Loek Schoenmakers
BCO Onderwijsadvies
Change is daily business in the educational field. We must see educational change with all its human qualities, being designed by humans, for the benefit of humans. Educational change is people’s work to service our collective future, the youth. But does educational change, after years of reform, make us happy? Does it make our teachers and students happy? Unfortunately, at present, happiness as a result of educational change is hard to find. Teachers are working under great pressure to meet the set demands of government policies. Students fail to reach the test standards determined by the government, so we often blame teachers and school leaders. But should we? Can they be held responsible for the state of our educational system? I have been quite shocked to discover that, in spite of more than sixty years of school reform, when it comes to our approaches to educational change, politicians still want quick fixes and high, mostly academic, results; school inspection labels schools as weak or excellent based on biased criteria.
Isn’t this weird? Isn’t it sad? It is my grounded belief that the only ones who can produce educational change are the teachers and the students. They are in the midst of the daily commotion of education. In relations with each other, they produce change in many ways. We must put teachers and students at the centre of the change process and appreciate their daily efforts to construct change processes in their classrooms. Without teachers and students, there is surely no educational change!
So, how would educational change processes be different if we approached it as a relational process of co-construction, where teachers, students and school leaders are seen and heard, given voice and are made active producers of educational change, instead of solely passive consumers? This is the question I ask. It is, at first glance, a simple question; and yet it is profound in its capacity for sustainable change.
How would our educational life be if we were to do it another way? How would educational change processes be viewed if we counted all participants as equally important? How would these processes seem if we had the courage to put happiness and appreciation as the core values in the centre of our change attempts? We can establish more successful and sustainable educational change by using new kinds of mindsets, based on the ideas of social constructionism. The most important by-product we should produce within change processes is mutual trust. Trust must come from the process of being in relations in appreciative ways. Trust leads to feelings of happiness, confidence, and safety, and leads to the motivation to keep on going, together. Within a safe environment to speak, we will finally hear the many stories of those involved within the change process. The level of trust is, in my opinion, the most important parameter when we evaluate educational reform. Presently, the main parameter of politics is, sadly, academic results.
My slogan is: Happy teachers make happy schools. Happiness means, to be in relation with oneself and the world based on a collective feeling of trust. Happiness means having the confidence to contribute to the best of one’s ability. Schools are meant to make dreams of both teachers and students come true. Having relations and being in supportive relationships is one of the keys to happiness.
Happily different! Happily we can approach educational change in different ways! In this paper, I aim to give the reader an interesting and inspiring journey of educational change by using a relational approach. This social or relational thought comes close to this Buddhist saying: Everything touches everything. I desire that others, including teachers, will benefit from understanding the construct of (educational) change processes. They will, hopefully, discover possible reasons for their efficacy and strength within the processes of generative change. Our future educational change is a matter for all of us. Happily, we can do it differently!
(Presented in the 2015 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum: Understanding Happiness, 16-17 July 2015, Le Meridien Bangkok Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies and Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)