Educational Change as Social Movement

This chapter introduces the idea of educational change as social movement as a metaphor with a good fighting chance of overturning scientific management as the dominant set of ideas shaping how one think about and pursue educational change. It looks at the core principles of action to liberate learning in large numbers of schools and across entire educational systems. Social movements offer a powerful metaphor for the new paradigm to guide how we think about and pursue educational change. The sense-making/co-construction perspective offers a more nuanced explanation for the development and implementation of educational change than does the technical-rational perspective, which assumes that education policy flows through a direct line from central offices to classrooms. Widespread change has to happen at both the micro-level – the everyday activities of movement actors – and the macro-level – the wider structures of political opportunities that enable or constrain cultural change.