Role Shock in Local Community Development Dynamics

Abstract

Recent developments in Canadian Indian education provide some otherwise unavailable opportunities to observe potentials for implementing significant changes in schools elsewhere. One domain of potential change, often considered by educators and others to be a desirable condition, is control. For all the rhetoric about local control of schooling, it is actually observable only in a few cases and very little description is available about the processes or problems of implementation. This paper describes the beginning of one such undertaking and illustrates how the unanticipated emergence of pervasive role shock inhibits the expected positive results from autonomous local control of schooling. Les d6veloppements recents dans le domaine de l'education des indiens du Canada fourissent une occasion inesper6e d'observer les possibilit6s de realiser des changements significatifs dans d'autres dcoles. Un des domaines ou des changements seraient possibles voire souhaitables, de l'avis de nombreux enseignants et autres educateurs, est celui de l'autonomie locale. Malgre toute la rh6torique entourant la question de l'autonomie locale de l'ecole, force nous est de constater que tres peu de cas et d'6tudes descriptives existent concernant les proo6des et les probl6mes relatifs a son implantation. Cet article expose les debuts d'une entreprise de ce genre et fait voir que l'apparition inopinee d'un conflit de r6le a empechbe l'atteinte des resultats positifs que l'on esperait de l'autonomie locale de I'ecole. A unique choice to assume local control of schooling is now available to Canadian Indians. Community development processes in assuming local control have model implications for all who see grass-roots participation as desirable. Control, in this context, refers to autonomy; no external educational hierarchy of authority is involved. Aoki ( 973 ) identifies this as a process of devolution - not just decentralization, but complete freedom from the centralized bureaucracies that are characteristic of Canadian education. Local control has a high positive affective appeal to many people and is variously used as a political slogan or as a means of local community power manipulation (Fein, 1971; Repo, 1972), but it is difficult to conceive under existing school laws for any Canadians other than Indians or private, independent schools. The idea is relatively new in Canada, emerging from the reform ethos of the I96os into federal policy in the I970s. Urion (1975) and Carney (1978) provide substantial reference to its genesis among Amerindian people in the Navajo Nation and its rapid spread in both the United States and Canada. The Canadian National Indian Brotherhood pro