NAVIGATING THE RISK SOCIETY – HOW THE EDUCATIONAL ENTERPRISE GETS
STUCK AND WHY IT NEEDS POETRY
Dr Joe Cullen, Arcola Research and The Tavistock Institute, London, UK
Abstract
The paper addresses the key question posed by the EDEN 2013 Conference: “How can we do our best to make
learning a thrilling experience for learners, including providing a sense of joy in the virtual classroom?” It explores
the proposition that the dominant organisational culture and modus operandi of the educational enterprise is
based on ‘stuckness’ and resistance to change. This creates barriers to ‘thrilling’ and ‘joyful’ learning – even in
the face of advances in the adoption of ICTs to support more innovative teaching and learning. The paper
reviews the factors that lead to stuckness in the organisational enterprise with reference to ‘life politics’ theory in
sociology and with regard to organisational psychodynamics. It presents an approach to dealing with stuckness,
based on an ‘alchemic model’ of innovation and discusses how this model will be applied in two research projects
recently funded under the European Commission’s ‘Lifelong Learning Programme’.
Background
The old certainties that linked learning to jobs no longer apply. Post-modern theories based on ‘life politics’
suggest that changes in post-industrial society have eroded the power of the old institutions centred on family and
community to support ‘resilience’ – including developing the social capital that comes from education. Beck’s
theory of ‘reflexive modernisation’ is based on the assumption that changes in post-industrial society have led to
the emergence of the ‘risk’ society. As the old institutions of industrial society are undermined by globalization,
each individual must learn to navigate society for themselves. The most vulnerable groups in this are the old and
the young. Young people have to navigate this ‘risk society’ while having to manage their own 'ambivalent
biographies' with little support from increasingly fragile social structures including their own family, and in nation
states that have restricted welfare provision for young people based either on their age or on their lack of
employment history. These restrictions have been exacerbated in recent years by the financial crisis and the
austerity measures that have been imposed on the economies of many member states.
Giddens argued that risk and uncertainty are the hallmarks of a ‘runaway world’. Individuals are forced to interpret
diverse, unpredictable experiences in order to establish their own coherent biographies. No longer regulated by
external structures and norms, the self has become a fluid and "reflexive biographical project”. On the one hand,
this allows unprecedented freedom and opportunities. On the other, self and identity become fragile,
individualisation becomes a lonely business "full of risks which need to be confronted and fought alone”. Young
people are now more than ever free to become architects of their own lives – but the culture of individualism, and
the pressures it generates in terms of having to achieve, conspire to promote a sense of failure, marginalisation
and, for some, mental ill-health (Rutter and Smith, 1995; EGRIS 2001). Against this background, it seems clear
that profound socio-cultural changes associated with the ‘Knowledge Society’ are promoting equally significant
changes in what we learn and how we learn it, and hence in the ways in which learning systems are responding
to these changes. If young people are increasingly called on to negotiate the minefields of ambivalent
biographies and biographical projects, they need to learn faster and more flexibly; they need to access and
evaluate information more efficiently and effectively, and they need to become better at making choices based on
the available evidence – not least because of the increasing role played by new technologies in shaping cultural
discourses.
