‘Wicked Problems’ and the Work of the School

As communities respond to challenges, threats and opportunities, organisations are changing in significant ways — new organisational designs, new communities of practice, new skills and new forms of human capital are sought. Yet K-12 school systems appear to be permanently failing organisations, not changing despite being shrouded by the rhetoric of change and entrapped in the competing expectations of different stakeholders. Using the idea of creative design and innovation as the cornerstone for learning and a focus on wicked problems for authentic audiences for the work of students and teachers, this article explores the opportunity of such a change and the barriers to enactment. Case examples are given of problem-based learning with design at the heart of the learning process and an analysis of schools as permanently failing organisations is provided. Since the human capital needs of the 21st century require different skills from those of the last century, this approach is seen as essential. It demands a transformation of our schools, not continuous improvement.     

Book reviews

The role of information and communications technology (ICT) in widening participation in lifelong learning, and thereby establishing the UK as a bona fide ‘learning society’, is now enshrined in a series of multi-million pound government initiatives such as the University for Industry, learndirect and UK Online. Although politicians and educationalists have been quick to herald such initiatives as revolutionizing post-compulsory education and extending learning opportunities to ‘anyone’ on an ‘anytime, anywhere’ basis, there has been little empirical analysis of how ICT is actually impacting on patterns of lifelong learning in the UK. With this in mind, the present paper presents an analysis of data from the 2002 National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) survey of 5885 households, focusing on learners' access to technology and the role that technology is playing in facilitating learning.     

Young lives,diverse choices and imagined futures in an education and training market

In the UK, policy developments in vocational and further education have created a market in post-16 education and training. This paper reports on an Economic and Social Research Council study and one small cohort of young people entering and moving through one such urban market. They enter with very different learning identities, aspirations and motivations, and their ‘educational inheritances’ prepare them differently for participation. Some young people simply want ajob and awage and ‘nomore learning’, others come with alongterm commitment to gaining higher qualifications. The authors both describe and explore a number of ways of conceptualizing these differences. Both despite and because of the changes in the local labour market ‘deep sub-structures of inequality’ re-emerge. The differentiation of routes and ‘spaces’ of opportunity confronting these young people are reproductive of social class divisions.     

PREDICTING MULTIPLE CRITERIA OF CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENTS WITH MODERATOR VARIABLES1

A moderated regression technique was applied to two samples, one of males and one of females, each of which had multiple predictor, moderator, and criterion information. One moderator was found that consistently identified a group of predictable individuals regardless of both sex and the three creative achievement criteria. This moderator was a modification of the Drews sociability scale and it indicated that those individuals who had little or no inclination towards social functions tended to be considerably more predictable than the remainder of the sample or when the group was taken as a whole. Within the low social groups, girls appeared to be somewhat more predictable than boys on two of the three creative achievement criteria, however the greatest discrepancy appeared in the writing criterion where the girls were substantially more predictable. Finally, the low sociability groups were characterized by greater predictive accuracy regardless of whether subgroup or overall prediction equations were used.     

Political Education in/as the Practice of Freedom: A Paradoxical Defence from the Perspective of Michael Oakeshott

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose goals are transformed to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities.