local actors determine which features of the artifact are implemented. For example, an artifact that features evaluation in multiple domains of practice can afford a more comprehensive approach to teacher assessment by addressing out-of-classroom as well as classroom practice. The availability of these features does not mean the artifact will be used as intended. For example, an evaluator could focus only on classroom teaching behaviors while effectively ignoring out-of-classroom behaviors. In the hands of another evaluator, however, the evaluation artifact could afford a better-rounded assessment of professional practice. Artifacts can also serve to constrain behavior (Norman, 1993). Like affordances, constraints are perceptions of artifact features that limit or qualify behaviors. Teacher union contracts, for example, often constrain evaluator action by permitting a maximum of two formal observation occasions during the school year. While certain affordances and constraints are built into artifacts by design, the challenge of implementation rests on the interests and abilities of local actors to identify and exploit the intended artifact features. An artifact-based approach to the analysis of implementation focuses on how local leaders select certain features of complex artifacts as affordances and consider other features as constraints. Policy artifacts are introduced into schools not only to alter existing practices, but also to enhance the capacity of local actors to understand their work in new ways and to alter the organizational conditions of the work. A sensemaking perspective highlights how the introduction of complex artifacts draws upon and contributes to the evolution and interaction of individual understanding and local capacity. School principals play a key role in how evaluation artifacts are implemented. In many school districts, administrative certification is required for performing teacher evaluations. Principals shoulder most of the burden of teacher evaluation processes. We use the concepts of principal will and skill and organizational structure to capture the interplay between actors and the school context. The principals capacity for innovation is measured

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in terms of individual will and skill to enact new practices. Will refers to the level of motivation of the local leader to implement the artifact. Leaders who have had a role or stake in the development of the artifact, and those who view instructional leadership as core to their role may be more likely to embrace the artifact, emphasizing its affordances and deemphasizing the constraints it may impose. Skill is the ability of leaders to engage in the intended practice. From a sensemaking perspective, skill levels are determined by the relevant experience of the leader as well as by the training received for the intended practice. Will and skill are not generic capacities appropriately activated in predictable ways. From a sense making perspective, the availability of will and skill depends critically on how actors interpret the need for action in a given situation. In addition to the will and skill of individuals, local leadership capacity is framed by the context of organizational structures, such as pre-existing practices and available resources, to support innovative practice. Leadership capacity is determined by the prior context of practice, including pre-existing similar practices, constraints on innovation, and multiple professional responsibilities. Our sensemaking perspective emphasizes how a leaders perception of structural possibilities, in the form of artifact affordances and constraints, bear on implementation. In the example of teacher evaluation offered above, the perceived needs and capacity of the local situation help to shape both a local leaders will to enact difficult features of a complex evaluation program, and her skill in fully implementing the artifact. Organizational capacity is both shown and determined through the material and temporal resources perceived necessary to support the implementation process. Methodology This study focuses on the ways that school leaders make sense of a complex district teacher evaluation artifact in their local school setting. We chose a case study approach to collect, interpret and present our data. Case studies provide opportunities to explore practices in depth, and to understand the complex interactions that characterize local systems (Stake, 1995). In order to make comparisons across cases, we chose to develop three cases of schools within a single district, faced with similar pressures to implement district policies. Site selection The study takes place in a large school district in the Western United States, which we refer to as Valle Verde Unified. The district was chosen because it has made a substantial effort to implement a standards-based teacher evaluation system based on the framework for teaching (Danielson, 1996). The framework interested the district because it addressed criticisms of traditional teacher evaluation models by incorporating more sophisticated and elaborate evidence gathering and by providing feedback to enhance teaching practice for teachers at all skill levels and career stages. We adopted a multi-dimensional approach to investigating how school leaders made sense of the teacher evaluation system. The data collected for the study include: interviews with district leaders and with principals and teachers from 7 elementary, 4 middle and 3 high schools in the district, for a total of 14 schools; written teacher evaluations in each school; and data describing the local demographic environment and instructional contexts. Fourteen schools were selected from the districts elementary, middle and high schools. We consulted with a district representative to choose schools with a range of socioeconomic contexts and perceived levels of acceptance of the evaluation reform. Other schools were randomly sampled from among the remaining schools available. Data Analysis We began our analysis by examining themes that emerged from interviews conducted in all 14 schools. We searched for patterns in the how the artifact was used to support the

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principals role as evaluator and instructional leader. The triangulation of principal selfreports with (a) teacher and district administrator interviews, (b) teacher assessment scores and (c) written (narrative) teacher evaluations provide multiple sources of data to understand principal perceptions of the constraints and affordances presented by the evaluation framework. Analysis of the data collected from the 14 schools shaped our selection of an elementary, middle and high school for more detailed case analysis of leadership sense making. We developed a coding scheme iteratively to allow patterns to emerge from the data. The coding scheme enabled us to explore the programmatic context, characteristics of the implementation process, local perceptions of artifact affordances and constraints, the impact of the evaluation system on principals, teachers and on the school, and local perceptions of artifact utility. After coding the data, we constructed three school cases to describe the implementation process in each school. The cases were then analyzed to reveal shared and unique characteristics of the sensemaking and implementation process. Findings In the following sections, we present a summary of findings from the teacher evaluation experiences in the 14 schools sampled in the district, including perceptions of administrators and teachers of system features and implementation. Following an analysis of the experiences across the schools, we provide illustrative case descriptions of the ways in which three Valle Verde schools implemented the new teacher evaluation framework. Each school case includes a brief demographic background, a description of the evaluators perspective, an outline of the evaluation process, a summary of the written evaluation forms, and an account of the evaluators and teachers perceptions of the utility of the process. Experiences Across the District The evaluation system at Valle Verde, based on the Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 1996), was implemented in 2000 following three years of planning and fieldtesting. In contrast to the prior system, the new approach represented a more comprehensive set of teaching standards, with explicit performance rubrics, and multiple sources of evidence. The new district policy required that all teachers participate an evaluation cycle of a) a goal setting meeting, b) a pre-observation meeting, c) the observation, and d) discussion of the observation write-up. The cycle was organized around the district-developed evaluation model. The number of observations ranged from nine times per year for beginning, or probationary, teachers to single observations for experienced, or postprobationary, teachers. Key findings relating to principal and teacher interview responses, written evaluations and evaluation decision-making in the 14 schools are summarized below: Principal responses. Teachers and school leaders alike felt the evaluation system provided the opportunity to observe and reflect on teaching practice. Principal perceptions of the evaluation system ranged from an opportunity to develop morale or team building in the school to a significant time-management problem or a mandate that needed accommodation. Compared to the previous, open-ended system at Valle Verde, principals who viewed themselves as strong instructional leaders felt constrained by the specificity of the new system. Other principals liked the clarity of the new system for providing guidance on the focus of evaluation. Most principals viewed evaluation as a time management challenge, with increased meetings required and more paperwork requirements. Some made adjustments by streamlining their evaluation approach or cutting back on the amount and types of evaluation evidence. Others made changes to build in more time at school for evaluation activities. More details about the district evaluation policy are available in Appendix A. Many gave up significant personal time to complete all of the evaluations. Each principal saw merits in the system despite the widespread belief that teacher evaluation itself was not a

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primary force improving teaching. Most evaluators adhered to the basic evaluation procedures and tried to complete the goal-setting session, the required number of observations, and the post-observation conferences. Teacher responses. Teachers were largely positive about the feedback they received as a result of evaluation. With a few exceptions, feedback was seen as frequent, timely, and positive. Teachers cited specific examples of feedback that they utilized to change aspects of their instruction. Most said that their evaluator was qualified to provide feedback. However, in a few cases, teachers felt their evaluators were not adequately qualified to evaluate content-based pedagogy. In particular, evaluators who lacked instructional skills (e.g., those with a background in physical education, special education, or business) were not perceived as having the ability to evaluate instructional content decisions or pedagogical content knowledge. Few claimed dramatic change in instructional practice as a result of the evaluation process, but teachers were positive about the specific changes to theirs practice such as better questioning techniques, use of materials, and improved student engagement. Overall, teachers were positive about interactions with their principals and other evaluators. Several post-probationary teachers remarked that their ability to select their evaluation domain contributed to the fairness, but not necessarily the accuracy of the evaluation. Others said that the principal or other evaluator set the stage for fairness by actively seeking dialogue with the teacher about the evaluation rating and getting the teachers input. Several spoke of the principal encouraging teachers to offer other evidence if they disagreed with a rating. Nature of evidence used in the evaluation. There was variation in the evidence gathered across evaluators. The evidence primarily consisted of class observations and related discussions. Although lesson plans and student artifacts were required to be collected, they did not appear to be systematically gathered or analyzed. In addition, some evaluators skipped the goal-setting session and either left out the goal-setting process or combined it with the post-observations conference (for the next series of observations). The evaluation system was perceived as a low-stakes, formative artifact. Principals emphasized praise in written evaluations and provided gentle criticisms if they criticized teachers at all. The district evaluation form contained an area for rating based on a number of rubrics and space for a narrative evaluation. Very little critical feedback was provided either through evaluation scores or in narratives. Principals did not assign an unsatisfactory rating in any of the 485 written evaluations we reviewed. For evaluation decisions, some principals evaluated teacher performance by comparing the teachers practice to the proficient level (Level 2), and adjusted scores as evidence warranted. Others allowed scores to evolve more naturally from their analysis of the evidence. Narrative feedback was affirmative and seemed intended to foster reflection and growth. Written evaluations provided by elementary and middle school principals in many cases included longer narratives, despite often having more staff to evaluate than middle or high school principals. High school evaluations contained minimal written feedback, usually one to three sentences, even though the evaluation role was shared in high schools. Most evaluators allowed considerable teacher input into what would be observed and into the performance ratings (e.g., teachers could bring additional evidence to bear in the decision). The analysis of the data from across the district revealed a substantial investment by district and local school leaders in designing and implementing the teacher evaluation framework. Many teachers and leaders were grateful for the opportunity to talk about their teaching. However, the reception of the artifact into local school contexts caused several conflicts. The evaluation program required a considerable amount of time. The time pressures, as we shall see in our cases, forced leaders to select which artifact features to implement. While the artifact was intended by designers to give local leaders a tool to

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improve teaching, most leaders did not use the artifact to disturb existing administratorteacher relations. Praise rather than critique, and high scores rather than low, characterized the written feedback provided by evaluators. In the next section, we provide three cases to illustrate themes of how principals made sense of the artifact in their local school contexts. La Esperanza Elementary School La Esperanza Elementary is a K-6 school in the heart of the largest city in the Valle Verde district. Principal Susan Richards and her staff see the education of students learning English as a second language as the main challenge for the school. La Esperanzas 36 teachers are organized into grade-level teams throughout the school. 81 percent of the 690 students are members of a minority group (primarily Latino), and 84 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. Nearly half are classified as English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The school is currently under significant accountability pressure from the state and is being monitored and assisted in the effort to improve student academic performance. The teachers interviewed at La Esperanza included one first grade, one second grade, and two third grade teachers. Three of the four teachers did not have substantial teaching experience, while the fourth had been teaching for more than a decade at the school. All four of these teachers (along with the rest of the faculty) were evaluated by the principal. All of the teachers interviewed and the principal agreed that La Esperanza had challenges not faced by other district schools. Principally, the presence of significant numbers of non-English speaking students meant that teachers must be patient with and accommodate students. Evaluator characteristics. Principal Richards had been at the school for four years. Before coming to La Esperanza elementary, she worked for eight years as a fourth grade teacher, served as a teacher leader, and a trainer for the district initiatives in writing and math. In addition, she worked as a dean of students for four and a half years and as an elementary school principal for three years. Part of her prior work was on a Native American reservation, working with a highly at-risk student population. Richards viewed her role as an instructional coach for the faculty. She believed that her experience with the district provided her with the knowledge and skills she needs to identify appropriate teaching techniques and make helpful suggestions. She recognized the potential stress associated with a summative evaluation system that attempts to provide formative feedback to teachers, and works with teachers to reassure them that the system is formative and an opportunity for growth, rather than for humiliation and anger: My goal is to make them, to help them feel more comfortable, that I am not just an evaluator but I am also a coach. That is my role. That is the role I want. I want to be a supervisory coach. And so we work hard at trying to establish that kind of rapport. And we are getting there. It has taken four years of trust to know that I am not going to beat them upand destroy them. Teacher interviews corroborated Richards description. All four teachers commented on their positive and upbeat interactions with Richards. One teacher said that she truly is there to help us. I mean, not to criticize or anything like thatI love it when she would come in because I know she is watching me to help me improve what I am doing. Evaluation process. Richards estimated that she spent approximately fifteen hours per year on each teachers evaluation. (With 36 teachers, this is the equivalent of fully a third of the academic year spent on observation, evaluation, and feedback). The evaluations were based on evidence collected through formal observations and intermittent informal observations, such as walk-throughs, throughout the year. The principal also gathered information regarding teacher performance during other committee meetings and professional gatherings. She viewed the new evaluation system as flexible in its use. For example, this past year she chose to emphasize teacher goal-setting and required all teachers

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to submit their goals in the first month of the school year. As part of goal-setting sessions, teachers evaluated themselves and then discussed her evaluation of their performance. Richards connected the evaluation process to how teachers met their goals. In her classroom observations, Richards split her time between scripting part of the lesson and observing classroom dynamics. This process allowed her to get a sense of how the classroom worked while using examples of classroom conversation and activity in her report. She focused on teacher skills in questioning and responding to students. After recording her reflections on the observation form, Richards dropped the written evaluation off for the teacher to sign and arranged for a post-observation conference. During the conference, she asked about the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson and what the teachers might do differently. She offered positive feedback to highlighting the successful aspects of the lesson. Richards reminded teachers of needed changes in a positive manner until the third time, that is my key, a third timeif I have asked you three times to clarify your lesson plans and they are still not clarified, then it becomes an evaluative measure... that is all lettered and documented. Summary of written evaluations. An analysis of the evaluations revealed that the mean score for the faculty across evaluation domains at La Esperanza was between proficient and area of strength on the district scale. No teacher received an unsatisfactory rating. This indicated that, according to the principal, most teachers are performing at or above a proficient level. Richards included a significant number of written comments on the teacher evaluation forms. The narrative section averaged just over 24 sentences per evaluation. The majority of the narratives were composed of excerpts from Richards scripted observation notes. Each evaluation had a final summative paragraph, which expressed the high value that person added to the school. In addition, this final paragraph always included a sentence saying that the teacher was an important member to the La Esperanza family. For example, she described one teacher as being a wonderful asset for La Esperanza. There was no clear relationship between the assigned scores and the amount and content of the written narratives. For example, there were several instances where a score of a 1 was given, but there was little or no discussion of the rationale for the low score in the narrative. Information gathered from the teacher and principal interviews suggested that substantial dialogue was taking place between the principal and the teachers that was not documented in the evaluation forms. For example, one teacher reported that, after an observation, the principal gave her a recommendation about how to improve her questioning and answering techniques with her students. This recommendation could not be found in the written evaluation narrative. The teachers also reported that they regularly received verbal suggestions from the principal throughout the school year. Perceptions of the evaluation process. All four of the teachers interviewed indicated that Richards written evaluations are extremely affirmative, emphasizing many positive aspects of their teaching. As the principal said, I try to find their highlightsand then I will make one recommendation. I wont beat a dead horse, but I will make one recommendation because that is what I should do and to assist my teachers. The principal indicated that teachers have been positive about the evaluation process. She gave the following example of a positive response from teachers as a result of the evaluation process: I was in a first grade classroom and I saw a lot of the same writings hung up on a wall that had been there all year. And I didnt have. . . a problem with that but I was curious for the teacher to tell me what was the purpose to maintain those? And their reasoning was excellent. Based on this reading training that we had which is the children go around and they read familiar print continuously so that they have success with finding the writings and it is also finding words and they do word writing. So