Yet there is compelling evidence to suggest that the educational enterprise – at all levels, from kindergarten
through school, to university and into the world of adult education – remains stuck in an outmoded cultural and
organisational bind that renders it incapable of responding to these profound changes and challenges. As a
result, evidence is emerging that young people are increasingly confused about the learning choices they need to
make and how these choices will impact on their future life course. One indicator of this is the rate of early school
leaving (ESL). In 2003, the EU Education Council set a target to reduce early school leaving to a level of 10% by
2010. By 2010, the average rate of early school leaving across EU27 states stood at just under 15%, and the
1
benchmark target of 10% has now been re-scheduled to be met by 2020, as part of the key targets of EU2020. 1
Similarly drop-out rates in higher education have remained consistently high despite recent policy initiatives
aimed at making higher education more inclusive. 2 Other signs of an incipient stuckness in the educational
enterprise are reflected in high levels of stress and anxiety in the teaching professions; high rates of turnover in
schools and other learning enterprises and a failure to modernise organisational structures and processes. A
recent report on stress in the classroom, carried out by the BBC in the UK concluded that “About 80% of teachers
complain about stress at work and thousands of teachers leave the profession every year - predominantly due to
stress.” According to the UK Teacher Support Network, which runs a well-being helpline: ‘One in four of those
teachers who called between January and March this year (2011) described themselves as suffering from stress compared to one in five the year before. The helpline has thousands of calls and e-mails every year from
teachers struggling to protect their wellbeing at work’. Policy documents and studies show that leadership and
governance skills in schools remain poorly-developed (EC 2007 Communication ‘ Improving the Quality of
Teacher Education) and that progress in developing such skills has been’ slow and haphazard ‘ (EC Impact
Assessment, 2007). A study of head teachers (Balanskat and Gerhard, 2007) concluded that ‘Leadership issues
are a major concern in several countries’. A UK OFSTED report in 2001 concluded that school governors are
‘amateurs’ and that differences in skills, expertise and power between senior professionals and governors are a
major obstacle to modernising the school. 3
Stuckness
Watzlawic (1974) defines stuckness as ‘a person, a family, or a wider social system enmeshed in a problem in
persistent and repetitive ways, despite desire and effort to alter the situation’. People, families, organisations,
societies get stuck for a number of reasons and in a number of different ways, and so it is possible to
coneptualise ‘stuckness’ from a number of levels. These range from a psychological level, for instance looking at
how individuals find it difficult to change their behavior because of things like low self-esteem, to the broadest
societal level. As an example of the broader level, in a recent lecture to launch the UK Royal Society’s ‘Changing
Minds’ programme, the RSA’s Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor, suggested that the current crisis of western
society reflects a deep cultural inertia, and an inability to move beyond comfortable, and outdated, notions of how
humans think and learn. 4
Schools get stuck because of a number of complex factors: the drive towards greater devolution of control and
more say for teachers, parents and students in school affairs; the increasing pressure on head teachers,
governors and school managers to deliver ‘quality’, ‘choice’ and ‘value for money’; the demand for new teaching
and learning methods, using the potential of new technologies like social networking. In the face of these
pressures ‘stuckness’ in schools can be seen as a vicious circle that starts with the stresses and anxieties that
teachers have to deal with in their work practice; leads to pressures for teachers to change the way they teach;
then subsequently reflects anxieties created by resisting change and finally includes the stresses and anxieties
created by NOT changing in the face of these pressures.
Yet it is clear that ‘stuckness’ is that it is not simply an ‘individual’ (teacher) problem. It is an organisational
problem. As organisational behaviour theorists have argued for many years, organisations typically act as
‘defences against anxiety’. Although schools, like most organisations, appear to function logically and rationally,
developing and applying explicit tasks; systems of organisation; rules and mechanisms to resolve conflict, there is
plenty of evidence that, under the surface, schools, like most organisations, also operate in irrational ways. This
‘underground’ behaviour is often driven by ‘unconscious’ processes and typically surfaces as dysfunctionality and
resistance to change. Post-secondary education shows similar patterns. As noted above, the evidence of
increasing student drop-out rates can be set against a corresponding failure by HEI’s to provide relevant and
effective guidance and counselling services. Moreover, this is taking place against a bigger backdrop of a higher
education culture and organisational structure that is failing to recognise, let alone keep pace, with ‘risk society’
and the changed perceptions, aspirations and needs of students. Although the shift from an industrial to a
knowledge society has been clearly recognised in policy circles, ‘new’ lifelong learning and e-learning models are
source; Eurostat, 2010
See “Institutional diversity in European Higher Education”, EUA 2009; “A social dimension in Higher Education”, ESU
(former ESIB) 2006; “Participation in Higher Education”, Osborne 2006
1
2
3
OFSTED (2001), Making it Better; Improving School Governance
4
RSA Changing Minds: preparing for an era of neurological reflexivity 30th June 2008
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primarily updated versions of the old ‘human capital’ paradigm ( Becker, 1975). In higher education, research
points to the emergence of a ‘new pedagogy’ based on ideas of ‘performativity’ and ‘customer-orientation’ (Usher,
2001). Essentially, the influence of the human capital model in shaping learning agendas, systems and services
has led to the domination of a highly individuated vision of learning, focused firmly on employability and
‘reproduction’ rather than on ‘transformative learning’, and based on a singularly ‘linear’ notion of learning as
seamless transition pathways from school to higher education to work to professional development. As a result,
universities find themselves in a similar pattern of stuckness as schools.
