Charles R. Green
Ruthanne Kurth-Schai
January 2002

The future of public education in a democracy is everyone's concern. From everyday conversations to campaign rhetoric to policy community discourse, general and specific educational critiques and proposals abound. Reform agendas on local, state, and national levels attest to the depth of concern afforded to aspirations for an informed, active and principled citizenry. Calls for restructuring to support broader participation in more equitable, effective, and compassionate systems of public education are frequent and compelling.

There have been impressive achievements. There is greater inclusion of, and more substantive support for historically under-served populations in public school settings. Improved processes upholding the rights of individual students to be protected from varied forms of neglect or abuse are in place. Initiatives promoting productive decentralization and innovation in curricular and instructional design have resulted in enhanced student performance.

Yet in spite of shared goals and often-valiant efforts, seemingly intractable problems and heated controversies persist. Progressive reform initiatives have yet to accomplish a profound and integrative restructuring of public education.

During this time of intensive public scrutiny, the crisis in public education is defined in relation to the perceived necessity of protecting and promoting narrow definitions of academic excellence in order to ensure market proficiency in a consumer-driven global economy. Approaches to systemic educational and political reform are largely formulated, fueled, and financed by government and corporate interests. Too often progressive reform efforts result in disillusionment, disengagement from social institutions and abandonment of further attempts at systemic change. Too often, deeply committed supporters of more deeply democratic public education find no other option than to settle for small victories or alienated retreat.

We contend that movement toward substantive restructuring of public schooling is impeded by over-reliance on change strategies that are highly individualistic, intensely oppositional, and narrowly rational. Passive acceptance of public educational systems emphasizing individual merit, competition, and conformity to narrow conceptions of 'excellence' and 'accountability' not only constrain learning broadly, but also hinder the development of civic commitment and participation. Tendencies toward oppositional politics emphasizing critique, persuasion, special interest advocacy, closure and control limit opportunities for sustained deliberation and creative compromise. Tendencies toward narrow rationality and risk avoidance prevent full integration of emotion, aesthetics, intuition, and spirit. Visions of school reform thereby loose their capacity to inspire and sustain principled action.

Supporting public education within a context of democratic values, institutions and practices presents challenges that require us to move well beyond what is taken as education, public policy, and politics "as usual". As one response, we have begun to experiment with carefully structured yet open-ended approaches to research, planning, implementation, and evaluation. To deepen our experience and understanding of collaborative policy inquiry and design, and to provide varied points of entry and engagement for participants, we propose utilization of what we will refer to as exploratory democratic practices.

As a social practice each technique provides opportunities to develop and apply knowledge in a collaborative, systematic and purposive manner. Rather than being structured to solve specific problems or to generate particular products, they are designed to provide preparation in the form of broadly transferable skills and dispositions. Drawing from the rich literature on democratic process and pedagogy (e.g., Arnstine, 1995; Dewey, 1916; Parker, 1996; Sehr, 1997, Soder, 1996), we include practices that have been shown to:

* expand possibilities for thought and action beyond those initially brought by individuals,
* bring new elements, relationships, and possibilities into play by increasing the number and variety of meaningful connections among participants, and
* enhance capacities for continued engagement in civic learning and public life that narrow the gap between democratic aspirations and 'real-world' accomplishments.

Above all, these practices are included to support efforts not only to experience, but also to evolve vibrant democratic processes within specific community contexts. They are intended to help shape imaginative but pragmatic contributions to public education reform initiatives grappling with the challenges and complexities of enacting democratic visions in large, resource-constrained, bureaucratic and authoritarian systems.

Conversational Reading

Reading, like all forms of inquiry, is fundamentally a social act. It carries a strong potential not only to affect the course of our personal lives but also to enhance the quality of our collective experience in public settings. To begin collaborative consideration of a specific reform prospect, we propose an exploratory approach to reading---a conversational approach that entails reading in a manner that is resonant, recursive, and responsible.

During the early stages of considering a particular reform challenge, we encourage participants to read relevant background materials (theory, research, popular press, anecdotal accounts) resonantly. This involves attuning increasingly skilled internal attention to particular possibilities and relationships. The aim is to recognize aspects of ones personal knowledge/values/feelings/experience most strongly engaged by the text, and then to reflect on implications for the reform task at hand. To read for resonance also involves attending to the development of interpersonal conversational skills needed to productively express issues of personal significance while engaging and extending those presented by others.