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that kind of conversation is really good so I understand what they are doing. And they also are aware of what is going on in the classroom. The principals focus on positive feedback and coaching, along with the team-based instruction throughout the school, helped to create a climate of openness to observation, evaluation, and feedback among teachers. Teamed teachers often worked together to address evaluation goals. While the evaluation was not a primary focus, teamed teachers typically discussed with one another their evaluation goals as they planned their work for the year. Despite the large time commitment and teacher reception to the evaluation system, Richards did not believe that the evaluation process was a good tool to improve teaching in her school. When asked whether the evaluation system could change teaching, she said, On average, no. I dont think so. I think it can be very disheartening. I think evaluations can either encourage and give teachers a pat on the back that they dont often get or it can totally destroy them. It is just how you approach it. And I have seen both things happen. It is a very hard thing to do. And I dont think it changes people. I think it can stop people. I dont think it changes them. While the evaluation system itself may not have led to deep change, the principal described how state accountability requirements provided pressure to change. I think what changes us, what drives change here for my teachers will be, well, it really comes down from the State Department beating us up. And then as a team, it is a total team effort, we get together and look at our scores, look and what we are doing, and then we look at what we need to change and how to implement change? Richards low estimate of the impact of the evaluation system contrasted with teachers views. Teachers provided several examples of how Richards evaluation feedback enhanced their teaching. Newer teachers remarked how the evaluations helped to improve classroom management. A veteran teacher offered an example of feedback regarding pedagogical content in math. Much of this feedback was specific and not directly connected to the evaluation framework. For example, one teacher indicated that the principal suggested using a microphone at the next student presentation and having a master of ceremonies to host the show. Another recommendation focused on increasing wait time after questioning students, or shifting the balance of large and small group time to improve student discussion. Teachers did not mention evaluation rubrics in their comments about principal feedback. Several new teachers believed that the framework itself provided a progress map to identify areas for improvement. One teacher said that the system kind of gives you the direction to go to or work towards. While these new teachers noted the effect of the system on their practice, one veteran teacher did not think that the system caused teacher change. However, the veteran teacher did say that the system provided a good method to track what type of professional development she would seek. All four teachers believed that the system was fair. The teachers reported considerable input into what went into the final evaluation. One teacher said that she can discuss with her why I feel I am at a 2 and maybe at a 1 there. She is very fair about taking my suggestions into her reasoning. Woods Middle School Woods Middle School serves about 1000 6 th ,7 th and 8 th graders in a large city in the Valle Verde district. In 2001-02, 17% of Woods students were Latino, and 28% qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Student performance in reading, language arts, and mathematics

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is above national norms for eighth grade students; however, significant gaps exist between the test scores of white and ESL students. The school staff included 42 teachers, five special education teachers, and five additional teaching staff. The teachers interviewed at Woods included one probationary teacher, two teachers on major evaluations, and two on minor evaluations. The probationary teacher was in his first year, the two major evaluation teachers had been teaching for less than five years, and the two minor evaluation teachers had been at Woods for at least eight years. Two taught math and three taught English. The school was organized around a cohort model that grouped students and teachers together as they passed through grade levels. This structure gave teachers opportunities to get to know their students well, and established structures for common instructional planning time. While several of the veteran teachers mentioned this structure as an occasion to share strategies about instruction, other teachers designed and taught their lesson plans independently. Evaluator characteristics. The Woods administrative team included Principal John Storm, an assistant principal and a Dean of Students. Storm was in his seventh year at Woods Middle School, his third year as principal. After an earlier career as a managing partner of a private sector business, Storm has spent his past twelve years as an educator in the district. Storm feels that his main strength as a principal has been his ability to listen to teachers, students, and parents and to solve problems as they emerge in the school. This blend of problem-solving and listening has enabled him to use the evaluation system to point out potential instructional issues while being sensitive to teachers professional context: Because then I can point out problems to (the teachers) and that requires a little bit of discussion. Some of it just comes from personal experience. I have been doing this long enough where I happen to know that so and so is working on their masters degree. I dont have to ask them. I just know they are doing it. Principal Storm saw the teacher evaluation framework as an important, if burdensome, supplement to his role as school instructional leader. Storm felt the evaluation system was particularly useful as a tool to help or dismiss probationary teachers. His approach to the new evaluation program was informed by his own six-point system for what constitutes good teaching: The first is that the objective is clearly stated and the kids have to know what it is they are supposed to learn. The lesson has to have a clearly defined structure. You cant just do this and that. They all have to be related. I expect to see most of the students actively participating in their learning, not just sitting there and listening. I expect to see a teacher checking for understanding frequently so that they dont keep teaching after they have lost their kids. And then I expect to see teacher/student, student/student interactions to be appropriate. And any misbehavior I expect the teacher to respond to appropriately. Teachers reported that Storms six-point system characterized their experience of the evaluation process. Four of the five teachers interviewed reported that the principals concerns with checking for understanding, classroom management, and clearly defined organization structure came across in the evaluation process. When asked to provide a specific example of feedback, four of the teachers mentioned Storms review of their questioning practices. The teachers did not seem to differentiate between Storms established checklist and the new framework. One veteran teacher noted that Storms focus on questioning technique flowed from the evaluation form he always uses. Evaluation process. Storm used the new evaluation system as a complement to his existing informal system of formative feedback. Storm began the evaluation process with

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brief visits to each classroom within the first several weeks of school. Leading up to that I spent some time in the classroom informally, two times that I documented, and then two or three times just walking around getting into the classroom. His multiple observation practice enabled him to get a sense of where potential problems might occur in the school as well as to introduce himself to students and teachers throughout the school. Storm considered the observations themselves to be an important component of the evaluation process. Allocating sufficient time to observe all teachers requires annual planning. What I do is I reserve 25 percent of my day, one period a day, to do observations. And then I will sit down with the teachers scheduleand I will actually book observations a month in advance. His time commitment to the evaluation process fully 25% of his time -is corroborated by the 114 formal visits recorded on the official evaluation forms. The annual cycle began with an opportunity for teachers to rate themselves using the evaluation system: At the beginning of the year I ask the teachers to go through the rubric and selfevaluate. And then when they sit down with me to go through their goals for the year, I will ask them about their self-evaluation.I find teachers to be pretty much on target. They know where they are. Storm then scheduled individual teacher observations. He used a laptop to record his observations of classroom practice. Storms ability to write-up his comments in the class enabled him to provide feedback to teachers by the end of the school day. These comments serve as a rough draft for the final evaluation report, and give teachers the chance to discuss the main points of the report before it takes final form. Storm relied on his past experience as an evaluator as well as the observation data to make his judgment about the quality of teaching. Storm began each rating at Level Two, the basic level of performance. If the teacher has met the Level Two criterion, Storm moves to Level Three. Level Three is just a little extension of Level Two. In fact, most of the rubric is written, take Level Two, and then add a little component to it. Level One ratings provide a special challenge in writing the final report. Storm commented: Level One is poor teaching even though it is satisfactory, it is still poor teaching. Storm felt that the level of documentation must be much greater in a Level One evaluation, as it is directed toward remediation or to establish grounds for termination. Consequently, Storm reported that teachers with Level One evaluations received more substantive feedback for their observations. Summary of written evaluations. 48 Woods teachers were evaluated during the 20012002 school year. Average scores ranged between proficient and area of strength across the four evaluation domains. No teachers received an unsatisfactory rating in any domain. Limited narrative feedback was provided for each teacher. Forms for post-probationary teachers included an average of 9.7 sentences per domain area, while the probationary teachers received 10.2 per area. Most of the narratives included a balance of descriptive and laudatory sentences. There was an average of less than one sentence per evaluation directed toward either suggestions or critiques of teaching. Although both the teachers and the evaluators remarked on the value of the scripted comments made in class, these scripted comments were not present in the written evaluation forms. Over half of the evaluations included sentences commending the teachers contribution to the local school culture, hard work, or participation in extra-curricular activities. Perceptions of the evaluation process. Teachers were generally more positive than Storm about the potential effect of the evaluation process on their teaching. One teacher commented how the rubrics and domain structure of the evaluation program helps create a common sense of good teaching among the staff. Another teacher mentioned that the framework offers a structured opportunity to reflect on practice that helps me strengthen my

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content knowledge. Teachers differed about their assessment of the Storms time investment. Two teachers noted that, even though the time taken by the observation and evaluation process signified administrative interest in teaching, the principal did not spend enough time in their classroom to really make a difference. Even though he questioned the effect of the new system on shared perceptions of teaching, Principal Storm saw the teacher evaluation program as an improvement on the system it replaced. The older system focused on nine topics of teaching, and allowed teachers to pick three topics on a major evaluation, and one topic for a minor. The disadvantage of that system was that it allowed teachers to focus on one area and just ignore everything else. The new system: Forces you to look at a broad range of teacher skills. And in that respect it is very, very good. Because, as an administrator, I am looking at this, boy, they have a lot of stuff they have to do as teachers. And it helps me remember the things that I am supposed to be looking for. In Storms view, the new system was particularly helpful in documenting poor performance and for helping new teachers. These affordances of the system accorded with Storms belief in the importance of working with probationary teachers. The system rubrics provided a common reference for communicating about substandard teaching practice. Storm offered an example of how: In Domain Three, under grouping of students, if I were to tell a teacher that his or her instructional groups are inappropriate to the students or the instructional goals, that is unsatisfactory. Now, if a teacher knew that, then they could go to this rubric and say, well, what is satisfactory? So, for someone who is doing poorly, it is very beneficial. The system helped Storm and the teachers frame formative programs to improve their teaching. Storm described a teacher evaluated as unsatisfactory several years before: I was very, very specific in the areas and had very concrete evidence as to why he was unsatisfactory. And I have worked with him for four years now and I would say this year he has made some real improvements. According to Storm, the capacity of the system for identifying and helping poor teaching did not seem to apply equally well to good teaching. Because he spent the most time with newer or poorer performing teachers, good teaching received relatively less feedback. Storm contrasted the value of the system for probationary and proficient teachers: But I view this system as extremely effective for an unsatisfactory or a Level One teacher. For a teacher who is proficient or a very strong teacher, we are just documenting the fact that they are good teachers. Storm did not feel that the new evaluation system supported the establishment of agreement about what good teaching means: I think every teacher thinks that their teaching is good. Whatever they do is good. And they havent tailored their teaching style to meet the rubric. The novelty of the system may mean that it has not had a chance to create a shared sense of agreement. Storm commented, you have to remember . . . these teachers werent brought up in this system. This system has been imposed on teachers that have been here a long, long time. It is interesting to note that while Principal Storm emphasized the value of the evaluation process for novice and poor teachers, it was the veteran teachers with relatively higher scores who reported the most benefit to their teaching. Two veteran teachers valued the opportunity to reflect on their teaching afforded by the process. One teacher mentioned that the rubrics helped me understand the difference between Level 2 and Level 3 teaching, and that the rubrics gave him something to aim toward in his teaching. Storms final point concerned the lack of feedback he has received on being an

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evaluator. While he noted that he received valuable training to conduct evaluations, he has received no feedback on his own evaluation practices. In his words: I have never gotten any feedback from anyone on [whether] I am doing a good job as an evaluator. I mean, my bosses never ever talk to me about the evaluations that I have written. I dont think my boss has ever read my evaluations. So, I wouldnt mind getting some feedback to know whether or not I am meeting district standard or not. Jaye High School The Jaye High School context presents special challenges for understanding how evaluators make sense of the evaluation process. In 2001-02 the largely upper-middle class student population at Jaye included 1,880 students. The student transience rate was 16 percent, 6.8 percent were labeled as special education students, 3.1 percent of the students were English-language learners, and the free/reduced price lunch population was 11.2 percent. Student performance on a national norm-referenced test was higher than the average performance of other district high schools. The 93 teachers on staff included 10 probationary teachers. The teachers and principal commonly reflected upon two features of the school context during the interviews. The first involved efforts to involve staff across the curriculum in setting school goals. The second, and a related factor, was a strong sense of collegiality in the school. Teachers interviewed at Jaye included a veteran English teacher, a mid-career biology teacher, an early/mid-career history teacher, and a novice mathematics teacher. Principal Jennifer Fredericks was in her third year at the school and had extensive experience as a teacher and administrator. The four other administrators who acted as evaluators were not interviewed. Evaluator characteristics. Fredericks sought to develop department and school-based instructional goals, using a consensus-building approach. She explained that from her first day in the school, she worked to get the school to focus on data (e.g., student test scores) to set goals and to monitor progress. She encouraged teachers to share best practices during staff meetings. These processes were intended to develop a common building belief system of what we are doing as a community, the sense of community to serve the students. Principal Fredericks supported the new teacher evaluation system and was willing to invest the time and effort to make it productive. She asserted that the system fit with their school wide belief system in rubrics. It gives you a verbal picture of what you want to see. Her active support of the evaluation system capitalized on her instructional expertise and was reflected in how she structured the evaluation process. Fredericks described the evaluation system as fitting her philosophy on instructional leadership and incorporated the rubrics into her own contextual belief system. She compared her leadership approach to the four domains of the evaluation system by planning what she wanted to do before she became a principal (reflecting domain 1); creating an environment where people felt free to interact with me, to interact with one another, (modeling domain 2); then implementing the plan or plans (domain 3); and finally, giving back to her school community by working and sharing with each other through best practices during faculty meetings (domain 4). As she summarized, We have actually role-modeled the [evaluation system] as school leaders. Fredericks explained that her experience, training, and practice as a teacher made her a good evaluator. Before she became an administrator, she attended Madeline Hunter training sessions and developed her skills in scripting classroom observations. In addition to the skills needed to conduct evaluations, Fredericks asserted that her credibility as a classroom teacher was a critical attribute for her legitimacy as an evaluator. As a principal, she saw her most important strength as her ability to see all sides of the situation and to put myself in the

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shoes of the other person, whether it be a parent, a student, a teacher; to understand where everyone is coming from. And not to take anything personally. Despite the increased demands of the evaluation system, Fredericks said she was able to manage the process because, I am a pretty good time manager I look over a semester and I can figure out where I have to be. To handle the time and workload demands, she planned one semester at a time and began with the probationary teachers, who required more time due to the structure of the evaluation system and their uncertainty in practice. Then she worked with teachers on the major evaluation and finally addressed the minor evaluations, because they take less time. She lamented that the time dedicated to probationary teachers, although necessary, limited how much she could work with other teachers. Evaluation process. The evaluation process described by the principal was similar to that described by teachers who had other evaluators. Fredericks held pre-observation conferences to meet with the teachers before the evaluation process began. During the meetings, she went through the evaluation rubrics and procedures to explain the process. She asked where teachers saw themselves in the rubrics. If a specific rubric lacked clarity, she would discuss what she believed it was trying to get at. When the questions were resolved, the focus of the evaluation was selected (i.e., domain(s), components, and elements). Teachers set a target for growth for each domain. Teachers chose a growth goal for each domains on which they were evaluated. Probationary teachers prepared one goal for each of the four domains. The targets of growth served as the focus for the written evaluation. Fredericks structured her evaluation approach to focus on probationary teachers and centered her efforts on maximizing formative feedback to these novice teachers. She assigned herself a larger share of probationary teachers than the other evaluators. As she explained, I want the new teachers I hire to have that connection with me andI think that is a very formative time. She saw probationary teachers as vulnerable and was concerned about attrition, because new teachers typically are just not mentored and encouraged. To lower teacher anxiety about the process, Fredericks told teachers to feel free to make mistakes and not to worry about her being in the room. She also gave them flexibility in scheduling observations. As she stated, I am not there to look at a perfect lesson so I try to put them at ease ... because I see this role as a helping role, not to go in there and catch them doing something wrong. She also tried to make sure that teachers were aware that what was being written down would be in the evaluation. As she explained, There is never anything in the evaluation that I do that surprises. There is never anything in writing or checks in those boxes that the teacher has not been with me [and discussed] And I try to always find something to commend them on. She explained that she was careful about what she wrote and how she phrased written comments in order to prevent teachers from reacting negatively to evaluations. When she first started doing evaluations as an administrator, she was amazed that the use of a word could make somebody very anxious. So, I am more careful about using words like very or often or frequently or occasionally. During conferences, she asked teachers to talk about instructional artifacts (planning documents, test results, etc.) involved in the lesson. Consistent with the leadership approach discussed above, teamwork and school wide goals re-emerged during evaluation discussions. Fredericks tried to foster self-reflection and monitoring/correcting and used constructive criticism, trying to help teachers think about the observed situation and go back to it in their mind and think about how they might do it differently. And then I will say or you could have , but I dont say this is the way it should always be done. There is never one way to do anything. She tried to encourage teachers to have interactive classes, where kids are major participants. Summary of written evaluations. The evaluation context at Jaye is made more

