Nate's question takes us one next step. When an innovation (after-school
programs) links itself (horizontal boundary crossing) to a more established
institution (school), what determines whether it gets coopted and swallowed
up (after-school as just more schooling) or triggers a dialectical
synthesis .... what I characterized as the emergence of a new institutional
joint or hybrid system in which each element is changed by entering into
new relationships with the other(s)?
This way of looking at things would lead me to ask: How is schooling
changed by the after-school movement? what tug back does after-school exert
on schooling? or if not directly on schooling, then, say on our ideals of
how learning is best accomplished? or on our values about what development
should lead to?
If after-school programs just become another resource for the goals and
means of schooling as an activity, then there is no synthesis, there is no
real change, there is not even reform, much less revolution. There is only
extension of hegemony. Not "expansion" at all in Yrjo's sense.
We usually come back here to issues of scale. How can a small movement like
after-school tug on a gigantic institution like schooling? even on the
local scale of the community where they are less unevenly matched? I think
it is possible. Probably Mike has strategized about these issues. What
happens if teachers as well as students are involved in 5D? does it change
their notions of what "these students" are capable of? of what students
respond to? of what sorts of methods work? ... that much could lead to
reform (not revolution because I don't see it as likely that even then
there would be much change in notions about the goals of schooling).
Do we know other examples where small innovative institutions-in-the-making
have exerted disproportionate influence on much more established
institutions to which they were linked by the horizontal trajectories of
people and things?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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