To read recursively entails reconsidering the same piece of writing at different times, at different stages of inquiry and deliberation. Readers are encouraged to continually weave backwards and forwards through the experiences they bring to the specific reform project, to revisit asumptions at various points, and refresh the expectations raised by a particular text as the process evolves. Participants are encouraged to converse with others in ways that do not foreclose revisiting ideas as the context changes.

Perhaps most important to our conception of a conversational approach to reading is the challenge to read responsibly. In order to explore reform prospects democratically, participants cannot read only for themselves-to advance their own understandings, competencies, or support their initial advocacy positions. In reading responsibly, participants are encouraged to be mindful of two questions:

* "What have I come to understand that has the greatest potential to advance our project and support the well-being and continued participation of my colleagues?"
* "What needs to be voiced to sustain respectful and compassionate consideration of the implications of our work for all of those who will be affected?"

Cultural Futures Delphi

The cultural futures variation of the Delphi technique is a methodology developed explicitly to engage diverse perspectives in integrated processes of knowledge creation, policy formation, political coalition building, and principled social action. Though rooted in a quantitative method of technological forecasting designed to focus highly specialized expertise into sound predictive judgments; expanded conceptualizations of the Delphi as a method for enhancing social discourse, understanding and decision-making concerning complex issues soon evolved. (See, for example, Linstone et al, 1977 &1975; Jillson, 1975; Hill & Fowles, 1975; Rauch, 1979)

Decades ago, and still today, the most significant problems confronting schools and society remain dauntingly complex, dynamic, ambiguous, controversial, and broadly cultural rather than narrowly technical in scope. In response, in order to generate knowledge capable of ethically and effectively informing social and educational policy, it has been useful to shift the focus of future oriented inquiry from an emphasis on social forecasting to an emphasis on social systems design.

More specifically, the purpose of conducting a cultural futures variation of the Delphi is to engage carefully selected, diverse constituencies in social inquiry and imagination (developing a shared vision of patterns of social interaction that are possible, desirable, and sustainable) linked to collaborative policy design (identifying strategies and resources necessary to enact that vision). Recast and reformed in this light, the Delphi has emerged as a particularly promising tool for social systems design due to its demonstrated capacity to enhance understanding while building consensus and commitment in relation to significant social and educational concerns. (e.g., Cookson,1986; Martorella,1991; Kurth-Schai et al, 1998, 1998, 1991, 1988)

The Delphi process is distinctive as a deliberative survey technique in that it provides opportunities for clarifying and evolving opinion and commitments in a socially interactive setting while carefully protecting personal privacy. Participants are asked to respond anonymously first to focused yet open-ended interviews, and then to a carefully developed forced choice questionnaire over a series of rounds. As the questionnaire must provide an accurate representation of the complexity and controversy of the issue or task under consideration, varied techniques are used to ensure that diverse resources and perspectives are reflected in its design (e.g., questionnaire statements are drawn from interviews, relevant theory and research, media representations of controversial issues, etc.). Between rounds participants are given statistical summaries of the group's response so that they might reconsider and possibly revise their initial judgments in light of the opinions of others. Response in the form of open-ended commentary is also invited, analyzed, and shared. The process is continued until a predetermined level of agreement regarding key design priorities is reached.

Cultural futures Delphi is a flexible technique that can be creatively and strategically adapted to specific research/policy concerns and contexts with project scales ranging from within the classroom applications, to building and district level analyses, to more extensive state, national, and international initiatives. Promising examples might include supporting collaborative research and reflection in a secondary social studies class leading to the development of school policy initiatives designed to address issues such as youth alienation and the rise violent acts on school grounds; orchestrating broad based participation in the design of a charter school; informing a statewide policy debate on the restructuring of graduation standards or fiscal policy to support public education; deepening and extending a national discourse on topics ranging from science education to teacher preparation; and taking on the distinctive challenges posed by educational concerns of global significance that require intensive international consideration.