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complex because of the multiple evaluators involved. Thus, even though Fredericks played an important role in making sense of the evaluation artifact for the school program, the other evaluators brought their own assumptions to the process. Thus it is not surprising that both the written evaluations by evaluators and the teacher reactions to their evaluations at Jaye varied considerably. Two of the evaluators (including the principal) provided detailed written commentary, with evidence described and specific recommendations for improvement. In contrast, the other evaluators provided very brief descriptions of performance, with only a few sentences, little if any evidence reported and few recommendations for improvement. Individual teacher evaluation scores on the 79 evaluations provided by the district averaged between proficient and area of strength on the district scale. Although five teachers received level one ratings in particular domains, there was no written description of why the rating was given or how the teacher could improve on the element. Despite the prompt on the evaluation form (and implied requirement of the system) to offer specific evidence for the ratings, it was rare for evaluators to offer such evidence or to provide recommendations to improve. It was also difficult to find negative feedback in either the write-ups or from the interview transcripts. Evaluators delivered criticism in a positive fashion (if critique was provided) or first pointed out positive aspects of performance and characteristics of the teacher. Written evaluations documented positive aspects of teacher performance. In some cases, recommendations for improvement were provided. For example, one evaluator commented that, teacher uses goals suitable for most students. This same evaluator had three recommendations for the teacher, including the following: When planning lectures, provide as many opportunities to engage as many students as possible throughout the lecture. The written evaluations also allowed evaluators to document praise for how teachers had taken on extra school responsibilities. For several of the teachers interviewed, more feedback seemed to be provided during discussions with the evaluator than was reflected in the written evaluations. However, other teachers reported receiving minimal feedback in either written or verbal form. Perceptions of the evaluation process. Principal Fredericks thought the comprehensive standards and rubrics of the evaluation system helped to promote a common and continuing dialog with teachers. Fredericks believed the system provided a framework for teachers to think about their work and a process for them to interact, get help and talk about their practice, and be recognized for their efforts. Most teachers also preferred the new system to the prior one, which required an extensive written evaluation but did not have the level of knowledge and skill elaboration of the current system. One teacher, however, preferred the old system, where you could sit down and talk and you could read it and pick it out and read it again if you need a little pat on the back. Other teachers valued the potential for objectivity of the new systems detailed rubrics. Jaye staff had mixed reactions about the impact of the evaluation process on their instruction. The principal believed that the evaluation system led some teachers to change their practice. For example, a special education teacher who had relied on lectures changed his practice to get students more actively involved. After evaluation discussions, Fredericks noted his room is full of colored pens and pencils and the kids have no books and the kids are keeping these forms And he loves it. Two teachers mentioned the evaluation process improved their teaching through better planning and classroom management, keeping students on task and increased use of reflection. Two other teachers were not as positive. One commented that her evaluator (not the principal) had little or no teaching experience: I was evaluated by someone who didnt teach school, who has never taught school. [He] went from the world of work, business, into education, into administration. This teacher reported a better experience with a different evaluator the prior year. The other teacher consistently

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received high ratings and was rarely offered feedback specific to the content he taught. Teachers commented that the evaluation system required more paperwork and effort than the prior system, but it was more burdensome for evaluators than for teachers. One teacher said that, I think what happens is [the administrators] get up against the time when all the evaluations are due and things get really hectic. Two teachers explained the system was more work intensive than the prior system, but was worth the effort and more objective. Fredericks expressed that evaluator training offered by the district could be improved. The trainers took a minimalist approach focused on getting evaluations done efficiently rather than well. As she stated, Basically, the person was saying, this is how you can get them done the fastest. You dont really have to do this. And you dont really have to do that. And you can just whip them out. She suspected that evaluators varied considerably in how accurately they evaluated teachers and how well they provided growth-directed feedback. She suggested the district should have master evaluators help beginning administrators, to go in until they have a comfort zone of performing evaluations and the process. Analysis Investigating the way that local leaders make sense of a complex artifact such as a new teacher evaluation highlights the selection of artifact affordances, from among the many possible features of the artifact, and helps us to understand how leaders adapt new practices to their existing contexts. The interaction of leaders will, skill and their perceptions of organization structure organize our comments about sensemaking. Will Most principals wanted to make this system work and tried hard to comply with the system requirements for numbers of observations and write-ups. However, it was apparent that the evaluation system was extremely time-consuming, absorbing as much as 25% of the principals time. We saw principals address the time issue by complex scheduling and by investing significant amounts of personal time. Evaluators satisficed the time requirements through brief classroom visits, writing up the observation while observing the class, and in stealing a few minutes before and after class for the pre- and post-observation meetings. Despite this significant time investment, some teachers felt that an insufficient amount of time was invested in the system to provide meaningful feedback on teaching practice. In many schools, most evaluations were dated all on the same day at the end of the evaluation cycle, suggesting that many evaluation forms were completed at the last minute. The considerable time investment required to conduct observations and complete the evaluations narrowed the range of cognitive and structural resources available to implement the full range of artifact features. The artifact design relies on evaluators to collect multiple kinds of evidence to document the different components of teaching practice as specified in the rubrics. The elaborate system of rubrics and evidence requirements challenged evaluators to move beyond classroom observation in order to develop fundamentally new evidentiary bases. Our study suggests that although evaluators stretched their professional and personal time to observe all teachers, the evaluations lacked evidence grounded in the rubrics. The evaluation criteria included, for example, reflecting on teaching and communicating with families, but no evidence was provided by evaluators for ratings in these domains. Simply complying with the district policy to conduct observations of all faculty seemed challenging enough. To take full advantage of the evaluation program, evaluators and teachers need more time and training on how to collect, reflect upon, and present evidence to maximize the potential of the evaluation system for promoting better teaching practice. Skill We found that the written evaluations lacked either formative or critical feedback. The majority of written comments focused on scripting of classroom activities, classroom

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management and generic comments pointing to the important role the teacher had played in the school. While several of the principals used the evaluation process to suggest new practices and to encourage staff collaboration, few examples of specific, evidence-based suggestions grounded in the rubrics found their way into the written evaluations. The focus on classroom management was reflected in the views of new teachers who expressed a more positive view of the potential impact of the system on improving their teaching practice. Veteran teachers, presumably more familiar with classroom management practices, were more reserved in their praise. The evidence from our case study schools suggest that evaluators lacked the skills to provide valuable feedback, particularly with accomplished teachers. Evaluators instead used evaluation as an opportunity to work with novice teachers and to build a positive school culture rather than as an opportunity to push instructional practices to the highest levels. However, we cannot discern from our study whether this lack of skill was a cause or an effect of evaluator priorities. In other words, the perceived lack of skill in providing formative feedback to accomplished teachers was qualified by the competing, and perhaps more legitimate, goal of enlisting the support of veteran teachers to the new evaluation initiative. Concerns about the politics of evaluation and maintenance of strong social relations among faculty and evaluators may have led evaluators to provide nearly exclusively positive and largely low level, narrow and specific feedback to teachers. The lack of critical comments and the inconsistencies between the reported value of feedback and the written instruments suggest the importance of attending to the political context for evaluation. While the lack of unsatisfactory ratings in the case-study schools and the narrative feedback might suggest a high quality of teaching across the schools, all principals described instances of sub-standard teacher performance. Clearly, the evaluation process was not fully represented by the written components alone. Performance appraisal research suggests that negative feedback is difficult to convey and often avoided for fear of depressing employee motivation (Ilgen & Davis, 2000), and the political nature of formal appraisals may result in lenient evaluation ratings in order to motivate employee performance (Longenecker, Sims & Gioia, 1987; Murphy & Cleveland, 1995). In such cases, evaluation systems may send mixed messages about organizational goals for rating accuracy and performance improvement through evaluations (Kozlowski, Chao & Morrison, 1999). Written negative comments carry great weight in organizational cultures, and supervisors interested in maintaining long-standing, collaborative relationships with employees are often reluctant to use formal instruments to provide negative feedback. The absence of critical feedback in most written evaluations might not mean the complete absence of such feedback. Recall Principal Storms comment that the specificity of the rubrics was valuable for helping to dismiss incompetent staff, yet these critical messages were not reflected in the written evaluations. If teachers receive the most meaningful feedback verbally, then the written instruments could be used to preserve the delicate organizational culture of trust and collaboration between evaluator and teacher. At the same time, neglecting to document specific instances of low performance blunts a central intention of the evaluation program. Without critical feedback, the artifact becomes a tool to maintain a positive sense of community rather than a tool to distinguish levels of practice, and to foster improvement and reflection on teaching practice. Structure Structure here refers to the personal, professional and institutional traditions that shape local practice. Our analysis showed the power of the self-perceived role of evaluators as instructional leaders on the evaluation process. Self-imposed role definitions reflected the skills of the evaluator, and seemed to enhance or constrain their will for selecting and

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implementing certain features of the artifact. The roles chosen by evaluators had significant effect on the affordances of the artifact selected for implementation. For example, Jayes Principal Fredericks actively modeled her instructional leadership approach around the vision of performance represented in the evaluation domains. At La Esperanza, Richards role as an instructional coach was reflected in her team-building messages of encouragement and inspiration on her written narrative evaluations. Richards belief that critical evaluation feedback could be devastating to teachers shaped her role as an evaluator to encourage rather than to criticize her teachers. She downplayed the summative, critical features of the artifact in order to fit the artifact to her perceived role in the school. Woods Principal John Storm perceived the evaluation artifact differently. His role as an instructional leader involved communicating a consistent message about his six key indicators of good teaching. While not inconsistent with the evaluation model, it was these indicators and not the evaluation system itself - that guided his observations. Storm relied on his model to guide the Woods evaluation process and to give specific feedback to struggling teachers. In this case Storm replaced designed features with his own conception of good teaching, and used the new district initiative to flesh out his previously developed evaluation practices. While full implementation of the artifact may require a redefinition the self-perceived role of the evaluator, the expertise of the evaluator as an instructional leader depends on the very role-perception in need of alteration. Implementing more of the artifact features would require evaluators to see their instructional leadership roles differently to allow for a more critical perspective on evaluation practice. Conclusions and Implications In this study of sensemaking and implementation of a knowledge and skills-based teacher evaluation system, we found that the features of the artifact that potentially enhance the opportunity to improve teacher quality were filtered through pre-existing perceptions, knowledge, and structures. Consistent with the literature on sensemaking and implementation, we found that local implementation of the evaluation system varied substantially from school to school, and was shaped by the ways in which principals understood their own role, their context, and the evaluation artifact. Principal sensemaking seemed to be primarily a function of principal self-perception of their role as a leader and the knowledge and skills they bring to that role; prior evaluation practices in the school and district; and school context factors such as teacher morale and existing challenges facing the school (e.g., student population risk factors, external accountability pressures). We found that there was a strong desire of local leaders to use teacher evaluation practices for two central purposes: one, to maintain a community of good will with teachers, and two, to help novice teachers improve or remove those unable to perform at a basic level. In each case, the affordances exploited by leaders seemed to extend the functions of the previous evaluation system. Further, these uses seemed to inhibit the recognition and use of other features intended to provide specific, critical, and formative feedback to veteran teachers. A key question in the implementation of complex artifacts is whether features have sufficient power to change the embedded organizational culture. From a compliance perspective, the amount of time spent to implement the teacher evaluation framework should be judged a huge success at Valle Verde. However, implementation of the full range of artifact features seems hindered by time constraints and school cultures and professional practices that reinforce the separation of instructional and supervisory practices. The gap between supervision and instruction that constitutes the organizational culture of many schools is difficult to cross (Rowan, 1990; Hazi 1994). Closing this gap takes time. A condition for closing this gap might be to develop both common practices for teachers and

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leaders to interact around instruction, and a common language to facilitate the conversations. The district framework for teaching includes features to facilitate both processes. Since the framework is already in place at Valle Verde, and since teachers and principals view it as a useful process, there already is significant movement toward these ends. The framework is being used widely across the district, and appears to be helping to develop the capacity for teachers and evaluators to engage in regular conversations about instruction. District leaders could push implementation further and capitalize on this newfound capacity in order to more tightly couple instructional and supervision practices in the school culture. Over time, this capacity may have the power to change instructional culture. Thinking of implementation as a long-term process of reshaping prior knowledge, skills, and beliefs will require district leaders to focus on the key teachable moments currently emerging for district evaluators and teachers, such as the desire of evaluators to receive district feedback on their own evaluation practice. We hypothesize that the increasing experience with evaluation and feedback might make principals more likely to identify and focus on the instructional improvement features of the evaluation system. Taking advantage of the ways evaluators learn from their experience may change the features principals select in the artifact, and therefore modify the implementation of specific features of the artifact to enhance its instructional improvement outcomes. Specifically, our analysis suggests the following five areas of focus for continued attention: Providing a Clearer Conceptual Connection between the Teacher Evaluation Framework and Enhanced Student Learning A key intention in the district design was to use the evaluation artifact to improve student learning. However, few principals and teachers viewed the evaluation process as having a direct relationship to student achievement, accountability goals, or even as a pathway to significantly improving teacher quality. To make this link explicit, evaluators may need additional training in content-based pedagogy and evaluation feedback. Enhanced skills alone may help evaluators recognize the opportunity for instructional improvement that the evaluation artifact provides, and thereby encourage them to use evaluation as a means to work with teachers at all skill levels to significantly improve instructional practice. Tying Feedback to the Evaluation Standards Training for evaluators could also focus on building understandings about how evaluation rubrics enhance teaching practices and improve student learning. Although teachers are asked to set goals for one or two specific elements in the domains on which they are evaluated, written feedback is seldom specifically tied to the standards. Maintaining a focus on the evaluation standards beyond the goal setting process could help to more directly link goal-setting, evaluation feedback, and overall improvement in the teacher evaluation system. Training in providing evidence-based feedback, such as evidence needed to demonstrate content-specific pedagogy, could extend existing training and support relationships in order to create shared understandings of evaluation as a tool to promote instructional improvement. Teachers could more clearly see a connection between formative recommendations and improvement on the rubrics in the evaluation system. Coordinating the Structural Requirements of the Program With three years of implementation, the routinization of the evaluation process provides a foundation for further development. District leaders need to familiarize themselves with the evaluation process, and better understand the various roles that goal setting, observation, and verbal and written feedback play. In doing so, the district could provide feedback on the existing evaluation process in local schools, and evaluators could develop networks to share practices on how to provide effective and efficient evaluations. Once district and school leaders realize how far they have come, their insights can be used to build on these newly developed capacities.