Dealing with stuckness: the IGUANA and STAY IN projects
Against this background, this paper presents an experimental approach to dealing with stuckness in the
educational enterprise with reference to two projects recently funded under the European Commission’s ‘Lifelong
Learning Programme’. The first project – IGUANA - aims to enhance understandings of the ‘risk society’ and
‘organisational stuckness’ in the context of education and training and to apply these understandings to work with
schools in identifying and overcoming the factors that inhibit schools from becoming more effective and efficient
institutions capable of operating in the modern education system and in the broader social and economic
environment outside. This means creating the conditions in schools that can nurture effective leadership but
leadership that involves collaborative working between the different stakeholders. IGUANA therefore supports
‘training for good governance’ in schools by developing a 'learning community'. This will integrate and build on
techniques and tools developed by the eight partners from six different EU countries working in the project,
including programmes currently being provided in UK schools based on developing ‘emotional intelligence’ for
staff and students. The IGUANA programme will be supported by ‘Web 2.0’ tools, such as social media, to
promote co-working and sensemaking. It will also develop and test ‘blended learning’ approaches combining ICTs
with mixed media methods, including poetry and drama. The second project – STAY IN - focuses on reducing
student drop out in higher education institutions by exploring ways of developing innovative guidance and
counselling services including ‘e-counselling’. STAY-IN moves beyond the narrow ‘reactive’ paradigm that
characterises current student guidance and counselling services to explore ways of delivering guidance as a
holistic and on-going process. Like IGUANA, it references the wider ‘risk issues’ that are contributing to anxiety
and uncertainty for young people and which are not currently addressed in HEI guidance services.
The approach developed in IGUANA and STAY IN to work with ‘stuckness’ in the educational enterprise draws on
the ‘systems psychodynamic’ approach to understanding organisations. This has long argued that organisations
typically act as ‘defences against anxiety’ by operating in ‘groupish’ mode (Bion, 1961; Miller ,1996). On the one
hand, the ‘conscious’ organisational mode involves the work group and its leadership in defining explicit tasks;
systems of organisation; rational rules; conflict mechanisms; management of change. However, people also bring
into the work group unconscious dynamics that are rooted in their childhood experience - particularly the loss of
boundaries children experience in the transition from childhood to adulthood. In this ‘unconscious mode’, people
and their organisations will create and apply strategies to reduce anxieties and to resist change. This is because
the organisation, and the work group, replaces the boundaries lost in childhood. It provides an environment that
protects them from anxieties and provides a definition of status – the location of the ‘me’ in relation to the ‘not
me’. Bion suggested that the work group operates in unconscious mode in three main ways to develop and
implement strategies to deal with issues around leadership and authority. When faced with a change in
organisational status – and therefore faced with a threat to the organisation’s capacity to defend its members
against anxiety – the work group will adopt either a ‘fight/flight’ strategy (resisting or retreating from change, for
example by searching for a scapegoat to blame); a dependency strategy (for example searching for an
‘omnipotent leader) or a ‘splitting and pairing’ strategy (for example fragmenting into sub-groups in the hope that
new alliances will produce a new leader).
A powerful defensive strategy to deal with anxiety is ‘mirroring’ behaviour – resisting change by adopting the
dysfunctional behaviours of clients. Cardona (1999 ) describes how teams ‘work as a sponge’ absorbing and
soaking up the central dynamics which operate within their client group, often without realising that this is
happening. In one of Cardona’s case studies – Cherry House - front line staff working in a hostel for chronically
mentally ill people coming in off the street were observed to only come alive when they were faced with a crisis
precipitated by the needs of clients. In intervening periods, they tended to sit passively, waiting for the next crisis
to happen, unable to reflect on why they were doing their work; what effect their work was having in supporting
lifestyle change for clients, and how they could do it better. This behaviour mirrored the behaviour of their clients.
When an organisational innovation was introduced into the workplace – in this case a shift from ‘reactive’ to
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‘rehabilitative’ care – the staff unconsciously sabotaged the intended change. The new approach in this case
focused on implementing a strategy to get clients to take more control over their lives by organising their meals
and doing the cooking. In reality, the staff themselves did all the work, ensuring that the old staff-client
relationship, one based on dependency, was preserved.
