Dilemmas in Educational Change

George G. Ambury is an associate professor of adult education at
Queen’s University.

It is the thesis of the editors that there is a new crisis of relevancy,
and that this crisis is at the heart of problems in educational change.
Solutions to this crisis are difficult to find, they argue, because the
surrounding issues take the form of dilemmas. In the opening chapter,
Daniels presents a useful taxonomy of “Dilemmas of Change.” He
suggests that at the centre of most dilemmatic situations in education
are contested conceptions. Other chapters present case studies of
various actors in the school system. The most novel of these is a report
on what children have to say about some of our change endeavors. Other
chapters deal with history or philosophy. Underleider concludes the book
with a useful summary of factors affecting change in education.
“Perhaps the most significant obstacle to change,” he writes, “is
the uncertainty surrounding the goals of education.”

The reported research is generally qualitative in orientation,
thorough, and well presented. The major weakness of this book is its
lack of cohesiveness. Little is made of the so-called crisis of
relevancy or of the Daniels taxonomy. It would have been helpful if the
authors had been provided with the opportunity to read Daniels’s
chapter before writing their own. Failing this, the editors might have
used his construct, and theirs, to provide a synthesis of the papers.
Despite these shortcomings, the book does make a useful contribution to
our understanding of how change may take place in educational settings.