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Recognizing and Accommodating the Political Contexts of Evaluation The politics of evaluation were evident in a variety of features of the evaluation artifact. For example, district training for evaluators in time management suggests awareness by the district of school-level reactions to the time-consuming nature of the evaluation process. In addition, the politics of supervisor-teacher relations at the school level shaped the nature of written evaluation feedback, which was almost uniformly positive, even when teachers received relatively low scores on specific rubrics. Recognition of the political nature of evaluation might help to untangle how issues of training and skill development combine with existing political and cultural expectations for the evaluation process. Political response is rational and appropriate if it facilitates implementation of the evaluation system. Recognition of the political nature of implementation could enable district and school leaders to view political response as a part of the process on the way to full implementation of the evaluation artifact, and not the final destination. Explicit attention to the political nature of evaluation and an examination of the features of the evaluation artifact could enhance the ability to use evaluation to provide constructive feedback in a dynamic political and cultural organizational context. The Valle Verde Unified approach to implementing a new teacher evaluation system relied on a low-stakes, developmental model that depended heavily on the ability of local evaluators to extend their prior evaluation experience to meet the requirements of the new system. Our study of the resulting implementation suggests that the district has developed local capacity to use the framework for teaching to support richer teacher and leader interaction around instruction. While much sensemaking research looks backward to investigate the relation of the past to the present, our perspective suggests that a sensemaking perspective can also point to areas for subsequent development. Future research is needed to understand how leaders might choose and exploit the potentially transformative features of evaluation system and integrate these features into new practices of teacher evaluation.

Notes
1 A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2003. The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National institute on Educational governance, Finance, Policy-Making and Management, to the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison (Grant No. OERI-R3086A60003). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the National Institute on Educational Governance, Finance, Policy-Making and Management, office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, the institutional partners of CPRE, or the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. 2 The authors would like to thank Gary Zehrbach, Bill Thornton, and Terry Fowler for their contributions to data collection and analysis on the project. 3 The will, skill, and structure elements are adapted from Rowan (1996), who describes teacher knowledge and skills (skill), teacher motivation (will), and the situation or context in which teachers work (structure) as critical factors influencing teacher and student performance. 4 Names of the school district, schools, and educators have been disguised.

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References
Berends, M., Bodilly, S., & Kirby, S. N. (2002). Looking back over a decade of wholeschool reform: The experience of New American Schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(2), 168-175. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Chinn, C. A., & Brewer, W. F. (1993). The role of anomalous data in knowledge acquisition: A theoretical framework and implications for science instruction. Review of Educational Research, 63, 1-49. Cohen, D. K., & Barnes, C. A. (1993). Pedagogy and policy. In D. K. Cohen & M. W. McLaughlin & J. E. Talbert (Eds.), Teaching for understanding: Challenges for policy and practice (pp. 207-239). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Confrey J. (1990). A review of the research on students conceptions in mathematics, science, and programming. In: Courtney C. (ed.) Review of research in education (pp. 3-56). American Educational Research Association. Danielson, C. (1996). Enhancing professional practice: A framework for teaching. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Danielson, C., & McGreal, T.L. (2000). Teacher evaluation to enhance professional practice. . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Darling-Hammond, L., & Ball, D. L. (1997). Teaching for high standards: What policymakers need to know and be able to do. [Electronic version]. National Education Goals Panel, June, 1997. Retrieved September 12, 2003 from [Link] Darling-Hammond, L., Wise, A. E., & Klein, S. P. (1999). A license to teach: Raising standards for teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Darling-Hammond, L., Wise, A. E., & Pease, S. R. (1983). Teacher evaluation in the organizational context: A review of the literature. Review of educational Research, 53(3), 285-328. Davis, D. R., Pool, J. E., & Mits-Cash, M. (2000). Issues in implementing a new teacher assessment system in a large urban school district: Results of a qualitative field study. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 14(4), 285-306. Desimone, L (2002). How can comprehensive school reform models be successfully implemented? Review of Educational Research, 72(3), 433479 Elmore, R. (2002). Bridging the gap between standards and achievement: The imperative for professional development in education. Washington, DC: The Albert Shanker Institute. Fischoff, B. (1975). Hindsight foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,1, 288-299. Gallagher, H. A. (2002). Vaughn Elementary's innovative teacher evaluation system: Are teacher evaluation scores related to growth in student achievement? Madison: University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Genter D., Rattermann M. J., & Forbus, K. D. (1993). The roles of similarity in transfer: Separating retrievability from inferential soundness. Cognitive Psychology, 25(4), 524-575. Gentner, D. & Stevens, A. L. (Eds.). (1983). Mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Greeno, J. G. (1998). The situativity of knowing, learning, and research. American Psychologist, 53(1), 5, 26. Greeno, J. G., Collins, A. M., & Resnick, L. B. (1996). Cognition and learning. In D. Berliner & R. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 15-46). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan Hallinger, P., & Heck, R. H. (1996). Reassessing the principal's role in school effectiveness: A review of empirical research, 1980-1995. Educational Administration Quarterly, 32(1), 5-44. Halverson, R. (2002). Representing phronesis: Supporting instructional leadership practice in schools. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University. Unpublished dissertation Halverson, R., & Zoltners, J. (2001). Distribution across artifacts: How designed artifacts illustrate school leadership practice. Paper for the 2001 American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA. Hammer, D., & Elby, A. (2002). On the form of a personal epistemology. In B. K. Hofer, & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing (pp. 169-190). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Haney, W., Madaus, G., & Kreitzer, A. (1987). Charms talismanic: Testing teachers for the improvement of American education." In E. Z. Rothkopf (Ed.), Review of Research in Education (pp. 169-238). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Hazi, H. M. (1994). The teacher evaluation-supervision dilemma: A case of entanglements and irreconcilable differences. Journal of Curriculum & Supervision, 9(2), 195-216. Ilgen, D. R., & Davis, C. A. (2000). Bearing bad news: Reactions to negative performance feedback. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 49(3). 550-565. Keisler, S., & Sproull, L. (1982). Managerial response to changing. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 548-570. Kimball, S.M. (2003). Analysis of feedback, enabling conditions and fairness perceptions of teachers in three school districts with new standards-based evaluation systems. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 16(4), 241-269. Kozlowski, S.W.J., Chao, G.T., & Morrison, R.F. (1999). Games Raters Play: Politics, Strategies, and Impresson Management in Performance Appraisal. In James W. Smither, (Ed.) Performance Appraisal: State of the Art in Practice (pp. 163-205). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Longenecker, C. O., Sims, H. P., & Gioia, D. A. (1987). Behind the mask: The politics of employee appraisal. The Academy of Management Executive, 1(3), 183-193. Loup, K. S., Garland, J. S., Ellett, C. D., & Rugutt, J. K. (1996). Ten years later: Findings from a replication of a study of teacher evaluation practices in our 100 largest school districts. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 10, 203-226. March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. New York: Wiley. Milanowski, A. T., & Heneman, H. G., III. (2001). Assessment of teacher reactions to a standards-based teacher evaluation system: A pilot study. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 15(3), 193-212. Murphy, J. (1994). Transformational change and the evolving role of the principal: Early empirical evidence. In J. Murphy & K. S. Louis (Eds.). Reshaping the principalship: Insights from transformational change efforts (pp. 20-53). Newbury Park, CA: Corwin. Murphy, K. R., & Cleveland, J. N., (1995). Understanding performance appraisal: Social, organizational and goal-based perspectives. London: Sage.

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Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that make us smart: defending human attributes in the age of the machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Odden, A. and Kelley, C. (2002). Paying teachers for what they know and do: New and smarter compensation strategies to improve schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Pea, R. D. (1993). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education. In Salomon, G. (Ed.). Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 47-87). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, K. D. (1989). Secondary principals and instructional leadership: Complexities in a diverse role. Madison, WI: The National Center for Effective Secondary Schools. Peterson, K. D. (1995). Teacher evaluation: A comprehensive guide to new directions and practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Ross, B. H. (1987). This is like that: The use of earlier problems and the separation of similarity effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 629-639. Rowan, B. (1990). Commitment and control: Alternative strategies for the organizational design of schools. Review of research in education. American Educational Research Journal. 16, 353-389. Rowan, B. (1996). Standards and incentives for instructional reform. In S. H. Fuhrman & J. ODay (Eds.), Rewards and reform: Creating educational incentives that work (pp. 195-225). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic memory: A theory of reminding and learning in computers and people. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Simon, H. A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Spillane, J., Halverson, R., Diamond, J. (2001). Investigating school leadership practice: A distributed perspective. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 23-28. Spillane, J., Reiser, B. J., & Reimer, T. (2002). Policy implementation and cognition: Reframing and refocusing implementation research. Review of Educational Research, 72(3). 387-431 Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case research. London: Sage. Starbuck, W. & Milliken, F. (1988). Executives perceptual filters: What they notice and how they make sense. In Hambrick, D (ed.) The Executive effect: Concepts and methods for studying top managers (pp. 35-65). Greenwich, CT: JAI. Wartofsky, M. W. (1979). Models: Representation and the scientific understanding. Dordrecht, Holland ; Boston, D. Reidel. Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1): 1-19. Weick, K. E. (1996). Sensemaking in organizations. London, Sage. Wise, A. E., Darling-Hammond, L., McLaughlin, M. W., & Bernstein, H. T. (1984). Teacher evaluation: A study of effective practices. Santa Monica, CA: Rand. Wright, P.S., Horn, S.P., & Sanders, W.L. (1997). Teacher and classroom context effects on student achievement: Implications for teacher evaluation. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 11, 57-67. Appendix A DISTRICT OVERVIEW AND EVALUATION SYSTEM SUMMARY The school district is the second largest in the state and includes 85 schools, approximately 60,000 students, 3,700 certified staff, and 270 administrators. Thirty-eight percent of the student population is non-white, with Hispanic students making up the largest

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part of the non-majority group. Although the district had recently revised aspects of its teacher evaluation system, the district and teachers association agreed in 1997 that more comprehensive evaluation reforms were needed. The new teacher evaluation system includes all of the standards and many of the suggested sources of evidence included in the Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 1996). There are four domains of practice with 23 components and 68 elements elaborating behavioral descriptions of the components. The domains are Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities. Each element includes separate descriptions of teaching performance on a four-level rubric: unsatisfactory, target for growth (level 1), proficient (level 2), and area of strength (level 3). Table 1 includes an example of one set of rubrics for one of the 68 elements. Table 1 Example of Rubric for Domain 1: Planning and Preparation; Component 1b: Demonstrating Knowledge of Students Element Unsatisfactory Target for Growth/Level 1 Proficient/Level 2 Area of Strength/ Level 3 Knowledge of Students Varied Approaches to Learning Teacher is unfamiliar with the different approaches to learning that students exhibit, such as learning styles, modalities, and different intelligences. Teacher displays general understanding of the different approaches to learning that students exhibit, and includes a limited variety in lesson planning. Teacher displays solid understanding of the different approaches to learning that different students

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exhibit and occasionally uses those approaches. Teacher uses, where appropriate, knowledge of students varied approaches to learning in instructional planning, as an integral part of their instructional planning repertoire. Multiple sources of evidence are called for to assess performance relative to the standards. Evidence may include a teacher self-assessment, a pre-observation data sheet (lesson plan), classroom observations, pre- and post-observation conferences, other observations of teaching practice (e.g., parent-teacher meetings or collegial discussions), samples of teaching work and instructional artifacts, reflection sheets, three-week unit plan, and logs of professional activities. Unlike the suggestions in the Framework for Teaching, instructional portfolios are not required as part of the evaluation evidence. Similar to the districts prior system, teachers are evaluated annually and specific procedures exist depending on where teachers are in three evaluation stages: probationary, post-probationary major, and post-probationary minor. Probationary teachers are those who are novice teachers or who taught previously in another district. Probationary teachers are observed at least nine times over three periods of the year and are provided a written evaluation at the end of each period. If they dont advance after their first year, probationary teachers undergo a second probationary year. If there performance is unsatisfactory, they may be dismissed. Teachers in post-probationary status are evaluated in a major evaluation based on two of the performance domains, one selected by the teacher and the other by the evaluator. Formal observations occur three times over the course of the year and a written evaluation is provided toward the end of the year. After successful major evaluation, teachers move to a two-year minor evaluation phase. Teachers on the post-probationary minor cycle are evaluated on one domain and receive one formal observation, resulting in one written evaluation at the end of the year. The process is repeated during the next year, with one new evaluation domain selected. An optional minor evaluation process is available to teachers who have at least five years experience in the district and have been successfully evaluated under the major phase. Teachers in the alternative minor process may choose from six professional growth options (e.g., pursuit of National Board Certification, supervising a student teacher or engaging in an action research project). These options must still be tied to an evaluation domain, but are less structured than typical minor evaluations. The written evaluations include a cover sheet with the teachers name and basic demographic information (hire date, school, grade/subject, type of contract), whether the teacher is on the probationary and post-probationary cycle, and when the evaluation and observations occurred. Pursuant to state law, the form also indicates whether the complete evaluation was satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The form ends with evaluator and teacher signatures. Evaluators are to mark the appropriate performance level on the four-level rubric for each element of each domain evaluated. Following the scores, the evaluators are required to provide a narrative description of the evaluation. The narrative is to include a separate

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description for any element receiving an unsatisfactory rating, with evidence cited from observations, and recommendations. For domains with scores above unsatisfactory (level 13), the form calls for one complete narrative mentioning data for each, commendations, and recommendations. Any evaluation standard rated unsatisfactory results in an unsatisfactory evaluation and the teacher undergoes an intervention process. Teachers in the intervention process work with their administrator to establish an assistance plan and are evaluated on all performance standards that are not being satisfactorily met. When all objectives of the assistance plan are met, teachers may go back into the regular evaluation cycle.

EVALUAREA PROFESORULUI DE CTRE CLASA DE ELEVI

TEACHER'S REPORT CARD

Teacher:_______________________
Directions: Do not sign your name. Read each item carefully. Put a check in the number on the right that describes what you believe to be true about your teacher. Please answer the questions on the back of this page also.

1. Excellent 2. Strong 3. Average 4. Weak 5. Very Poor 1 1. Shows interest in us 2. Treats us courteously 3. Is really interested in helping us 4. Respects us

4 5

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Has a sense of humor

Speaks clearly and distinctly

Uses language that we can understand Tries to see our point of view

Jokes with us

Seems happy and interested Seems to like and enjoy teaching

Keeps class under control without being too strict

Treats everyone fairly Gives fair punishment Treats us as individuals

Knows the subject being presented

Tries new teaching methods Gives good fair assignments Presents a suitable appearance Leads good class discussions Explains topics clearly Answers questions thoroughly Praises good work Listens to our ideas Encourages us to work alone Permits us to express our ideas Gives fair examinations Grades fairly Has interesting classes Encourages differences of opinion Encourages us to be responsible
Gives sufficient time to complete projects/assignments.

1. How could this class be improved?

[Link] do you like best about this class? 3. What do you like least about this class?

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Teacher Evaluation of CyberGuide

Directions to Teacher: Complete this after at least one CyberGuide activity has been used and completed by at least one student.

CyberGuide Title Grade level of students using the CyberGuide

Location of school (state, province, country) If California, please indicate county in which you teach. In my situation, students use CyberGuides primarily
o

in a classroom with one computer

in the classroom with two or more computers in the computer lab in the school library at home I use CyberGuides with
o

few students (<25%) many students (26-75%) most students (76-100%)

The class in which I use CyberGuides is

o

a regular, heterogeneous class an advanced or GATE class a reading improvement class a bilingual class a Sheltered English class a Special Education class home school--at home other:

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The CyberGuide is assigned, it is completed by

o

the whole class

a group of students (2-4) working together by a few individuals, working alone To what degree does the CyberGuide support the objectives of the unit within which the CyberGuide is used?
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent can't tell

To what degree do you need to assist your students in their completion of the CyberGuide?
o

never a few times sometimes frequently

To what degree is the quality of the student work better as a result of the CyberGuide?
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Navigation The CyberGuide provides navigation pathways with easy access, hyper-links, and clarity so that students know where they are and where they can go.
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Informational Content The CyberGuide provides links that offer information that is significant in depth and richness.