It is possible to identify within the educational enterprise similar types of organisational defensive strategies. One
example is the use of ICTs for teaching and learning. A recent ‘Futurelab’ report highlights a ‘digital divide’
between teachers and student skill levels which may affect how students are able to access ICT in lessons.
Many teachers want to maintain control over the curriculum and what students are learning and the teachers’
perspective on what and how to learn often clashes with those of their students. As a result, mobile devices and
social media applications are banned in many schools across many EU states. 5 A recent survey in the US
involving 300,000 students, 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, 2000 librarians and 3500 administrators from over
6500 private and public schools showed that whilst 70% of parents are likely to buy a mobile device for their child
to use at school, 65% of school administrators said they would not accept the use of mobile devices by students
in their schools. 6 This research suggests a similar pattern of ‘unconscious sabotage’ of change to that illustrated
in the Cherry house example cited above. In a more extreme example, Devine-Eller (2004) observes that ‘some
schools, like some prisons, have begun using radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to track students’
movements. The chips are currently contained in plastic ID cards students wear around their necks’. Devine-Eller
also illustrates some of the ways in which new technologies in the school are now being used to reinforce the
devices schools have to exert control over students. These vary from overt measures of bio-control, such as the
increasing use of Ritalin ostensibly to help students with ADD/ADHD, to more covert measures such as the use of
timetabling for student surveillance and the regulation of student behaviour. This trend, like the example of Cherry
House, could be interpreted as another strategy aimed at maintaining the dependency culture schools have long
imposed on their students.
In this context, a key conceptual component deployed in the IGUANA and STAY IN approach is the ‘holding
environment’ (Winnicott, 1965). Winnicott argued that a child’s journey to self-awareness – the transition
between the child being entirely dependent on its parents to becoming an autonomous self – is shaped by the
space in which the child makes the separation between dependency and autonomy. In this space, the child
makes use of ‘transitional objects’ – things that are ‘not-me and yet not not-me either’ – for example a favourite
teddy bear or doll - which the child uses in times of stress to make this separation less traumatic. In
organisational theory, the holding environment is migrated to the group context, becoming a space that is
receptive to the birth of new ideas and changes that will eventually stimulate growth (Kaplan, 1978). However, in
most organisations, the holding environment is deployed not as a space for the cultivation of self-awareness but
as a device for the containment of anxiety and for the repression of change. Organisational theory has drawn on
the work of Melanie Klein (1959) in this regard, arguing that organisations deploy two defensive positions or
stances which people use that interfere with the expression of their inner experience. The first one – the
defensive position – is driven by fear of total indifference. Members of the work group are afraid of opening up
their inner experience to support change for fear that no-one in the organization will respond. The second one –
the paranoid position – is driven by fear of retaliation. It is difficult to risk expressing vulnerable inner experiences
(i.e., to tell the truth in a controversial situation) when faced with the possibility of being attacked or punished.
Within the educational world this ‘defensive holding environment’ is illustrated in Figure 1.
As Figure 1 shows, the educational enterprise can be seen as a system which, on the one hand, has to respond
to and manage dynamics emanating from the ‘turbulent external environment’ (Miller, op. cit.) outside. These
dynamics include changes in socio-cultural structures and relations associated with the emergence of the ‘risk
society’; policy changes (like the targets on early school leaving set by EU2020) and economic pressures (for
example cuts on educational and welfare resources associated with austerity measures imposed by central
government). These create organisational anxieties that become internalised within the organisational life of the
enterprise. At the same time psychodynamic processes played out within work groups operating within the
enterprise create an additional burden of anxiety and tension that is in turn internalised. This combination of
external-internal anxiety surfaces, as noted above in defensive strategies like mirroring behaviour and contributes
to a self-perpetuating cycle of stuckness within the organisation.
5
6
4
BECTA (2009) Digital participation, digital literacy, and school subjects, Futurelab
Watters, A (2011) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_do_kids_say_is_the_biggest_obstacle_to_techno.php
Turbulent External
Environment
Risk Society
Policy Changes
Educational Enterprise
Bullying T
Stress
ICTs
Exams
Expectations
Funding Cuts
Figure 1: The Defensive Holding Environment in the educational enterprise
Coming Unstuck: the ‘alchemic’ model
Based on this analysis of stuckness, the main objective of the IGUANA and STAY IN projects is to turn this
‘defensive holding environment’ from an apparatus that constrains change into one that actively supports change.
