ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we turn to a few of the innovations to examine them in greater detail and on their own terms. Up to now, we have compared and contrasted, drawing first from one study then from another, to make specific points about the role of teachers, or the specific conception of the subject, or some other key element of reform. Our purpose in this book has been to offer a framework for all those who have to make or carry out policy for science, mathematics and technology education. But each innovation is singular, with its own distinctive place in the ecology of reform in science, mathematics and technology education. For those involved in any way in policy, it is just as important to get a coherent understanding of one particular innovation as to understand their collective contribution to this issue or that: the particular strength of an innovation-and its problems-lies in its unique configuration of the factors that apply to them all. Thus, in this chapter, we shall return to a few of the reforms themselves. We shall take them one by one. We shall show how each reform touches many of the themes on which we have built the broad analytic framework of this book, but how, at the same time, it is exceptional and almost surely unreplicable.