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not at all somewhat to a great extent

Sharing of learners' work The CyberGuide facilitates learners' sharing of their work. There is a support for the development of a variety of student projects. There are templates or forms to use in creating projects. Student work is displayed or accessible on the site.
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Stability and reliability The CyberGuide is stable and reliable. Comments on the links in the teacher guide are helpful. The links are updated and current.
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Multiple Points of View When appropriate multiple points of view are presented in the links provided.
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Objectives and Standards The objectives and standards listed in the Teacher Guide are consistent with the task.
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Rubrics ("How You Will Be Graded") The rubrics, when provided are clear and informative so that students know how their work will be assessed
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

Online communication The CyberGuide indicated above directs students to use e-mail to get

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information or to establish communication.

o

yes no

If yes, to what degree was this e-mail successful for your project
o

not at all somewhat to a great extent

The following statements apply to my students who have used CyberGuides. Check all that apply:
o

Self-motivated and highly capable Average commitment to most assignments

Needs special support to complete assignments Special Education support Language development support AVID support Further comments about the following in these boxes: Design: Procedure: Assignments: Grading:

VIII. MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AFTER POSTMODERNISM

POSTMODERNISM, PEDAGOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
Clive Beck Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

INTRODUCTION

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In recent years, philosophers of education have been paying a great deal of attention to trends within philosophy which may be loosely referred to as postmodernist. In this paper, I wish to examine some of these trends and note some implications they have both for pedagogy in schools and for teaching and research in philosophy of education. It may be presumptuous of me to talk on this vast topic. But I wish to assure you that I am not doing so just because, as PES President for the year, I have a captive audience. I would have been this presumptuous even if my paper had been refereed! But then, of course, it probably would not have been accepted. Today, then, you are seeing academic freedom at work. I hope the results are better than they often are when academics are given freedom. I should say at the outset that I am not an expert on postmodernism. However, postmodernist doctrines and practices kept intruding into my life especially as an attender of PES conferences and a reader of graduate student theses and course papers to the point where I could no longer ignore them. Also, from my little site in the academic world some might call it a hind-site but I prefer to see it as a fore-sight I see enough problems with postmodernism, and enough misplaced criticisms of it, that I am inclined to say to heck with the experts and just wade in, a response which postmodernists officially at least must accept, given their avowed rejection of the concept of an expert. In discussing postmodernism I will, as a non-expert, focus especially on secondary sources, the literature which for me is the most accessible and with which I have been able to become most familiar. I will also give a large amount of attention to one writer, namely Richard Rorty, mainly because among self-proclaimed postmodernists he is one of the more theoretical, which suits my purposes in this paper. Some might say that Rortys theoretical approach means that he is less of a postmodernist; but to me it means that he is a more open postmodernist, willing to talk about his methodological and substantive assumptions. Philosophical postmodernism is a development of which one might say that, like many other things, it has done more good than harm and it has done an awful lot of harm! As with most philosophical movements, it is perhaps best viewed as a rich quarry in which we can go searching for gems of insight while not feeling obliged to take home all the rubble. In this paper I will be concentrating mainly on the gems, looking at the positive side of postmodernism. This should not be interpreted as indicating that I am a postmodernist; however, given the trenchant criticisms of modernism developed by postmodernism, I would equally not wish to be seen as a modernist.
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

Postmodernism is not just a philosophical movement: it is found also, for example, in architecture, the graphic arts, dance, music, literature, and literary theory.1 As a general cultural phenomenon, it has such features as the challenging of convention, the mixing of styles, tolerance of ambiguity, emphasis on diversity, acceptance (indeed celebration) of innovation and change, and stress on the constructedness of reality. Philosophical postmodernism, in turn, does not represent a single point of view. There are progressive postmodernists and conservative ones,2 postmodernists of resistance and postmodernists of reaction,3 strongly reform-minded postmodernists and others who concentrate on pricking bubbles. There are bleeding hearts and loose cannons. There is constant debate among so-called postmodernists about how a true postmodernist should approach life and inquiry and hence what qualifies as postmodernism. The names most often associated with postmodernism are those of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty. Theoretical approaches most commonly seen as postmodernist are deconstruction(ism), poststructuralism, and neopragmatism.4 However, a case could be made for adding other names, e.g., Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, Winch, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Kuhn; and other theoretical approaches, e.g., perspectivalism, postanalytic philosophy, and hermeneutics. Even the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas, with its affinity with hermeneutics and its communicative ethics, has clear postmodern elements, despite Habermass insistence that he is

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furthering the project of modernity rather than rejecting it. I mention all these names and movements not to impress or confuse, but to show the great overlap between different schools of thought and the pervasiveness of the postmodernist outlook. I feel that in discussing postmodernism we have often spent too much time searching for a neat central core. What is needed rather is to expose ourselves to and respond to a whole family of related outlooks and approaches. Overlap can be found not only between contemporary theoretical approaches but also between these and ones of earlier historical periods. This is the view of Lyotard who, according to John McGowan, holds that postmodern and modern cannot be distinguished from each other temporallythey exist simultaneously, referring to two different responses to modernity.5 Rorty takes a similar position, questioning whether the shifts associated with postmodernism are more than the latest moments of a historicization of philosophy which has been going on continuously since Hegel.6 Further, Rorty thinks that these changes were pretty well complete in Dewey.7 He does not see Foucault, for example, as any more radical in the postmodern manner than Dewey. He says: I do not see any difference between Dewey and Foucault on narrowly philosophical grounds. The only difference I see between them is the presence or lack of social hope which they display.8 There is of course something odd about seeing Hegel, Nietzsche, or even Dewey as postmodernists, given that they wrote within the modern era and in many ways expressed its spirit. Some writers prefer a more chronologically correct definition of postmodernism. John McGowan, for example, sides with Frederic Jameson in expressing the view that postmodernism as a temporal term designates a (very recent) historical period that is to be identified by a set of characteristics that operate across the whole historical terrain.9 However, despite the awkwardness, I prefer to interpret postmodernism as embracing many approaches and insights which were around before the last few decades and even before the present century. Personally, I feel I have been something of a postmodernist most of my life, even before my exposure to postmodernist writings (I can show you chapter and verse if you wish). And in terms of the history of philosophy, I think the notion that these are entirely new developments exaggerates the extent to which human thought and behavior change, and leaves us wondering how people in earlier centuries could have been so dense as to be completely taken in by the ideas of Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Indeed, it is a good question whether these gentlemen were completely taken in by them themselves: as we know, philosophers often get carried away, and then feel compelled to defend what they have said. For these various reasons, then, the view of postmodernism I am employing in this paper is a rather broad one. In opting for breadth, however, I am not alone. Some general philosophers, such as Rorty (as we have seen) and Richard Bernstein, take a similar tack, as do many educational theorists for example, Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, and William Doll.10
AN OUTLOOK INFLUENCED BY POSTMODERNISM

Accounts of postmodernism abound today in the literature of both general philosophy and educational theory.11 Accordingly, I will not here provide a general exposition of postmodernism but rather, after the brief statement of a particular theme, will go straight to an integration of it (usually in a modified form) into my own proposed approach. I hope, however, that such a treatment will, incidentally, help clarify the nature of postmodernism. The understanding of postmodernism I will assume here is a rough composite of ideas from Rorty (especially) and Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. It should be stressed, however, that many of these ideas have appeared in other schools of thought, both historical and contemporary, e.g., Marxism, feminism, critical pedagogy. I have chosen to focus on these particular writers because they provide a convenient point of departure; and also because discussing them helps us come to terms with the dominant philosophical tradition, which we have some responsibility to try to influence. I have called what I am presenting here an outlook, but that term is rather too cognitive in its connotations. The

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word attitude is sometimes seen as more appropriate for what postmodernists are talking about. The issues in question also have a strong methodological component: they have to do with an approach to inquiry and life in general. One might almost say that what we are concerned with here is a way of life, which includes cognitive, affective, and methodological components.
Reality

Postmodernists have helped us see that reality is more complex than we had imagined. It does not exist objectively, out there, simply to be mirrored by our thoughts. Rather, it is in part a human creation. We mold reality in accordance with our needs, interests, prejudices, and cultural traditions. But reality is not entirely a human construction, made by us, not given to us,12 as postmodernists have claimed. Knowledge is the product of an interaction between our ideas about the world and our experience of the world. As E.T. Gendlin says, the assumption is overstated, that concepts and social forms entirely determineexperience. [W]hat the forms work-in, talks back.13 Of course, all experience is influenced by our concepts: we see things even physical things through cultural lenses. But this influence is not all-controlling; again and again reality surprises us (as modern science has shown) in ways that compel us to modify our ideas.14 We thought the world was flat, for example, but were obliged eventually to change our minds. This view may appear dangerously close to Kants notion that knowledge is a product of interaction between mental structures and sense data. However, whereas Kants mental structures were innate and universal and his sense data natural and pure, I see culture and experience as already deeply infected by each other. They are interdependent, and differ only in degree of determination by human agency. A corollary of this interactive view of reality is that there is no sharp fact-value distinction. All factual statements reflect the values they serve, and all value beliefs are conditioned by factual assumptions. There is again a difference of degree which enables us to talk of facts and values. But what we call facts are only somewhat less valuedetermined: they are not independent of values. This ties in with Foucaults postmodernist notion that knowledge and power cannot be separated, since knowledge embodies the values of those who are powerful enough to create and disseminate it.15 Foucault has perhaps an overly conspiratorial view of knowledge, but the link with peoples interests which he identifies cannot be denied.
Change and Difference

Because reality is in part culture dependent, it changes over time, as cultures do, and varies from community to community. Knowledge is neither eternal nor universal. Once again, however, we should not exaggerate this point, as postmodernists have done. There are enduring interests (Dewey) and tentative frameworks (Charles Taylor) which point to a degree of continuity; and there are some commonalities (again qualified) from culture to culture and probably across the whole human race. To deny continuity and commonality where it in fact exists, as postmodernists tend to do, is just as irrational and unpragmatic as to see knowledge as eternal and universal. It betrays an absolutist attachment to such values as innovation, originality, and diversity. Furthermore, it can have unfortunate practical consequences, since it leaves people without an adequate basis for daily living. It is one thing to reject the idea of a fixed, universal foundation to reality, quite another to claim that no useful guidelines can ever be identified. Taking note of the postmodernists cautions, however, we should be careful with generalizations: they can be deceptive. Behind a general formulation such as all humans are rational or people pursue pleasure there is usually a great diversity of realities and interpretations. We should try to become more aware of this, and also more often explicitly qualify claims with words such as some, many, most, sometimes, often. But even qualified

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generalizations are of great value in everyday life.

Metaphysics

Postmodernism is often seen by its proponents as bringing an end to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and so forth, on the ground that these types of discourse assume a fixed, universal reality and method of inquiry. However, in my view it is better to shift to a modified conception of these fields rather than do away with them completely. Precisely because we live in a changing, fragmented, postmodern world, we need whatever stability we can find. And inquiry into general intellectual, moral, and other patterns limited and tentative though they may be is a legitimate form of metaphysics. An irony of the postmodernist movement is that, despite itself, it is centrally concerned with what we can say of a general nature about reality. I would even say that it has led to a massive (and salutary) revival of metaphysics. Postmodernists believe they have put an end to metaphysics and have thrown the ladder away after reaching their foundationless perch. But in fact their writings are full of general assumptions about culture, human nature, values, inquiry. As Landon Beyer and Daniel Liston observe, postmodernist analyses are paradoxical, containing standpoints without footings and talking about nothing.16 Not that postmodernists always deny that this is what they do Derrida happily admits that he crosses out his own claims; but to admit a fault is different from overcoming it.
The Self

Postmodernism has rightly questioned the idea of a universal, unchanging, unified self or subject which has full knowledge of and control over what it thinks, says, and does. It has shown that the self is strongly influenced by its surrounding culture, changes with that culture, and is fragmented like that culture. To a degree, it is not we who think, speak, and act but the culture which thinks, speaks, and acts through us. In many ways Rorty is correct when he describes the moral self as a network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind itconstantly reweaving itselfnot by reference to general criteriabut in the hit-or-miss way in which cells readjust themselves to meet the pressures of the environment.17 It is an exaggeration, however, to maintain that because the self is limited, conditioned, and contingent in this way it has no significance, identity, or capacities. Individuals may be no more important than cultures, but neither are they less so. Individuals are just as unified and characterizable as communities, and they have considerable (though not unlimited) capacity for self-knowledge, self-expression, and self-regulation. There is no basis for emphasizing culture or community to the neglect of individuals. And the same may be said for specific groups within a larger culture: ethnic groups, gender categories, socioeconomic classes, and so on. There is a tendency among postmodernists to emphasize these categories to the neglect of individuals. But in fact two individuals of the same national background, ethnicity, gender, religion, or the like may differ greatly. And two individuals who differ in all these respects may turn out to be kindred spirits who can have a close friendship, even a good marriage, and agree on most major matters. Individuals are only in part identifiable in terms of the various categories to which they belong.
Inquiry

Postmodernist insights require a major shift in our conception of inquiry. No longer should we see ourselves as seeking to uncover a pre-existing reality; rather, we are involved in an interactive process of knowledge creation. We are developing a working understanding of reality and life, one which suits our purposes. And because purposes and context vary from individual to individual and from group to group, what we arrive at is in part autobiographical; it reflects our personal narrative, our particular site in the world.

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To some extent, then, we must question the notion of expertise. In particular fields, some people do know more than others; but the difference, insofar as it exists, is usually one of degree. So-called experts are often heavily dependent on non-experts for input if they are to arrive at sound insights; and since each individual or groups needs and circumstances are different, expert knowledge cannot be simply applied; it must be greatly modified for a particular case. The interaction between expert and non-expert, teacher and taught, is often best seen as a dialogue or conversation (to use Rortys term), in which there is mutual influence rather than simple transmission from one to the other. The knowledge arrived at, too, is more ambiguous and unstable than we had previously thought. It refers to probabilities rather than certainties, average effects, better rather than the best; and it is constantly changing as each individual or group gives a particular interpretation to it, reflecting distinctive needs and experiences. And as postmodernists have pointed out, language is well adapted to this constant play of interpretation. Words are not tied to fixed concepts or referents; they depend for their meaning on a whole system of words within which they are embedded, a system which changes over time and varies from one speech community or language user to another. Inquiry must also be approached pragmatically.18 We should not insist that reality, including human nature, take a certain form but rather accept what emerges. If altruism, for example, has to be based in part on feelings of group solidarity, then we must acknowledge that: there is no point clinging to a rationalistic view of moral motivation that cannot work. Once again, however, we should be careful not to exaggerate these points. Postmodernists have often attacked notions of reason, means-end thinking, theory, teaching. But in fact there is a place for them, in a modified form. We must employ reason as well as feelings, intuitions, direct social influence, and so forth. We must think in means-end terms to some extent if we are to know what we want in life and how to achieve it. Theory, understood as a loose interconnection of qualified generalizations, is crucial for daily living. Teaching, so long as it is largely dialogical, is both possible and necessary. And so on. All of these can cause problems if they are understood too strictly and taken too seriously; but without them we would quite literally be lost. We must also qualify the notion of a pragmatic approach to inquiry. While there is no external foundation to reality, no traditional Kantian backup, as Rorty says, there are internal continuities which serve as important reference points. It is possible and necessary, then, to develop theory which explains particular phenomena in terms of these continuities. Postmodernists often display an easy pragmatism which, while claiming to be open and tolerant, is merely superficial, since it fails to develop and use theory of this kind; its doctrines thus become dogmatic assertions, without explanation or justification.
Forms of Scholarship

One of the slogans of postmodernism is that there is no center, and in particular there is no central tradition of scholarship (namely Eurocentric, middle- class, predominantly male) of which other traditions Native American, Afro-American, Islamic, feminist, working class, for example are mere colonies. Insofar as we study traditional Western scholarship, we should be wary of its white, middle-class, male bias; and we should (if we belong to one or more other categories) approach it as equals, expecting to contribute as much as we learn. This is in line with the view of knowledge and inquiry noted earlier. With this approach I am in agreement, but as you might expect I have some provisos. To begin with, we should not exaggerate the extent of the bias (great though it undoubtedly is) in traditional Western scholarship. There is much we can learn from such scholarship (although also much we must reject). This is because the writers in question, though white, middle- or upper-class, and male, were also human beings, struggling with basic issues of how humans are to survive, flourish, and find meaning in life. The bias in favor of particular ethnic, class, and gender interests is only part of the picture. Terms such as Eurocentric and patriarchal are bandied about too much, as though they

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described everything that an individual or group does, and as if every error that is made is due to the bias in question. As noted earlier, people of different races, genders, religions, or whatever may have a great deal in common. There is enormous scope for people of different categories to learn from each others scholarship. None of this means, however, that we should regard the Western scholarly tradition as the central one to which others merely contribute or add footnotes. Rather, white, middle-class males should just contribute along with everyone else, and any new, common tradition should be pluralistic scholarship, not simply a modification of the mainstream. A key point, in line with my earlier remarks about the self, is that in addition to anti-racist, feminist, anti-agist, etc. scholarship we need individual scholarship: Jane Doe scholarship, Jos Sanchez scholarship, Shiu Chun Leung scholarship, etc. We have not taken the personal quest of individuals seriously enough: every human being is constantly questioning, observing, theorizing, trying to understand life and make the most of it in his or her own very distinctive situation. The radical democracy of postmodernism leads in this direction, but it gets waylaid because of its excessive preoccupation with cultures and speech communities. Every individual should be seen as the center of a scholarship her or his own comparing notes on equal terms with other individuals, groups, and traditions.
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY

There are many implications of the foregoing for educational practice, but space permits me only to outline a few of the main ones. To begin with, students in schools from an early age should be helped to see how ideas and institutions are tailored to suit peoples values and interests: how, for example, a picture book or novel expresses the distinctive needs and background of the author; or how TV programming promotes life-styles which benefit commercial enterprises; or how the health professions tend to favor males over females; or how the school curriculum reflects the values of certain sectors of society. This need not involve use of technical language, or be particularly confrontational: such study can be a rather straightforward and enjoyable aspect of the school day. But unless we foster this kind of cultural-political understanding, we are supporting our students continued perception of the world as value-neutral, unproblematic, and unchangeable. Surprisingly, Rorty questions engaging in this kind of problem posing in schools. He maintains that lower education (primary and secondary) is mostly a matter of socialization, of trying to inculcate a sense of citizenship. It should aim primarily at communicating enough of what is held to be true by the society to which the children belong so that they can function as citizens of that society. Whether it is true or not is none of the educators business, in his or her professional capacity.19 However, to me this is an extraordinary and inexplicable betrayal of the main thrust of postmodernism. How can a society succeed in constantly breaking the crust of convention, as Rorty advocates,20 when all its school teachers and all its young people up to the age of eighteen are involved in singleminded reinforcement of convention? And how will this affect the self-image and well-being of young people who, as every parent knows, begin systematically to question our conventions from about the age of two? I agree that schools should teach students about social conventions and institutions, probably more than they do at present; but integral to that teaching should be fundamental evaluation and critique. At the same time as we encourage the questioning of accepted realities, however, we must help students find foundations for their lives, if of a less permanent kind. Lack of a sense of stability and direction is one of the major problems of contemporary culture and is a factor in todays reactionary trends in religion, politics, education, and other spheres. If we do not acknowledge this need, our anti-foundationalist teaching may backfire and at any rate may cause students (and parents) considerable distress. We should work with students (and parents, as far as possible) in a dialogical manner, identifying outlooks which are an appropriate combination of old and new elements. Students need to find enduring values (e.g., relational, aesthetic, occupational) and ideals (e.g., pluralistic, global, ecological) which do not contradict their experience of reality but at the same time provide an adequate basis for everyday living.

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One way of putting this point is to say, as I did in Part III, that metaphysics is important. Schools must encourage and assist students to engage in general theorizing about reality and life. The postmodernist emphasis on concrete, local concerns is important and should be applied in education: school studies are often too abstract and of little apparent relevance. But learning should combine both the concrete and the general. The learning of isolated facts and skills can be equally boring and meaningless. It is often through the drawing of broader connections between phenomena and the exploration of their value implications that learning comes alive. And study of this more theoretical kind is necessary if students are to build up a comprehensive worldview and way of life that will give them the security, direction, and meaning they need. Another set of implications for schooling has to do with the democratic and dialogical emphasis of postmodernism, its questioning of the motives of authorities and its downplaying of the role of experts. We must think increasingly in terms of teachers and students learning together, rather than the one telling the other how to live in a top-down manner. This is necessary both so that the values and interests of students are taken into account, and so that the wealth of their everyday experience is made available to fellow students and to the teacher. Of course, the extent to which the teacher may be regarded as an expert varies from subject to subject. In science and mathematics, for example, a teacher may well know considerably more than most of the students in the class, while in values and family life this is less obviously the case; and with respect to a particular values topic, e.g., bullying in the school yard, a student may well know more than the teacher. But even where the teacher does have greater knowledge, we should question excessive use of a teacher dominated method. Lyotard has pointed out the extent to which students today at the postsecondary level can learn from computerized data banks, which he calls the Encyclopedia of tomorrow;21 and the same point could be made with respect to the elementary and secondary levels. Increasingly, teachers must help students learn how to learn, using such technology. One great advantage of selfdirected inquiry is that through it students are more actively involved in determining what they learn and why, and thus are able to give expression to their distinctive interests and needs. However, while I support a democratic, dialogical approach in schools, I believe that Lyotard (like another education critic, Ivan Illich, before him) underestimates the importance of the teacher in motivating and facilitating learning. The activity of teachers in structuring school studies and making learning materials available at appropriate points results in students learning a great many things they would not otherwise learn. It is not enough simply to give students learning skills and set them loose: most young people need ongoing encouragement and help in order to learn what they need for life in todays world. Perhaps this is simply due to a shortcoming of contemporary culture: it has made young people too dependent on adult help. Or perhaps it is the result of more basic features of human nature. But whatever the reason, so long as students need external help in order to learn, we are hiding our heads in the sand if we do not provide it. (We, on the other hand, also need help from our students in order to learn). In democratizing education, then, we should not simply dismantle all structures and hope that something happens, but rather try to create structures that give students the support they need and allow them to make a significant input and have optimal control over their learning. While schooling should as far as possible be dialogical, it should not be a mere pooling of ignorance. To be effective, dialogue requires strong input of many kinds: information, examples, stories, feelings, ideas, theories, worldviews, and so on. The point about a democratic approach is not that structure and content are unnecessary, but that students (and teachers) should have a major say in how their learning is structured and what content is made available to them.
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

There are many implications of what we have been discussing for philosophy of education, but once again I must be selective. To begin with, students of education, like school students, should be helped to see that knowledge is value dependent, culture dependent, and changeable that we are not searching for a fixed, universal philosophy of life and education. At the same time, however, they should be helped to identify continuities and commonalities that give

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some stability and direction to their lives and to the practice of teaching. One way of achieving the twofold goal of combating foundationalism and yet helping students develop modest foundations for life and education is to study various forms of scholarship e.g., anti-racist, feminist, individual, and so on as advocated in Part III, above. In this way students will see that theory is necessarily tailored to suit diverse group and individual needs. As I have argued, however, this does not involve denying substantial overlap between different forms of scholarship. Indeed, the exploration of what different categories of people have in common should be a major aspect of educational studies. The philosophy of education classroom, like the school classroom, should also be strongly democratic and dialogical. In this way the energies of students will be engaged, their values respected, and their insights made available to fellow students and to professors. It is surprising how often professors of education advocate democracy for schools and yet do not practice it with their own students. If we believe in a democratic approach to inquiry we should model it ourselves, so that our students understand what we mean and are given the opportunity to develop a democratic pedagogy which they can in turn employ in schools. Adopting a genuinely democratic and dialogical approach involves a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of philosophy and of intellectual work in general and of our role as professors. We should not view our research into educational theory as something that can be carried on separately in the mind or in the study and then used as a key to unlock the secrets of education and life. As Rorty says:
the intellectualis just a special case just somebody who does with marks and noises what other people do with their spouses and children, their fellow workers, the tools of their trade, the cash accounts of their businesses, the possessions they accumulate in their 22 homes, the music they listen to, the sports they play and watch, or the trees they pass on their way to work.

Philosophers are simply living life like everyone else, working on the same problems as everyone else, but using a distinctive language (often more distinctive than need be). We should compare notes with others, including our students, not impose our solutions on them.

In this respect, the postmodernist attitude is the same as the hermeneutic attitude, on Gadamers interpretation. As Dieter Misgeld expounds Gadamers position:
Hermeneuticsis a mode of inquiry that refuses to legitimate any disposition on the side of those inquiring to exempt themselves from what is topical in the inquiry. [I]f inquiry is itself a situated activity, just as much as what one studies, the co nduct of life of those inquiring 23 comes to be an issue as does the relation of inquiry to their lives.

This is not to downplay the importance of theory, as many postmodernists have done. Rather it is to recognize that everyone is constantly theorizing about life trying to make sense of it including the academically least able student in our class. Our task as professors is not to blind students with our knowledge of the history of philosophy and our command of technical jargon but rather to help them see that they are grappling with the same issues as we are and have been all their lives and to enable them to get into conversation with philosophers, ancient and modern, and other theorists, largely as equals.

However, while our educational theory will always be somewhat self-referential in this way, the broader our base of experience the more others (including our students) will gain from our theory. We education professors must as much as possible go out into society, homes, schools. As noted earlier, philosophy is not a theoretical key that unlocks practice. Theory must be fundamentally rooted in practical experience if it is to be of value. The common professorial disclaimer that we are not equipped to talk about practical matters appears humble but is in fact arrogant; and it betrays a lack of understanding of theory. If we are not equipped to talk about practice, we are not equipped to talk about theory. We must as far as possible address both theory and practice. That is the most effective way to contribute to education, which is our responsibility. People who specialize mainly in theory or mainly in practice can

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make a contribution, but normally they would contribute more even in their area of specialization if they did both (in accordance with Buckminster Fullers principle of synergy). Far from doing a better job by specializing in theory, we almost inevitably do a worse job. Finally, just as we should encourage our students to dialogue with us and other theorists rather than drinking it in, so we ourselves should be more critical or dialogical in relation to so-called pure philosophers. I feel that, in general, philosophers of education over the past few decades have shown too much deference to pure philosophy. We have tended to quote people such as Austin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Rorty, and so on rather than interrogating them. As you can see from this paper, I believe in taking pure philosophers seriously; but they, like us, make enormous errors. I feel that, in good postmodernist spirit, we who are in education should develop a positive image of ourselves as sensitive, knowledgeable people, working away in our particular site, interacting with other scholars and learning from them, but having as much to offer as to gain, and as in no way merely applying the findings of pure philosophy. In closing, I would like to pose a question: Am I here today engaging in genuine dialogue (and do I with my students back home?) or am I preaching, imposing, controlling, and so forth, in the manner criticized by postmodernists and by myself in this paper? That is something I want to reflect on more. But part of the answer, I think, lies in how active you are in assessing what I have to say. Part of the key to avoiding authoritarianism and indoctrination in classrooms of school or university is not to have teachers refrain from saying what they think, but rather to have students feeling free and acquiring the skills, emotions, and habits they need to react strongly and honestly to what teachers say. And the same is true here. I have said my piece as forcefully and clearly as I can. Now it is up to you to assess equally forcefully what I have said from the vantage point of your own experience, culture, ideas, interests, needs, values. I am sure my respondents will do that only too soon! REFERINE

On this point see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 1.

See Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, Postmodern Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 19, 59.

See Carol Nicholson, Postmodernism, Feminism, and Education: The Need for Solidarity, Educational Theory 40, no. 1 (1990): 43.
4

See Nicholson, 198.

John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 184.

Richard Rorty, The Dangers of Over-Philosophication Reply to Arcilla and Nicholson, Educational Theory 40, no. 1 (1990): 43.
7

Rorty, The Dangers of Over-Philosophication, 43. Rorty, The Dangers of Over -Philosophication, 44.
9

McGowan, 181. My parentheses.

10

See Aronowitz and Girouxs Postmodern Education and William Dolls, A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).

11

Apart from works cited above and below, I would like to mention especially Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

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12

Hutcheon, 2.

13

E.T. Gendlin, Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations, in The Presence of Feeling in Thoughts, ed. B. denOuden and M. Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 29. This process of interaction is discussed by Northrop Frye in terms of the tension between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. See his The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 52, 61-62, 217-18; and Words with Power (Penguin, 1990), 37-40
15

14

See for example Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990/1976), 11-13.

16

Landon E. Beyer and Daniel P. Liston, Discourse or Moral Action? A Critique of Postmodernism, Educational Theory 42, no. 4 (1992): 38387. Richard Rorty, Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism, in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 217.

17

18

For accounts of Rortys pragmatism, see for example, his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6377; and Richard Bernsteins Beyond Objectivity and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 198-207.
19

Rorty, The Dangers of Over-Philosophication, 41-42.

20

Rorty, The Dangers of Over-Philosophication, 44.