In IGUANA, the strategy is to develop a pedagogic approach based on an ‘alchemic model’ of collaborative
learning. This alchemic method aims to create an environment in which the hidden, latent and illegitimate talents,
creativity and entrepreneurial potential of members of an organisation can be surfaced, nurtured, validated and
productively applied. The model and approach draws on a range of theory and practice. It combines two
particular pedagogic methodologies: the ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978) and ‘cognitive social
learning’ (Bandura, 1977). The collaborative dimension of the approach also draws on techniques and practices
developed by Paulo Freire (1972) who emphasised the importance of critical reflection and collaborative dialogue
in supporting learning and behaviour change, and the use of ‘action learning’ to enable people to ‘step into each
other’s shoes’ so that together they can work to produce ‘sensemaking’.
The alchemic learning space aims to develop a holding environment within the school that reflects Kaplan’s
(1978) definition of the positive organisational holding environment - a safe and nurturing space to enable
repressed and restricted emotional and creative faculties to grow. Kaplan argued that the group or system
attempting to provide a ‘holding environment’ is symbolically faced with the same dilemma as that of a new
mother. The group, or system, in order to be receptive to the birth of new ideas and changes that will eventually
stimulate growth, has to address the problem that individuals in groups and systems will not reveal their inner
experiences and covert agendas unless the environment feels like a place safe enough to risk new behavior. To
create a holding environment in the work place, group and organizational life must meet the conditions of safety
and security.
In schools, safety and security appears highly prioritised in terms of organisational protocols like health and safety
measures; child protection procedures and the physical arrangement of spaces. However, beneath the surface,
unconscious processes conspire to create a climate of repression and resistance to opening up. At the individual
level, students are pressurised to perform to academic benchmarks that, for many of them are unattainable.
These are compounded by the emotional load students have to bear through things like conformance to peer
pressure, coping with bullying, being and staying popular and navigating their way through the minefields of the
‘risk society’. In turn, teachers have to cope with similar pressures of meeting targets imposed by government
standards bodies; adjusting their professional practice to meet changes in the curriculum; walking the tightrope of
work-life balance and meeting the duty of care they have to students whilst at the same time having to deal with
the sometimes challenging behaviour of those in their charge. In schools, the fetishisation of performance and the
pressure to achieve impossible perfectibility typically imposes a recurrent vicious circle of negative reinforcement,
depicted schematically in Figure 2.
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If I get it
right
everything
will be OK
So I must
try harder
to get it
right
Because
I'm not
good
enough
Everything
is not OK
It must be
my fault
Figure 2: The cycle of negative reinforcement
As Figure 2 suggests, members of the educational enterprise – students, teachers, managers, school governors
– are set both conscious and unconscious goals that focus on getting it right. If they get it right, everything will be
OK. Yet most schools do not run like clockwork, and the typical mode of engagement in the typical school is one
of crisis management. Since it is evident on a daily basis that everything is not OK, the members of the
educational enterprise internalise failure as guilt and anxiety – everything is not OK, so it must be my fault – and
then attribute failure to meet impossible goals as evidence that they are ‘not good enough’. The solution to not
being good enough is to try harder to get it right, because getting it right means that everything will be OK, and so
it goes on through the cycle of stuckness.
At the organisational level, negative reinforcement becomes embedded through unconscious psychodynamics
that operate below the surface of the formal structures and procedures the educational enterprise deploys to
define its explicit tasks; systems of organisation; rational rules; conflict mechanisms and management of change.
