After this past week's chat session, where I felt like I completely missed much of the conversation, I went back to revisit the Schlechty chapter in our book to consider the ideas about the normative system more carefully.I thought about norms this past weekend, as I walked through my neighborhood with my dog, checking out the decorated houses, surrounded by trick-or-treaters. The celebration of Halloween is, in some ways, very much a norm, a norm that is part cultural, part aesthetic, part technical, and also part conventional.
What made me think of Schletchy's chapter on my walk was my consideration of the history of Halloween; most of us know that our current celebration bears little resemblance to the reason and ritual of the ancient holiday. Yet, still, the norm of this holiday or celebration still exists in some, though much changed, form.
A contemplation of this holiday really helped me understand more about what Schletchy means by "To tear down the myth structure of schools without replacing it with equally compelling myths is irresponsible" (p. 232). We cannot simply disrupt the norms of society and schools; we must incorporate the existing norms, at least in some form, into the disruption in order for the innovation to actually work.
This analogy did also make me realize the importance of having good myths as replacements of the norm. While I am all for candy, costumes, and fake spiders, one could argue that the translation of the original myth/celebration has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous (like my dog, that I dressed up, as a Bat Dog, get it? Bad dog/ Bat dog? Ha, I kill me).
Melissa-
ReplyDeleteI really like the quote that you mentioned in your blog. I think all too often we tend to throw out the existing norms and just start over without thinking of why they exist or what worked in them and why it's compelling. It's definitely a good point to consider whenever change is needed.
Melissa,
ReplyDeleteI really like your reflection in connecting Schlechty to Halloween as an example of a cultural norm. Halloween is indeed a great illustration of a rather silly tradition at this point with little connection to its actually history. And yet as the quote cited points out, what alternatives to changing this cultural norm are really compelling? And so it continues. As leaders, it is difficult to discern what myths can be changed and are worthy of time and effort and which ones are not worthy of change or our efforts in them will be futile.