Educational change often fails due to its complexity: differing, even contradictory factors, agents, goals, norms or beliefs are involved. Too often practitioners, researchers and educators try to reduce or even ignore tensions, paradoxes and uncertainties and search for clear procedures and the one and only best solution in achieving the foreseen change. In this article, we discuss a valuable theoretical framework from organizational science, paradox theory, to understand why many change efforts fail and how to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of change. We propose that (1) educational change is characterized by complexity; (2) that change therefore is inherently associated with tensions and paradoxes; (3) that paradox theory can help to understand and improve complex educational change by 3a) providing a lens to recognize, label, and acknowledge paradoxes and their interactions and 3b) investigate how to handle these paradoxes to foster effective and sustainable educational change (i.e. to find a dynamic equilibrium). Based on these important lessons we propose a three-step model to investigate and improve educational change processes.
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In deze rede wil ik ingaan op de paradox van serious games. Over het spel en de knikkers. Het lijkt tegenstrijdig dat je met een spel naast plezier ook serieuze verandering of kennisoverdracht wilt bewerkstelligen. De paradox gaat echter nog een stap verder, want voor wie is het spel eigenlijk en van wie zijn dan de knikkers. In ons vakgebied is de partij die het spel ontwikkelt veelal een andere dan de partij die het spel speelt en zelfs binnen de partij van potentiële spelers wordt er gewezen naar medespelers: “het zou toch zo goed zijn voor de buurman"
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From the article The paradigm shift towards competency-based education in the Netherlands has a logical counterpart: the need for more flexibility in the curricula. After all, in competency-based education it is recognized that learning not only takes place in designated places (school, university), but may happen every time when the learner is confronted with a challenge. This observation leads to the necessity to incorporate the learning outcomes of formal and informal education in one curriculum. As a result, the educational process becomes more complex and must be better structured to control the individual learning outcomes. In this paper we discuss this paradox: how more flexibility in the program creates the need for more control in the process. We also discuss what kind of IT-tools are helpful in controlling flexibility in curricula for higher professional education.
MULTIFILE