As noted above, the members of the educational enterprise will often deploy defensive strategies against anxiety,
with members adopting a dependency position by putting their faith in an omnipotent leader (the ‘super-headteacher’) to solve their not-good-enoughness; a ‘fight-flight’ position by demonstrating aggression or withdrawal,
or a ‘splitting’ position, pairing off into splinter groups, based on divisions like departmental allegiance, in the hope
of producing an alternative leader who can rectify their not-good-enoughness (Bion, 1961). They may adopt a
‘mirroring’ position that replicates the perceived obstructive behaviours of their students (Cardona, 1999), a ‘oneness’ position, in which group members come together as one, for the purpose of joining in a powerful union with
an omnipotent force (Turquet, 1974), or a ‘me-ness’ position, in which the group behaves as if it is there to be
saved from its irrational feelings by being a non-group (Lawrence, Bain, Gould, 1996). At the same time, the
formal structures and processes set up to implement the organisation’s explicit tasks; systems; rational rules;
conflict mechanisms and management of change themselves act as powerful mechanisms for negative
reinforcement, and as theatres in which to play out the psycho-dramas of dependency, fight-flight and splitting.
As noted above, studies suggest that the governance structures in schools are characterised by dysfunctional
power relations; poorly-developed leadership and governance skills and innovation atrophy (European
Commission, 2007; Balanskat and Gerhard, 2007; OFSTED, 2000).
In order to address these issues, the alchemic model being developed in IGUANA aims at creating a positive
holding environment in which these anxieties, defensive positions and cycles of negative reinforcement can be
surfaced, explored and worked with. IGUANA explicitly targets the school governance body as the apparatus
within which the positive holding environment can be developed because this institution is the key formal change
mechanism within the school, and it is also the space in which all stakeholders in the educational enterprise are
represented. By working with this core body, and its members, the intention is to strengthen the innovation
capacity of the school, through a blended learning programme combining three components: emotional
intelligence building; leadership competences and evaluation competences. In essence, the objective is to turn
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the dysfunctionality of the educational enterprise on its head by tapping the energy that organisations and their
members put into resisting change, and then re-applying that energy to support innovation. This is what is meant
by an ‘alchemic model’. The alchemic approach also aims to support knowledge and competency transfer from
the governance body through to the wider community of the school through ‘percolation’ of the learning gained in
the holding environment by ‘championing’, mentoring and peer-interaction. The model will be developed and
validated in five participating IGUANA schools in five EU states and in addition through the European School
Heads Association. The ‘champions’ consist of a small group of staff in each participating school. Their task,
supported by members of the participating governor representatives, is to develop a ‘community of practice’ in
each school and, through championing the programme, and mentoring their colleagues, engage their fellowteachers in exploring the use of ‘emotional well-being’ module of the programme to support their professional
development and improve their teaching practice. The idea is thus to ‘snowball’ the emotional well-being
component to enlarge the community of practice in each school. The ‘indirect’ target group are students in the
pilot schools. We anticipate allocating timetable space for teacher ‘champions’ in each school to run exploratory
workshops using an adapted version of the emotional well-being module with small classes of pupils.
The emotional intelligence component of the learning programme aims to support participating members in
exploring the dynamics that create anxieties and defensive positions. It focuses in particular in getting
participants to identify key behavioural and socio-cultural drivers that govern how their self-image and self-esteem
is shaped, how they are linked to performance anxieties and feelings of not being good enough, and how, in turn,
they reinforce cycles of guilt, helplessness and stuckness. The pedagogic approach used in developing and
implementing this component combines two methodologies: the ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978)
which provides for ‘scaffolding’ of the learning experience, allowing the target groups to learn within their
respective personal capacities and resources, and in collaboration with mentors, and ‘cognitive social learning’
(Bandura,1977), which emphasises peer interaction and the importance of people learning from one another, via
observation, imitation, and modelling. These two methods are aimed at addressing the cycle of negative
reinforcement depicted above in Figure 2 by replacing unattainable learning goals with realistic goals that evolve
as the emotional intelligence capacity of the group evolves.
