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    Dilemmas of educational innovation : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Khan, Sajid
    Education is reported to be in crisis. The needs and demands of learners are continuously evolving due to rapid changes in the socio-cultural and technological landscape, whereas pedagogy is slow to change. Institutions have been admonished that they need to encourage creativity and innovation in educational practices. Yet prior research shows that realising innovative pedagogical solutions is not easy for teachers because it involves complex dilemmas. This research investigated the experiences of tertiary level pedagogical innovators to identify dilemmas they encountered during the innovation process and the strategies they used to resolve them. Interviews were conducted, either face-to-face or via Skype, with 30 research participants. The participants were all tertiary-level teachers who had led a team-based pedagogical innovation project and who had published about the innovation in peer-reviewed academic journals. In order to explore experiences of innovators, each interview was used to generate a cognitive map, and then the individual maps were combined into an aggregate map using Decision Explorer. The aggregate map was then explored and analysed to identify the dilemmas of innovators and the strategies used to resolve them. These findings were then reviewed, interpreted and discussed in the light of relevant literature. Overall, the findings of this study reaffirm that pedagogical innovators encounter a range of dilemmas while realizing their innovations and the effective management of these dilemmas enables them to progress toward their intended pedagogical goals. Effective management usually involved the “through—through” thinking advocated by Trompenaars. The main contributions of this research are: the application of cognitive mapping to identification of dilemmas; the identification of thirteen distinct dilemmas that can be managed by educational institutions and innovative educators; and articulation of alternative ways of reconciling dilemmas. The findings may assist educators with choosing an appropriate course of action when facing a dilemma during their innovations.
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    Opportunities for learning mathematics in a newly established Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2018) Logan, Maree Joanne
    There is currently an increasing movement towards the implementation of innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in primary schools across New Zealand, advocated by the Ministry of Education. This ILE implementation has been met with both support and opposition from the public and educators alike. Simultaneously, mathematics education in New Zealand is undergoing reform, with research informing changes from traditional transmission-style approaches to those that place students at the centre and promote mathematical understandings in communities of learning. Reforms in how students learn mathematics are well-aligned to the skill sets promoted as reflecting the competencies required of 21st century learners. However, the paucity of research into opportunities for students learning mathematics in ILEs warrants the need for further research. Using a qualitative methodology and single case study design, this research explored the opportunities afforded to Year 7 and Year 8 students when learning mathematics in a newly established ILE. Throughout Term 2, 2018, data collected from one-to-one teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student focus group discussions were coded, analysed, and triangulated. Four salient themes emerged from the data: the affordances of spatial arrangement, opportunities for student agency, students leading the learning, and the ILE as a mathematics community of learners. Teacher and student participants reported space within the ILE opened opportunities for individual and collaborative mathematics learning. The increased affordance of student voice and choice positioned students as the central drivers in both the leading and learning of mathematics. The open, fluid, and flexible spaces within the ILE presented increased opportunities for varied grouping structures. When combined with new co-planning and teaching arrangements, teachers and students considered that opportunities to learn involved greater options for mathematical challenge and multiple perspectives on mathematics. This research study presents mathematics learning within an ILE through the voices of the participants, particularly the student participants. It provides insights into the set up and spatial qualities afforded within the ILE, ways students described their mathematical learning opportunities, and comparisons they made to their previous single-space learning environments. Teacher and student participants in this research were very supportive of the ILE arrangement and the opportunities for learning mathematics that it afforded.
