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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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.
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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the experiences of safety and security management students, enrolled in an undergraduate course in the Netherlands, and present quantitative data from an online survey that aimed to explore the factors that have contributed to students’ satisfaction with, and engagement in, online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main findings suggest an interesting paradox of technology, which is worth further exploration in future research. Firstly, students with self perceived higher technological skill levels tend to reject online education more often as they see substantial shortcomings of classes in the way they are administered as compared to the vast available opportunities for real innovation. Secondly, as opposed to democratising education and allowing for custom-made, individualistic education schedules that help less-privileged students, online education can also lead to the displacement of education by income-generating activities altogether. Lastly, as much as technology allowed universities during the COVID-19 pandemic to continue with education, the transition to the environment, which is defined by highly interactive and engaging potential, may in fact be a net contributor to the feelings of social isolation, digital educational inequality and tension around commercialisation in higher education.
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Dit artikel is een vertaling van Steyaert, J. (2005). Web based higher education, the inclusion/exclusion paradox. Journal of technology in human services, 23(1/2), 67-78. Het beschrijft de relatie tussen e-learning en toegankelijkheid voor studenten met een functionele beperking.
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Increasingly, education is delivered through computers and the internet. This article highlights that while such development is beneficial for some students with functional impairments, it might be excluding others if insufficient attention is paid to accessibility. Both the electronic learning environment (Blackboard, WebCT and the like) as well as the content author need to design for accessibility.
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Ever since the introduction of an ‘IT productivity paradox’ by Robert Solow, the business value of information technology (IT) has been the topic of many debates by practitioners as well as by academics. In these discussions a distinction can be made between the variance approach, investigating what the relationship between IT investments and organisational performance is, and the process approach, investigating on how this relationship works. Following the process approach, this paper describes a useful framework for assessing the organisational impact of IT. Secondly the paper considers the relation between IT impact and organisational performance and reviews the IT investment evaluation methods. The paper concludes with a proposal for a multivariable value assessment sheet, based on insights derived from the balanced scorecard theory.
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This paper seeks to highlight underlying issues of the tourism system that have led to tourism extremes of too much or too little tourism. Five phases are recognized that reflect different ways of dealing with too much tourism over time, after which the impact of a sudden lack of tourism is investigated in light of future renewal processes. This discussion highlights the remarkable capacity of the tourism industry to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and crises, even when these cause anguish to individuals and within societies at large. The paper thus seeks to contextualize the current discussions regarding the transformation of tourism post COVID-19. It highlights the complexity of changing a tourism that multiple stakeholders depend on or have grown accustomed to. To come to a more balanced tourism, it is necessary to not only come up with alternative visions and strategies, but also to engage with the political economy nature of tourism development. A future research agenda should therefore also discuss facets of entangled power, social exclusion, inequalities and class differences to come to new reference points of what actually constitutes a more inclusive tourism success.
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This interview-based article about Hubert Hermans, founder of The Dialogical Self Theory (DST), was intended to determine the founder’s personal relationship to the construction and development of his theory and to provide a portrait of the engaged scientist and vulnerable researcher at work. DST lends itself to interdisciplinary research and practice, and is used in diverse fields and contexts (e.g. psychotherapy; bereavement scholarship; higher education). However, little has been written about the founder of the theory. I embarked on this project to illuminate the researcher and theorist as an individual who taps into personal material for practical and conceptual learning, and to honour Hermans’s contribution to the field of psychology, in the spirit of a Festschrift. Reinekke Lengelle (02 Apr 2021): Portrait of a scientist: in conversation with Hubert Hermans, founder of Dialogical Self Theory1, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, DOI: 10.1080/03069885.2021.1900779
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Communities of Practice (CoPs) are social learning systems that can be, to a certain extent, designed. Wenger (1998) proposes the following paradox; “ no community can fully design the learning of another, but at the same time, no community can fully design its own learning” (p:234). My interpretation of Wenger’s statement is that learning environments such as CoPs need to be facilitated in their learning processes, but not their specific design. Approaching CoPs this way allows for the design of interventions that facilitate learning processes within a CoP rather than regulate them. However, empirical studies on facilitating internal processes of CoPs are sparse – most work is anecdotal. This means that one needs to look to other fields for guidance in order to discover how to facilitate CoPs in their learning. This paper describes part of a larger research project that asks the question whether communities of practice can be instituted in higher professional educational organizations as an effective method to facilitate participant learning (professional development) and stimulate new knowledge creation in the service of the organization. Using a more pragmatic approach to cultivating CoPs (Ropes, 2007) opens the possibility to use different theoretical perspectives in order to find and ground interventions that can facilitate learning in CoPs and which are typically used in organizational development trajectories based on learning (de Caluwe & Vermaak, 2002). In this paper I look at how theories of human resource development, workplace learning and social constructivism conceptualize learning and what type of environments promote this. I then map out community of practice theory along these fields in order to come to a synthesized conceptual framework, which I will use to help understand what specific interventions can be used for designing CoPs. Finally I propose several interventions based on the work done here. The main question I consider here can be formulated as follows; ‘what insight can Human Resource Development theories, Workplace Learning theories and Social Constructivist learning theory give in order to design interventions that facilitate internal processes of communities of practice?’
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This historical review uncovers the institutionalisation and diffusion of the SWOTanalysis by assessing academic literature, seminar materials, proprietary research reports and interviews with experts from the virus theory perspective. We suggest that reviews of the SWOT analysis using the management fashion theory perspective are inadequate in explaining the diffusion and rejection of ideas born in practice. The virus theory perspective starts at an organizational level and reveals that predominantly practitioners were instrumental in spreading the ideas like participatory planning and distinguishing between short term and long range planning in order to resolve the planning paradox in provisional planning. Due to mutations in practice by consulting firms, the 2x2 matrix of SWOT became a cognitive artefact on its own. Theoretical roots of the original SWOT analysis stem from psychology and behavioural sciences.It is questionable if current strategy textbooks reflect these theoretical backgrounds.
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