The leadership component of the learning programme is based on the ‘group relations’ approach developed by
the Tavistock Institute (Bion, 1961; Miller, 1993). It focuses on surfacing and working with the unconscious
dynamics that shape how work groups operate within the educational enterprise, using action learning sets
(Pedler, 1997). Action Learning is an approach to the development of people which takes the task as the vehicle
for learning. It is based on the premise that there is no learning without action and no sober and deliberate action
without learning. In the Action Learning Sets, members of the educational enterprise reflect on assumptions and
beliefs that shape practice. Critical reflection can be powerful because attention is directed to the root of the
problem and transforms perspectives. People recognise that their perceptions may be flawed because they are
filtered through views, beliefs, attitudes and feelings inherited from one’s family, school, professional training and
society. Critical thinking brings real issues to the fore and subjects them to scrutiny – allowing participants to call
into question the rationale underlying their actions and to examine problems from multiple perspectives. Reformulation of the presenting problem will occur when people uncover misperceptions, norms and expectations
that are often hidden. The aims of these action learning sets are to study the ways in which authority is vested in
leaders by others, to study the factors involved as they happen, to study the covert processes that operate in and
among groups, and to study the problems encountered in the exercise of authority. There is no attempt to
prescribe specifically what anyone shall learn. Participants are provided with experience-based group
opportunities to study their own behavior as it happens.
The evaluation component of the learning programme is seen as critical to positive learning reinforcement. The
overall aim of embedding an evaluation dimension into the design of the learning programme is to generate
iterative feedback loops to support ‘double loop learning’ within the intervention and within the school enterprise
as a whole (Argyris & Schön, 1996). Individual and group self-evaluation enables members of the learning group
to assess their progress in relation to the new goals set by the programme. The evaluation methodology is thus
based on a ‘theory of change’ approach (Pawson and Tilley, 1997; Weiss, 1995; Sullivan and Stewart, 2006).
Theory of change seeks to identify both the explicit and implicit paradigms of change that underlie interventions. It
can be defined as a systematic and cumulative study of the links between the activities, outcomes and context of
an intervention. It involves the specification of an explicit theory of how and why an intervention might cause or
have caused an effect. An initial task for the members of the learning group will therefore be to identify and map
the presenting problem (stuckness) and the theory of action that they think will support them in coming unstuck.
In turn, specifying the theory of change enables the subsequent development of a logical framework for the
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learning programme that will specify; the actions required to operationalize this theory (inputs); the expected
outputs of the actions; the expected outcomes associated with the use of these outputs; the longer term impacts;
how the outcomes and impacts will be measured (Figure 3)
Context
The presenting
problem stuckness
Context
indicators
Input
What is
invested skills, people,
activities
Resource /
input
indicators
Output
Outcomes
What has
been
produced
Short and
medium term
results
Output
indicator
s
Outcome /
result
indicators
Impact
Long- term
outcomes
Impact
indicators
‘Distance travelled’ indicators
Figure 3: The theory of change
The theory of change ‘journey’ can be demarcated at a range of points along its trajectory - from ‘context’,
through ‘inputs’ through to ‘outputs’, then ‘outcomes’ and finally ‘impacts’. Theory of change can be used as a
device to assess how far the educational enterprise has progressed in relation to its ultimate goal of ‘coming
unstuck’, i.e. the ‘distance travelled’. It can also be used at the individual level to enable a member of the
participating learning group to assess their progress in relation to their individual goals, set against their personal
‘zone of proximal development’. In this context, distance travelled can be linked to the measurement of ‘soft
outcomes’ that are integral to the emotional intelligence component of the learning programme, for example the
measurement of sense of well-being and of self-esteem.
ICTS and Poetry
A feature of the IGANA approach is its use of multimedia as devices for modelling, role playing and learning. One
of these devices involves using poetry to create a ‘Socratic Dialogue’ between participants involved in the
learning process. Poetry has a number of inherent advantages in working with stuckness. It is a highly ‘narrative’
medium, providing a vehicle to tell stories that people can identify with. At the same time, poetry enables the
communication of complex conceptual and philosophical ideas and structures within these narratives, through the
use of devices such as metaphor and analogy. In addition, despite appearances to the contrary, poetry can be
engaging and collaborative. Many studies show that poetry is a powerful vehicle for the retention and
transmission of myth and identity. People from all walks of life and across all age boundaries engage in it,
although people’s engagement with poetry tends to decline as they get older. In this context, the embedding of
poetry within a Socratic Dialogue is unusual. Although it has been recognised for some time that the Socratic
method, with its repetitive use of ‘questioning’ as a way of supporting critical thinking, is a very effective tool for
teaching 7 there are few examples of the use of the poetic form in the context of developing organisational
learning.
