����Ӱ��

Steven Courtney (Senior Lecturer in Management and Leadership, Manchester Institute of Education) will critically discuss the issue of the 'grammar of schooling'. This concept was famously proposed in 1994 by two Stanford scholars, David Tyack and William Tobin. They define the 'grammar of schooling' as a long and well-established set of regular structures and rules for organising the work of instruction. They claim that many enthusiastically started educational reform initiatives have not succeeded to change the basics of the 'grammar of schooling'.

Courtney and his fellow author, Bryan Mann, criticise Tyack and Tobin for providing a merely descriptive, nearly fatalistic picture of educational continuities, without actually explaining the reasons for these continuities. Courney and Mann highlight the shifting social and political ideologies as the reasons why certain characteristics of educational practice have been hard to chance – an approach which in their view better combines causal issues of continuity and change in education.

Literature (for understandability, please follow this order):

• Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994) The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal 31(3), 453–479.
• Courtney, S. J. & Mann, B. (2020) Thinking with ‘lexical’ features to reconceptualize the ‘grammar’ of schooling: Shifting the focus from school to society. Journal of Educational Change.

Please register at least 3 days in advance!

More information: Emanuele Bardone (emanuele.bardone@ut.ee), Rain Mikser (rain.mikser@tlu.ee)