Strategic Narrative

Building on the experiences and insights gained through techniques including conversational reading and cultural future Delphi, we encourage small groups (3-5 members) to jointly develop complex story lines interpreting challenges and possibilities to be confronted in their reform context. (Bell, 1987; Czarniawska, 1997; Schram & Neisser, 1997; Skolberg, 1994; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997).

For example, one group may consider two or three crucial ideas, problems or possibilities central to a specific reform initiative, and then compose a narrative that illustrates tensions and opportunities likely to arise during implementation. One group may anticipate challenges, even crises, in the future of their project and construct narratives that provide 'early warning' and generate resources for coping with such concerns. For another group, the narrative might focus less on dramatizing tough challenges and more on playing out plausible story lines that may resolve some of the conflicts or develop new possibilities necessary to move toward substantive reform.

These collaborative compositions-from problem portrayals, to change scenarios, to end state depictions-extend imagination and engage emotions. They usually broaden understanding of important issues and elicit alternative approaches to the strategic task of democratic reform. Both the authoring groups and the other members interpret the web of events, the situations described, and the proposed dialogue in light of their own experiences while reflecting on specific nuances and application possibilities to be explored collectively.

For strategic narratives and the techniques that follow, researchers (also working in small groups) analyze the products of the group interactions to identify both common themes and unique or thought-provoking perspectives. These are summarized and shared with research participants for the continuing collective consideration.

Ethnographic Futures Interviews

To further engage individual's policy imaginations while providing opportunities to extend and connect their insights through strategic conversations with other research participants, we have adapted an interview technique developed by Robert Textor (1979).

Ethnographic futures interviews are designed to elicit images of probable, possible, and preferable policy scenarios in a contextual manner. In reference to a specific policy concern, participants in pairs or triads are asked to take turns describing in detail each of the following: 1) a very optimistic scenario, 2) a very pessimistic scenario, 3) the most probable scenario, 4) a change model identifying strategies for movement in a positive direction. Interviewees are then asked to generate three questions they would most like to have answered regarding the policy task under consideration (referred to by Textor as the Imaginary Consultation with an Omniscient Clairvoyant). All interview sessions are tape-recorded and then summarized and shared as noted above.

Visualization

Many important aspects of the social decision processes that mark education policy are not primarily linguistic, Visualized understandings and communication of evidence, structures, and processes are deeply involved in policy inquiry and action. (Sless, 1981; Freidhoff, 1989) Attending to both the perils and the promises of visualization in research and decision-making is a necessary opportunity. On the one hand, we want all research participants to be wary of the seductions of visual eloquence, to be sensitive to non-obvious emotional triggers, and to exercise a rich multiplicity of perspectives in expression and interpretation. (Tufte 1982; 1990) On the other hand, researchers and policy actors can become more strategic and skillful in the use of visual representations that go beyond immediate persuasive objectives and familiar graphic conventions. (Tufte 1991) We seek new and perhaps deeper ways of seeing---at different levels of abstraction (e.g., macro-micro, whole -parts, etc.) and with flexibility to understand, express, and manipulate (e.g. search, query, compare, etc.) several visual symbol systems.

We encourage research participants to sketch--first by themselves and then in small groups--significant aspects of their design project. Initially, these often take the form of flow charts, maps, diagrams, and occasionally more elaborate drawings. We encourage consideration of the form as well as the content represented. For example, how are elements positioned relative to the designers' points of view and objectives? How are the images composed? How is interaction expressed? How are outcomes represented? How are directionality and causality expressed? How are designers' and viewers' expectations about information and inference entailed in the representations? What emotional loadings are detectable? How do expectations (e.g. among various project participants, among various forms of representation) influence the design, expression, and understanding of visualizations? How do the goals and the tasks interact to shape the way graphic information is selected, abstracted, categorized, and organized?

In the process, participants encounter the visual challenges of representing increasing complexity. They tend to explore structures and relationships and discover existing or missing patterns in the objects, attributes, and relations that are represented. We have used manual representation tasks but are interested in computer-based possibilities for social interaction in the policy research process. The results appear to be a greater tolerance of complex designs that incorporate more variables, richer relational possibilities, and demand multi-methodological imagination in project execution and interpretation.

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