7
see Paul, R, D Martin and K Adamson (1989) Critical Thinking Handbook: High School, A Guide for Redesigning Instruction,
Foundation for Critical Thinking
8
Prelude
Families and
Tribes
Acts of
Rebellion
SOCRATIC
DIALOGUE
Politics and
Power
Madness and
the Gods
Love and
Desire
Figure 4: Coming Unstuck – the Socratic dialogue
As Figure 4 shows, the Socratic Dialogue is built around five broad themes (and sets of questions) that have
been selected as key dynamics in the processes that lead to stuckness:

Families and Tribes – the role of factors like class and community

Madness and the Gods – the role of factors like psyche and religion

Love and Desire – the role of things like relationships

Politics and Power – how societal and political factors contribute to stuckness

Acts of Rebellion and Reconciliation – the final theme works with strategies people can use to get
themselves out of a pattern of stuckness. This theme corresponds to the ‘closure’ phase in classical
Socratic dialogues.
The dialogue is preceded by a ‘Prelude’ which is a ‘scene-setting’ device to explain how the process operates
and to get participants involved to familiarize themselves with the learning space. Each element of the dialogue is
implemented through the following dialogue modes: Questions – the key questions that will be explored through
the dialogue; Poetry – illustration of each of the themes and questions by relevant poems; Audio – relevant
quotations to illustrate the themes and questions; sound installations; Visuals – an iconic visual image (e.g. a
painting) to illustrate the themes and questions.
Complementing the use of this poetic Socratic Dialogue is the use of information and communication
technologies (ICTs). The approach uses multimedia (sound and video technologies; collaborative learning
technologies and social networking tools) to enable participants involved in the learning process to further explore
the ideas that have surfaced in their face to face and group work, to critically reflect on these ideas and to work
together within an on-line environment to improve their working environment and their work-life balance. The ICT
angle reflects an additional dimension of the approach, one that goes beyond the practical use of new
technologies as complementary tools to support learning. The ICT dimension is intended to address the
challenges for learning posed by the ‘risk society’ perspective, outlined above in this paper.
The use of multimedia and poetry in a blended learning environment aims to maximize the collaborative learning
dimension of the alchemic approach by providing an additional space to support the operation of the action
learning sets in the programme and, more broadly, by applying social media tools, including an on-line forum, to
support the positive holding environment being developed in the participating schools.
9
In the case of the STAY IN project, the aim is to support knowledge transfer from the testing of the alchemic
model in IGUANA to explore ways of improving the guidance and counselling services that are currently available
for students who experience problems that may lead to their dropping out of study. As noted above, the higher
education sector displays many of the organisational dysfunctionalities that can be observed in the school. The
increasing emphasis on ‘performativity’ in goal-setting; the fragmentation of work groups into discipline-based
silos; the labelling of mental health issues as signs of failure – are all examples of the kinds of negative
reinforcement that underpins organisational stuckness and resistance to change. One of the challenges for
IGUANA is to explore the extent to which the alchemic approach can be transferred into other educational
sectors, and in particular to higher education.
Conclusions
The paper has argued that innovation in the educational enterprise is constrained by an incipient stuckness that
makes the enterprise resistant to change. Such resistance reflects deep-rooted organisational features through
which the enterprise and its members adopt defences against anxieties that are driven both by internal
psychodynamic tensions and by external pressures from outside. A key external pressure has been the effects of
profound changes in social structures and relations, associated with the emergence of a ‘risk society’. The
educational enterprise has struggled to provide its clients with the new competences they need to navigate this
new environment. In order to address stuckness, the paper has presented a new learning approach – the
‘alchemic model’ - that aims to strengthen the capacity of the educational enterprise to surface the hidden
dynamics that constrain its openness to new thinking and new ways of working, and to explore ways in which it
can convert resistance into creativity and innovation. The model entails developing a ‘positive holding
environment’ within the educational enterprise, through implementing a learning programme, aimed primarily at
members of the governance institutions of the enterprise, which combines three elements: an emotional
intelligence component; a leadership component and an evaluation component. The approach will be developed
and tested in a recently launched project – IGUANA – funded under the European Commission ‘Lifelong Learning
Programme’ and focusing on stuckness in schools, and the results will be transferred to a second project – STAY
IN – funded under the same programme and focusing on supporting students at risk of dropping out from higher
education institutions. The results of these two research projects will be publicised in future reports.
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