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    The effects of an innovation involving choice : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1979) Gooding, Terence John
    A principal's observations are used to illuminate the effects of innovation on a school 'community'. Parents were given the opportunity to choose which of two optional programmes they wished to place their children in for one year. Over half the pupils (165) were placed in an alternative programme which broadly aimed to combine the advantages of the small rural with those of the larger urban school. Each teacher was responsible for a range of age groups and required to confer with individual pupils for at least fifteen minutes per week while senior pupils tutored others in the class. Planned provision for catering for different cognitive styles, interests and attitudes succumbed to the stresses associated with major changes, class size, inadequacies in training, and professional, bureaucratic and social constraints. The ramifications flowing from the exercise of choice greatly influenced all that transpired and became particularly significant as the roles, relationships, and functions of people were placed under increasing pressure. Whether to introduce new ideas gradually or quickly is a problem facing the innovator. It was found though that many factors aside from rapid change had unpredictable bearings on intended outcomes. The attempt to cater for the individual while seeking to capitalise on contextual social factors indicated that principals and teachers in novel situations need initial support and on-going training. It is suggested that a single organisation cannot fully serve competing interests or different sets of values and that the association of the word 'community' with a mandatory organisation like a state school erodes the capacity of many to understand that consensus largely typifies a true community in terms of fundamental values. Opportunity for considered choice in both value and other terms is advocated. It is asserted that, since major innovations have profound effects on personal equilibriums, interpersonal and intergroup relationships, and upon the ethos in which a geographically identifiable group of people function, an innovator should be able to rely on stability and suitability of personnel so that planned gradual change towards consensual goals is possible. The value of a monolithic state system of education offering relatively little choice is questioned. To mount viable alternatives permitting real choice is shown to be a rather daunting challenge.
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    A critique of deschooling : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1977) Gerve, Juris Robert
    The focus of this study is "deschooling", a concept and a movement which has grown partly out of the crisis in education of the last twenty or so years. Unlike reformers in education, deschoolers demand a paradigmatic shift in the way we view the world. The thrust of their argument is that compulsory schooling, as we know it, is anti-educational and evil in its effects. Schools, even reformed ones, have a hidden curriculum which creates a mental set of dependence on institutions and a propensity for consumption of what the institutions produce. All manipulative institutions must eventually be abolished if mankind is not to squander its finite resources and if man is not to be reduced to a state of psychological impotence through becoming dependent on institutions from birth to death. The school is the key institution in all societies, irrespective of ideology, because it fashions our imagination through the hidden curriculum and because it controls entry to all other institutions. Schools create and perpetuate poverty and inequality, and determine our life chances on irrevelant grounds. Hence the school is the prime target. Without abolishing the schools, there can be no true revolution. The deschoolers propose the creation of convivial institutions. Learning webs where people would be in complete control of what and when and with whom they learn, would replace the compulsory, age-specific, and teacher manipulated structures we have today. The intention of this thesis is to outline the deschoolers' case and to explore the philosophical and theoretical assumptions underlying the concept of deschooling. The manner in which the deschoolers present their case for the abolition of schools, disguises a spectrum of issues which apparently unbeknown to them, philosophers of education have agonized over centuries before the concept of deschooling was coined. Deschoolers raise many arguments against aspects of schooling as if they are breaking new ground. What really is new, is that a number of key philosophical issues (in different terminology) have been marshalled and organised into a cohesive theory about man's nature, the nature and function of mass schooling, and their relationship with a new vision of society. What is also new in a sense, is the solution - the abolition of an institution men have long regarded as unquestionably essential to the survival and growth of present-day civilisation. Certainly anarchists have proposed the liquidation of all institutions, unlike deschoolers who do subscribe to convivial ones, but their respective motivations and views of social reality differ markedly. Beneath the iconoclastic imagery and emotive expressions, the rhetoric and the many seemingly extravagant claims, there is a vision of man and society that deserves to be seriously considered. There are a number of insights which, even if one ultimately rejects deschooling, can be illuminating and which in a sense do fundamentally alter how we view schools. A further aim then of this thesis is to disentangle the empirical issues from the philosophical, so that attention can properly be rivetted on the latter. As mentioned earlier, the issues are certainly not new - they range over the notions of freedom and authority in education, the relationship between teaching and learning, democracy and equality of opportunity, the concept of education, the nature of man, children's rights, the nature of institutions and of schools, the relationship between schools and society, and the nature and limitations of reform as opposed to revolution. The deschoolers' case cannot be justified or invalidated on philosophical grounds alone, for the simple reason that they draw upon a wide base of interwoven sociological, historical, psychological, political and economic arguments to present their conclusions. To dismiss or accept their case according to a strict philosophical analysis would be grossly unfair, for they do not pretend to be writing philosophical works. Consequently no attempt is made to explore all facets of the traditional philosophical concerns deschooling touches upon, but rather to indicate their presence and delineate the philosophical boundaries of the theory.