Educational change in Scotland: Policy, context and biography

The poor success rate of policy for curriculum change has been widely noted in the educational change literature. Part of the problem lies in the complexity of schools, as policymakers have proven unable to micromanage the multifarious range of factors that impact upon the implementation of policy. This paper draws upon empirical data from a local authority-led initiative to implement Scotland’s new national curriculum. It offers a set of conceptual tools derived from critical realism (particularly the work of Margaret Archer), which offer significant potential in allowing us to develop greater understanding of the complexities of educational change. Archer’s social theory developed as a means of explaining change and continuity in social settings. As schools and other educational institutions are complex social organisations, critical realism offers us epistemological tools for tracking the ebbs and flows of change cycles over time, presenting the means for mapping the multifarious networks and assemblages that form their basis

Whatever happened to curriculum theory? Critical realism and curriculum change

In the face of what has been characterised as a ‘crisis’ in curriculum – an apparent decline of some aspects of curriculum studies combined with the emergence of new types of national curriculum which downgrade knowledge – some writers have been arguing for the use of realist theory to address these issues. This paper offers a contribution to this debate, drawing upon critical realism, and especially upon the social theory of Margaret Archer. The paper first outlines the supposed crisis in curriculum, before providing an overview of some of the key tenets of critical realism. The paper concludes by speculating on how critical realism may offer new ways of thinking to inform policy and practice in a key curricular problematic. This is the issue of curriculum change

Getting Serious about Taking Legal Reasoning Seriously

The motivation for this symposium is Professor Markovits\u27s accusation—or at very least his genuine concern—that some American legal academics these days no longer take legal reasoning seriously. This is no mere intellectual concern on his part, for he also suggests that this failure has genuine consequences for the practice of law and, ultimately, the quality of American life insofar as it is structured by law. If this be so, it is a grievous fault, and grievously must these academics answer it. But we think that the charge itself needs to be inspected carefully, not merely for what it says, but for what it does. In this essay we are interested both in Professor Markovits\u27s specific views about seriousness and the more general question of what it means to take legal reasoning seriously. The two are not identical. Professor Markovits believes that taking legal reasoning seriously requires a commitment to belief in objectively right answers to questions of law that people can arrive at by reasoning about and through certain rights and principles. This theory of serious legal reasoning is inspired in large part by Ronald Dworkin\u27s early work, although Professor Markovits apparently now believes that even Dworkin does not take legal reasoning sufficiently seriously

From authority to authenticity: the changing governance of biotechnology

In this paper, we suggest that the basis on which risk is publicly managed is presently in a process of transition from the demonstration of expert authority to that of public authenticity. That is, in today's contexts of contested trust, the achievement of an authentic persona has become an increasingly important representational objective for both institutions and individuals involved in risk management. The paper draws empirically on a recent controversy in biotechnology, xenotransplantation, the transplantation of tissues from animals to humans. Drawing on this case, we consider not only how risk is assessed (in the loose sense of weighing up, formally or informally, the risks and benefits associated with a particular development), but also how the riskiness of risk assessment is itself contained. That is to say, we explore how various actors engage not only, in one way or another, with the 'calculation of risks' associated with xenotransplantation, but also with the risks entailed in calculating risks, or what we might call 'meta-risk'. This meta-risk can be seen as an index of the erosion of scientific authority in the context of 'world risk society'. We suggest that one means of waylaying such meta-risk is the demonstration of 'transparency' in the process of rendering risk assessments. However, 'transparency' is itself highly problematic, not least because the criteria that make a decision-making process (such as risk assessment) 'transparent' are always open to query. Indeed, far from being a solution to the crisis in trust, it is very likely that we will see an additional crisis in transparency. We therefore examine our data in terms of the means by which the assessment of risk is 'anchored' and the need for further interrogation obviated. We suggest that the problems of 'meta-risk' and transparency are rhetorically waylaid by representations of authenticity, crucially signed by what we shall call the 'performance of suffering'. Drawing on recent work in the sociology of institutions and emotions, we suggest that there are emerging conventions by which 'suffering' evokes 'authenticity' in the effort to reach a decision (or assess a risk) and that this 'authenticity' is replacing 'authority' as the means by which a decision (or risk assessment) is rhetorically warranted