21

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984/1979), 51.
22

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37. Dieter Misgeld, On Gadamers Hermeneutics, in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger, 162

23

INTERPRETATION AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

Walter Feinberg University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

A memorable presidential address sets out an agenda that helps people explore new issues in new ways. This has certainly been the effect of Clives paper on me and I want to use the occasion of the response not to pick apart this paragraph or to applaud this insight, but to display how my own thought has been stimulated by his paper. Hence, I see this presentation as more of an extended footnote to Clive than a critical response. In this footnote I want to point out a tension in the implication of postmodernism as a cultural and a political movement, and I want to do so by highlighting a tension in two of the general commitments that Clive alluded to. These commitments are first, the priority that is given to first person accounts and second, the denial of the essential self. Let me illustrate my concern by describing a recent incident that occurred at the University of Illinois. A few weeks ago a woman doctoral student and a Fellow in the Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, which I direct, was giving a paper before our Fellows seminar on the topic of La Malinche, a native woman who, when she was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, was presented as a slave to Cortes. Malinche knew both Aztec and Mayan languages and this knowledge enabled Cortes to take advantage of dissention within Montezumas Aztec empire and to

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eventually gain Mexico as a Spanish Colony. Some say that if Cortes is the father of Mexico, Malinche, his concubine, slave, translator, consort and informant is its mother. Needless to say Malinche has undergone considerable reinterpretation since the conquest, depending upon whose light is shining brightest in the rich collage which comprises the Mexican and the Mexican American national identity. Spaniards and Natives, men and women, conservative and revolutionaries have1 all staked out a claim on La Malinche. She is savior and traitor, whore and saint, oppressor and oppressed, all rolled into one and, it seems that debates about Malinche are debates about the very heart and soul of Mexican identity. Here is a model for the kind of inquiry which Clive describes as postmodern. Those who study her are, as he says, often developing a working understanding of reality and life, one which suits our purposes and, as Clive notes, what we arrive at is in part autobiographical, it reflects our personal narrative. This autobiographical character then raises questions, even suspicions, about the role of expert knowledge. The expert gaze can, like the evil eye, bring the subject under the power of another, destroying its capacity for self definition and control. Paintings of Malinche show her to be dark, with broad features; and, depending on whether it is a Spanish or a native depiction, she is respectively either small or large, dwelling in the background or the foreground, passive or active. The student who related these events, Ann Storm, is tall, with red hair, light eyes, narrow features, and neither looks nor is Mexican. When she ended her presentation about Malinche, she related some of the criticisms she had received, as an Anglo woman, for undertaking to study this Mexican icon. She has been told that Mexican culture should not be studied by Anglo women and that to do so is but another example of white feminists exercising hegemonic power over their Third World sisters. Annes experience illustrates the cautionary note sounded by Clive. To paraphrase him: even the whitest, wealthiest male among our scholarly ancestors was struggling with basic issues of how humans are to survive, flourish, and find meaning in life. And surely Anne, hardly a paradigm of male scholarship, is open to the richness of experience and interpretation represented by Malinche. I believe that in exploring the question as to whether Anne, a white, Anglo woman, has a right to do her dissertation on Malinche, we can begin to see some of the more general assumptions about human nature and culture which are entailed by certain commitments of postmodernism and which Clive rightly signals as a basic concern in his analysis of postmodernism. I can think of three possible reasons that people might give for prohibiting a person from studying and writing about another culture. One of them is obviously legitimate, but uninteresting. The other two are both interesting and controversial. The legitimate reason is that if a person does not have the prerequisite background knowledge, she is likely to simply get it wrong. What follows from this, however, is a word of caution about how to study another culture, not a prohibition against such study. After all, one of the reasons that we study another culture is precisely to gain such knowledge. And the reason we write about it is to communicate that knowledge to others. The general principles which Clive mentions are likely to be found in two other possible reasons. One of these is political. The other is epistemological. To begin with the political, there are some very concrete material benefits that are at stake in who gets the right to interpret whom. After all, university positions are staked out on the basis of who is worth interpreting and who gets the right to interpret. Yet if this were the whole story, then the right to interpret or to be interpreted would simply be a matter of power. But if there is anything to the present objections being raised against third person narratives, it is that the right to interpret is wrongly granted to the powerful and denied to the powerless. The claim is based it would seem on some conception of right and wrong and not just on whether or not one has the power to interpret another. Yet what is the basis of such a claim? Why should not the interpreter and interpreted just be a matter decided by inclination and interest? Why should rights not usually a concept associated with postmodernism be an issues at all? Answers to these questions often turn on very specific conditions which have to do both with the fragileness of a culture, and the status

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of its people whether they occupy the position of oppressed or oppressor. Franz Fanon suggests something important when he proposed that the first job of the colonized is to get the colonizer out of their head, but just what is it that he is getting at? Is it that the colonizers interpretation is simply and always false or is it something more? We must recall that the demand that is being made at least as Anne heard it is not just that we all have a right to interpret ourselves, but that others have an obligation to refrain from interpreting me. But why would someone believe that they have an exclusive right to interpret themselves and why would they want to claim it? Exploring these questions may bring us closer to a glimpse at the general truths that Clive rightly suspects lie behind some postmodern commitments. Lets begin with the assumption that, for whatever reason, some groups do have an exclusive claim on their own interpretation, and ask: Why would they want to exercise this right? Is ones culture something like ones home, where only members of the family have a legitimate right to dwell but where others must be invited in? After all, not all cultures seem concerned about asserting their right to self interpretation. The English seem quite happy when Shakespeare plays in Peoria or even in Nagoya, and the Irish do not as a rule complain when Joyce is studied in Moscow or even Urbana. Of course, these are, one might argue, the best products of a given culture, whereas with Malinche we have a much more ambiguous exemplar. This is part of the problem, but only a part. Clearly, Benedict Arnold or Al Capone are not model exemplars of the character of the United States, but I see nothing inappropriate about some Mexican or Scotch person offering an interpretation of their impact. Indeed, some of the most astute interpretations of this country were performed by foreigners Crevecoeur, Toqueville and Myrdal come to mind. The difference is that today the demand for exclusivity is made largely because the very status of a colonialized people often means not just that they have incorporated the interpretation of the colonizer as lazy, or stupid, or dirty but that they have accepted the role of interpreted to the colonizers interpreter. When this fear is justified, it means that the oppressed stand as an object to their own history enabling the other to expropriate its meaning. In other words, in this demand for exclusivity of interpretation is what Clive speaks of as a general commitment to a specific conception of culture, value and inquiry. Here the commitment involves a subtle complex of principles that essentially says that dominant cultures have an obligation to provide dominated cultures with the space to inquire into their own history, and that when a culture is fragile and when its fragility is the result of a colonialized past, priority must be given to its self interpretation. The conception of rights developed here is not exactly like the right a home owner has to expel an unwanted guest. It it rather the right that a victim of an assault has to be given the time and the space to heal. And the concept of respect that is entailed is not the same as that which the phone solicitor exercises when she says thank you, good bye after the first rebuff. Here respect requires an understanding of the healing process and the need for autonomy. It does not necessarily mean that one must accept the vision of thick cultural boundaries and bounded interpretive boarders which are sometimes insinuated into the understanding of this process. Clive observes that terms such as eurocentric or patriarchical are bandied about too much, and if using these terms does in fact lead one to overlook the masses of oppressed European peoples both women and men then he is certainly right. If, on the other hand, their use is taken as a shorthand reminder of other voices and other experiences, then it has an important place in the discourse. The difficulty with the claim that is made for exclusive interpretation is not that it labels certain kinds of systematic distortions as paternalism or eurocentric. It is that it assumes that there is some real, inside-the-group interpretation which can be accessed only by members of the group themselves and which must be appropriated spontaneously and without interference from the outside. Yet this assumption rests upon a view of an essential, internal, spontanious self which is both essentialist and romantic two qualities which most postmodern theorists wish to reject. Moreover, self interpretations need not always be liberating interpretations. Consider tribal groups which view colonizers as simply instruments of some larger force serving to punish them for transgressions against the spirit world. For self

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interpretation to be liberating, the self that interprets must at least see the self that is being interpreted as part of a process where liberation is a possible outcome. Yet this kind of interpretation is always relational and diachronic. Self is connected to the interpretations of other and therefore inevitably ascribes to others motives, interests, pressures and world views, but this requires understanding of the self-understanding of the oppressor. And it requires a vision of self over time in which there is a reason for challenging, interrogating, altering, dismissing, reincorporating and transcending these self interpretations. In this process, interpretations and self understandings of the oppressed as well as of the oppressor undergo change in light of a new flow of previously disrupted interpretations. Hence the possibility of a self interpretation on the part of the oppressed which is not informed by the changing self interpretation of the oppressor is limited, although politically and psychologically it may serve some useful functions. To assume more to believe that self interpretation necessarily reaches deeper or represents truer is to accept both an essentialists and a romantics view of self, which goes against most of the tenets of postmodernism. Postmodernisms rejection of the essential self does not fit well with the insistence that there are epistimic boundaries2 that give priority to first person interpretations whether the first person be singular or plural. The soundness of the postmodern view that self is relational and should be understood as denying priority to first person interpretations if only for the reasons that not all relations have been actualized and that selfhood always contains evolutionary and deevolutionary potential. Hence, the self is more than its past and present manifestations, and the interaction of first and third person interpretations are essential to the development of both individual and collective selves. The problem with colonialism is not that it rendered wrong interpretations, as if there were some essential, hidden self which blows a horn and rings a bell when we dont get the right interpretation. The problem is that it silences alternative interpretations and therefore curtails the first and third person dialogue. And the problem with silenced dialogue is that it destroys the very diversity that is required for the epistimic and ontological development of both oppressed and oppressor. Hence, as Clive says: in addition to anti-racist, feminist, anti-agest scholarship we need individual scholarship Jane Doe scholarship, Jose Sanches scholarship, Shiu Chun Leung scholarship and, may I add, Anne Storm scholarship. And we also need Jose Sanches interpreting Shiu Chun Leung, and Shiu Chun Leung interpreting Anne Storm, and Anne Storm interpreting Jose Sanches. One does expect that any scholar operating in the postmodern world will be sensitive to dimensions of racism, sexism, agesm, classism, and will be alert for new and unnamed forms of discrimination. One expects too that scholars will seek to hear the voice of the other and seek to accept responsibility for the effects of the gazing that we do. But in the long run, the solution to any malady brought on by gazing in the way we experts gaze is to find ways to engage the object as subject, to see self as other, to help the healing process and reduce the need for oppressed cultures to build fortresses to protect their identities. So ends my footnote to Clives presidential address. Whether my own thoughts on postmodernism and interpretation are or are not correct, I believe that others reading his thoughtful and reflective presentation will find other issues to ponder in his rich analysis of post modern theory.

THE PLAYS AND PLOYS OF POSTMODERNISM

Maxine Greene Teachers College, Columbia University In a novel called Flauberts Parrot, Julian Barnes tells the story of a British physician obsessed with discovering the truth about the nineteenth-century novelist, Gustave Flaubert. He travels back and forth to Rouen and the surrounding country where Flaubert spent much of his life; he visits the hospital, the local museum, what is left of Flauberts homes and his

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lovers homes. He reads everything from Flauberts letters and journals to contemporary British criticism. Although the novelist died more than a century ago, the doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, realizes that all that remains of him is paper. Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound.1 He studies everything that survives, nonetheless, hoping to reach beyond the texts at least to the extent of identifying a stuffed parrot as the real one that stood on the writers desk and served as model for Felicits parrot in The Simple Heart. He examines a statue of Flaubert that is ostensibly a reliable semblance of the real. It turns out that there are three identical parrots left of fifty that looked almost the same. There are three statues of Flaubert, each one a second impression, a replacement of the original, each one lacking something a thigh, a mustache, an arm. To make it harder, six North Africans are playing boules around the statue in Rouen, suggesting a multiculturalism that enhances the uncertainty. The doctor devises a number of chronologies of Flauberts life; each is from a different vantage point; each is, to some degree, true. The doctor asks how we can ever seize the past. He remembers that, when he was a medical student, some pranksters at a dance released into the hall a piglet smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.2 And so, given what we see happening today, does what we used to call objective reality. It does occur to me, however, that there was an actual pig. I begin this way in part because the novel (like so many good novels) not only enables us to order the materials of our own experience in accord with the as/if disclosed in the work. Lending Dr. Braithwaites quest our lives until his questioning becomes our questioning, we are likely to rewrite some of our narratives as we begin to wonder about slippery pigs and textual realities and communities of interpretation and multiple points of view. One of my problems with Clive Becks beautifully and coherently drawn version of postmodernism is that he seems to want to integrate what he calls postmodernist doctrines and practices into his life-story without altering that life-story in any significant way. It is not accidental that he talks of those doctrines and practices intruding into his life. As we all know, no one can be more courtly or courteous with intruders than Professor Beck. I can see him inviting some of them to his dining room table, making them feel quite at home. Indeed, he may be doing precisely that at this Philosophy of Education Society meeting. Why make Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Derrida feel like outsiders? Let them join the remaining analysts, existentialists, idealists, and pragmatists and feel included, accepted members (French accents despite) of the community. This suggests some of the difficulties I have with the Presidential address, scholarly and authentic as it is. I cannot but recall Nietzsches Zarathustra in the presence of the tightrope walker, viewing the human being as a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, he says, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.3 He is speaking of those who are never finished, whose lives are always an overture. He is speaking of those who live to know and who want to know, but who recognize (as those touched by the postmodern mood cannot but recognize) that there is no net under the tightrope. There are no rational frameworks in which all conflicts can be resolved; nor are there time-tested authorities to offer resting points. Clive Beck is apparently troubled by the extremity of such claims and responds by recalling visible continuities, commonalties, and startling glimpses of stable realities. He does not mention the erosion of faith in the so-called Enlightenment Project, that linking of rationality with human promise and the conviction of ongoing progress in the years to come. We are aware of modernist and pre-modernist challenges to Cartesianism and merely abstract formulations. We need only think of Blake and the Romantics, Wordsworth, Emerson, Kant, as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey. The full force of instrumental rationality (that distortion of classical notions of reason to the wedding of science and technology) was felt with the discovery of the concentration camps in Germany and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The idea of perfectly rational men (yes, ordinarily men) deciding calmly and systematically to destroy other human beings because of their race, religion, sexual preference, or nationality clearly served to open the way to the rejection of master narratives like the myths of progress and reasons claims to privileged insights into what is true and valuable. The suspicion has become so widespread that it has even been applied to the work of Jurgen Habermas because of his belief that consensus can still be achieved by means of disinterested communication among groups of competent speakers. There are echoes, it is said, of the old reliance on the image of a patriarchal, always clearthinking figure permanently installed on the sixth or seventh stage of development, free of the chores and concrete

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distractions of the private sphere. (I suspect that many of the doubts and the unanswerable questions are now being aroused in those reading about the rapes of Bosnian women, sometimes by perfectly rational professional men. There was a nurse, some of you recall, who described her violation by a doctor she had always looked up to, whom she called a golden man.) Feminist theory, hermeneutics, new approaches to psychoanalysis, studies of texts and textuality, speech-act inquiries, explorations of the dialogic imagination,4 a cultural pluralism that now has broken through the silences of the long oppressed, long colonized, long subordinated people: these have led to an interest in situated knowing. Contingencies are being recognized; so are the diversities in vantage points and perspectives. We can grant with Clive Beck the importance of interactions between ideas and experiences of the world. We certainly can agree with him on the present fascination with reality as a human construction. Once we allow, however, for the unprecedented multiplicity of constructions due to the breaking of silences, traceable as well to the opening of different cultural realities due to media, travel, population movements, we cannot forestall what Beck calls the loss of strict definitions. Nor can we do much better than strive for some reciprocity among incommensurable ideas and points of view. Disturbed as we all obviously are by the loss of reference points and the challenge this poses to democracy, Clive Beck remarks that there is no center for postmodernists. He seems to connect this with the critique of what is called the canon because of its exclusion of such a large part of the worlds populations and their literatures. Given the surging interest in margins and borders, however, I would disagree. Reading Cornel West, Henry Gates, Jr., and Toni Morrison, I have been helped to see dimensions of a center never noticed before, and largely because they are consciously looking from the border. Toni Morrison, for instance, points to efforts to erase an Africanist presence, and how that presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American Literature.5 Like others who have been excluded, she is not denying the human quests of American writers nor the basic issues they have probed. She is simply making us see more, seeking the kind of repleteness of interpretation that is only achieved when works are read from multiple perspectives. So it is with Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, helping us come in contact with decolonized space and the importance of as yet unreadable alternative history6 that crisscrosses so much of western history that it does not and cannot erode or destroy what we think of as ours. Feeding new visions from the margins to the center, the formerly disqualified on the borders are likely to enrich, complicate, and thicken what we construct (without warranty) as the center of all things. Understanding all these as instances of knowing informed by value, I do not disagree with Clive Beck on the importance of calling attention to the impossibility of neutral or neutralized cognition. Still, I do not agree with his brief mention of Michel Foucault under that rubric. Foucaults conception of power as dispersed through our discourses, our examination systems, our ways of designing institutions seems to me to demand more attention, especially since he is disposed of here with the statement that he has perhaps an overly conspiratorial view of knowledge. His interest actually is, Foucault writes, in detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemonywith which it operates at the present time.7 Like John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, he calls for reflection on the rules that govern discourse at particular moments of time, and on the assumptions that underlie it. Speaking of thought much as they do, he says that thought is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question its meanings, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects upon it as a problem.8 As I suggested, there are continuities; but I would still want to insist that Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, yes, and Rorty (with all their own claims to connections with Nietzsche, say, or Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, or Searles, or Lacan, or Freud, or the pragmatists, or the neo-Marxists) are being read at a moment of history marked by distinctive shifts of sensibility on all sides. Some associate them with the overcoming of Communist systems, with the overtaking of democratic commitments by free-market ideals, with the changes in our economies, with the so-called simulacra9 created by the media and surrounding us all. I think it must be said, in the face of the demographic changes taking place, that there is an important effort within postmodernism to break with the category thinking Dr. Beck criticizes, in part by raising questions about

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representation that have seldom been raised before. It is not simply a question of whether discourse functions to represent some pre-existing, objective reality, whether (to move towards deconstructionist thought for a moment) consideration of a play of signifiers must replace familiar notions of signifiers referring to objectively existent instances of the signified. It is also a matter of recognizing that representation, for many postmodernists, is ordinarily arbitrary and dependent upon false assumptions. This applies not only to the taking for granted of the referential status of words, images, symbols, and the like. It also applies to any persons being representative somehow, of the Asian people, the South American, the Afro-Americans, the Native Americans, the female gender, as if indeed there were essences to be embodied or exemplified. This leads me to a last dimension of critique. It has to do with lack of attention (beyond mere mention) to the postmodernist shifts in feminism and feminist theory and the important impacts these have meant for postmodernist thinking about essentialism, perspectivism, difference, the self, and the whole matter of theory. Certainly, the idea of situated knowing has been emphasized and developed in considerable detail in feminist writing.10 The challenges to essentialism have connected with the complex problem of difference. The question of whether the self is obliterated by being entangled in and, perhaps, created by discourse relates to larger questions about the possibility of autonomy for any self in the traditional individualist sense. Both women and men are increasingly talked about in contexts or in the midst of dialogues, or in complex meshworks of relationship. At once, at a moment when the dissolution of epistemology seems to characterize so much of postmodernist thinking, feminist scholars are discovering or rediscovering epistemology from their own situated points of view. Sandra Harding, working as a feminist scholar in the domains of the sciences, speaks about the development of a feminist empiricism that primarily challenges the incomplete manner in which scientific method has been utilized, even as it complies with many of the traditional norms of science. Still rejecting the universalizing ideal knower, Harding also draws attention to standpoint theory, which emphasizes the importance of grounding knowledge in experience.11 It also attempts to overcome the distorted and limited orientations to social experience common to traditional science, so focused on mens experience from which so much of it derives. Not only does this expand the scene against which theories of knowledge are tested and examined; it indicates that Rorty is not the primary theorist among postmodernists, or even the one most interested in theory. Pastiche and the unexplained do indeed characterize those thought of as skeptical postmodernists, who often posit an equivalence of pluralist views and see theory as nothing more than a set of linguistic conventions. There are more affirmative postmodernists who still see truth as relative to particular communities, but who go on to talk of theory in connection with the local, the daily, or the narrative. As we have seen, there are feminist theorists who, for very good reasons, are reaching beyond the purely textual in a modest return to the empirical world. I cannot but think again of the Bosnian women and of how difficult it is to affirm that all is discourse or text. Similarly, in spite of the generally felt groundlessness where moralities are concerned, in spite of recommendations that we rely upon shared beliefs,12 since there is no way of universalizing or objectifying values, there appears here and there in postmodern literature a reaching out for principle, if only as perceived as a shared fiction, or what Joseph Conrad calls a necessary fiction, a barrier against nothingness.13 Going back to Julian Barnes Dr. Braithwaite and his unfinished research into Flauberts life and art, I need to say that there is secreted in the text until the end what is called a pure story. It is the story of the doctors wifes attempted suicide and of his having to turn off the life-support machine. We were happy, he writes, we were unhappy; I miss her. And then he quotes Flaubert again: Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?14 Later, he wonders whether there is any point to him, to his life. He does not want to negate himself in the face of those who seem more interesting. And then: But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that its yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because its yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

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Pondering risk-taking, he says that you cannot change humanity, you can only know it. Pride makes us long for a solution to things a solution, a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. You cannot change humanity; you can only know 15 it.

This, for me, is a postmodern ending, articulated by someone whose narrative I somehow achieve as meaningful against my own lived life and through my reading, which is forever incomplete. I make this a tale of a search for meaning while walking the tightrope, trying in a world without benchmarks to keep moving, to keep asking, to keep trying to create an identity. Of course, as Clive Beck tells us, this has to have implications for pedagogy. As he puts it in his fine third section dealing with pedagogy, there is the need for a dialogical approach, as there is a need to look though different perspectives. Perhaps by means of looking through diverse perspectives at the same books, the same environment, the same world, young persons will constitute something in common among themselves. Their teachers can make the materials, the ways of knowing available and accessible. They may then go on, teachers and learners, through and beyond the overture, taking their lives seriously, resisting thoughtlessness, renewing a world.

Julian Barnes, Flauberts Parrot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 12.
2

Barnes, 14.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1958), 126.
4

See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981).

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 46.

Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak, Who Claims Alterity?, in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 259.
7

Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews (New York: Pantheon Press, 1980), 132-33.

Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 388.
9

See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981).
10

See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992).

11

Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 24-27.

12

Richard Rorty, Solidarity or Objectivity?, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.
13

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Great Short Works (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 261.
14

Barnes, 163. Barnes, 166.

15

Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism

by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith

The 'postmodern condition, ' in which instrumentalism usurps all other considerations, has produced a kind of

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intellectual paralysis in the world of education. It is difficult to take issue with such shibboleths of our time as 'standards', 'effectiveness' or 'quality', or the transmission of a nation's 'heritage', yet many people sense that important values are being lost as the education systems of the developed world increasingly devote themselves to managerialism and 'performativity', the quest for efficiency and effectiveness that can be quantified. This book shows how a sustained and telling critique of current educational policy and practice can be developed from the writings of such postmodern thinkers as Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. These thinkers show us new directions, making what has become over-familiar in education seem strange, and they shake us out of established ways of thinking and writing. The book reveals how very different certain aspects of education--for instance, literacy, moral education (in the home as well as the school), curriculum policy and planning--look in the light of these ideas. The book makes many of the central ideas of postmodern theory accessible by demonstrating their relevance to familiar aspects of the practice of education. Berth Danermark

After Postmodernism: the Challenge for Critical Realism

AFTER POSTMODERNISM : an introduction to critical realism.
Edited by Jos Lpez & Garry Potter. The Athlone Press, London & New York, 2001. 0 485 00421 6 hardback 50.00 0 485 00617 0 paperback 17.99

In this review I first give a short presentation of After Postmodernism and then discuss some issues raised by its reading. The editors, Jos Lpez and Garry Potter, have done a great job. They have collected twenty-three papers dealing with various aspects of critical realism. The papers are presented under nine headings, each with a short introduction by the editors. It is not an easy task to review such a book. It is a book full of nuances, well-written chapters and covering so many different aspects of critical realism that it would take more space than is available to introduce and comment on the different parts of the book on equal terms. The volume begins with a general introduction, also written by the editors. This is a very useful, I would say necessary, part of the book. It gives the reader a snapshot of critical realism. It is only some fifteen pages long but it provides the reader with the basics of critical realism and its relation to both postmodernism and positivism/empiricism. For anyone who wishes to get a grasp of critical realism in five minutes I would recommend this part of the book. At the end of the book there are some, for the newcomer, very useful suggestions for further reading. The contributions cover a wide range of topics. There are philosophical, theoretical and methodological papers.

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However, it is a little unclear to me what the guiding principles were behind the selection of papers. The editors claim that the books contributors provide a good sampling of realism in action. I would say yes and no. Some papers are really good pieces of applied critical realism, some cannot be characterized as in action (I assume the editors mean something specific by in action but I am not sure we mean the same thing). This is a question to which I will return. It is not possible to do justice to all the twenty-three contributors in this review. Some will be mentioned, some not. This does not indicate any opinion by the reviewer regarding the quality of the different papers. In general they fit in very well. I say in general because I relate them to the theme and scope of the book. The title contains two keywords: after and introduction. This brings me to some questions raised by the book. In the following I will briefly discuss two such groups of questions. An introduction or an illustration? The first set of questions is related to the subtitle. Is this book really an introduction? Introduction of what and for whom, i.e. who were the readers Lpez and Potter had in mind when bringing these papers together in a volume? Is this an introduction I would recommend to my students who are curious about critical realism? I am not sure. In combination with a more coherent and non-polemical presentation of critical realism, this book is a very useful one. But, taken on its own, it does not serve as an introduction. The editors extremely useful presentation of critical realism, and their introductions to the nine parts, are an excellent aid for the reader to understand the context and evaluate the conclusions and theses in the different chaptersalthough there is a risk that the radical mix of papers might be confusing for a beginner in critical realism. I do not want to underestimate the experience and the intellectual capacity of potential readers, but to grasp some of the papers requires a good knowledge of critical realism. Let me just give two examples. The first chapter is a transcript of a debate between Rom Harr and Roy Bhaskar, among others, from IACRs second annual conference at the University of Essex in 1998. They are discussing the nature of causal mechanisms, more precisely if structures are able to produce phenomena, a thesis which Harr disputes and Bhaskar defends. Harr agrees that structures have causal consequences but he says that [i]t is active powers that I deny social structure possesses (p. 36). However, it is not easy to grasp the theoretical and methodological implications of these differences in social ontology by reading this chapter. Another example is the last part of the book under the

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heading Dialectics. It contains three very good papers by Robert Fine, Bertell Ollman and Andrew Collier, dealing with the concept abstraction among other things. These papers require some basic knowledge in philosophy and some familiarity with critical realism. After empiricism? The second type of question I would like to address is related to the after in the title. After what? What is postmodernism and has that unspecified intellectual mode of thinking really gone out of fashion as the editors claim (p. 4)? At the end of my article I will give an example countering this thesis. This is not the place to go into depth on this issue, but there is a need to modify the often caricatured way in which it is discussed. I do not claim that the editors caricature it, but that the question of postmodernisms contribution to our way of thinking about the world and our knowledge about it is of the utmost importance. Lpez and Potter make a very important qualification when talking about postmodernism. They emphasise that it is a very broad church (just like critical realism). There is much in the postmodern way of thinking that is in accordance with critical realism. However, I do agree with Lpez and Potter that postmodernism is beginning to come to its senses. We see nowadays less and less of the more extreme forms of reasoning in postmodernism. We seldom see statements like cholera bacteria are a social construct, which is obviously difficult to defend in the light of modern biology. Celebrating diversity and complexity does not always lead to relativism. This is developed in chapter seven, Sociology and Epistemology, written by Jean Bricmont. He writes that postmodern ideas contain a kernel of truth which can only be seen when they are carefully formulated and that when they are so formulated they give no support to radical relativism (p. 101). I think this is a very important and constructive way of approaching postmodernism. I have no problem agreeing with Lpez and Potter that postmodernism is in a state of decline, but I would add that this is truer of its radical strands than of the more sober postmodernism. However, more problematic is the relationship between critical realism and modern empiricism. What is state-of-the-art empiricism, and what are the issues that critical realism offers a radically different view on? And what are the implications of a move from empiricism to critical realism? Scientists tend

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to be realist, writes Bricmont (p. 101). From my own experience in interdisciplinary research I think he is right. But as Porpora says in chapter twenty, (Do realists run regressions?), [p]ositivism is a philosophy for sociologists who do not want to have to think about philosophy (p. 263). I would add, not only sociologists. This is the crucial point; many tend to think as realists but act as empiricists when it comes to applied research. This is a challenge for critical realism. If critical realism is to make progress and become the important meta-theory we hope it will be, we have constantly to have the epistemic fallacy in mind. It is addressed in the general introduction and in Porporas chapter. There are also some really good chapters dealing with concrete social phenomenon like smoking (David Ford), cyberspace (Pam Higham) and computing (Sue Clegg). But the fallacy deserves much more attention in an introductory book that also has the aim of showing critical realism in action. Most of the contributions discuss postmodernism but since this is a meta-theory that is out of fashion, at least in its extreme forms, one could let it rest in peace and face the normal science of empiricism as Porpora suggests. In practical research empiricism is many times a more vital competitor with critical realism when it comes to important social phenomena, for example inequality in contemporary society, than is postmodernism. If we do not succeed in demonstrating the usefulness of the critical realist metatheoretical orientation it will remain marginal. Showing critical realism to be an alternative to empiricism constitutes the bulk of Bhaskars writings up till the beginning of the nineties. One critical realist who has written a lot about this is Tony Lawson (see e.g. Lawson 1997); in his books he focuses on the problems of empiricism and the strengths of critical realism. Another is Andrew Sayer. It is extremely important that more critical realists show how critical realism is an alternative to empiricism in applied research. Realism at work? This brings me to my last set of questions triggered by the book. Is this a volume that does justice to critical realism at work? There are chapters on nature (Ted Benton), physics (Jean Bricmont and Christopher Norris), social structures (John Scott and Jos Lpez), computing (Pam Higham and Sue Clegg) and literary interpretation (Philip Tew) to mention some of the themes included in the book. These chapters are good illustrations of critical realism in action. There are also some chapters of a more reflexive kind, focusing on ontological and epistemological issues. However, if the term in action aims to indicate what difference critical realism makes when used in applied

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research, it is very important to be explicit about this. I sometimes see reports where the author claims that (s)he is a critical realist and devotes a chapter or two to the presentation of critical realism. But at the end of the road one could easily exclude these chapters because the conclusionsand the route to the conclusionslook more or less exactly the same as in a report written by a typical modern empiricist. Hence the question in practical research is: What difference does critical realism make when it comes to an empirical investigation? This addresses the complex issue of bridging the gaps between a philosophy of science, methodology and theory addressed by, for example, Margaret Archer. I think this is also what an introduction to critical realism should include, especially if it claims to illustrate critical realism in action. There are hints of that, explicitly and implicitly (mostly the latter), in the book, but one has to read carefully to find them. Also related to the question of critical realism in action is whether we could expect critical realists to be present in some areas of research and scholarship where it is not. There are of course a number of areas where we would like critical realism to be party to the discussion. But let me just indicate one very important discussion in which I have so far not seen any explicit critical realist stance. It is the debate between Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser among others (see, for example, Fraser & Honneth 2002). Not long ago there was a debate in New Left Review between proponents of two different views of how to understand inequality and the difference relating to, for example, gender, ethnic groups, gays/lesbians and heterosexuals. On the one hand, there were proponents of a culturalist perspective influenced by Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. On the other hand, we find a perspective rooted in political economy, with Nancy Fraser as the most articulate proponent. Is injustice rooted in exploitation and economic marginalisation or in culture and representation, interpretation and communication? Here it is very clear that an elaborated and sophisticated form of postmodernism is very vital and has many supporters. (To say that Axel Honneths theory of social recognition is a sign of a mode of thinking which is in decline is not accurate.) Is the answer Frasers theory of redistribution? This debate addresses one of the most important questions of our timeinequality between different groups in society. I think critical realism has much to offer in this debate and it is frustrating to note the absence (as far as I know) of an elaborated third position formulated in critical realist terms. In this review I have not at all been able to do justice to

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the different contributors. I find the book very useful, but more as a collection of different comments on and illustrations of critical realism than as an introduction. The strength of the book is its diversity and the introductions, especially the general introduction. It shows that critical realism is a very vital mode of thinking and covers many facets of reality. However, the book also brings to the fore some important questions, as a good book should. In this review I have indicated some. What is the state of postmodernism? Is it premature to say that it is out of fashion? What is the relation between modern empiricism and critical realism when it comes to empirical investigations? Are there important lacunae where critical realism is conspicuous by its absence? We do not find the answers in this book. But it is a strength of the book that it raises such important questions. References Lawson, Tony. 1997. Economics and Reality. London: Routledge Fraser, Nancy & Honneth, Axel. 2002. Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical Exchange. London:

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