Abstract
The concept of ‘wicked issues’, originally developed in the field of urban planning, has been taken up by design educators, architects and public health academics where the means for handling ‘wicked issues’ has been developed through ‘reflective practice’. In the education of teachers, whilst reflective practice has been a significant feature of professional education, the problems to which this has been applied are principally ‘tame’ ones. In this paper, the authors argue that there has been a lack of crossover between two parallel literatures. The literature on ‘wicked issues’ does not fully recognise the difficulties with reflective practice and that in education which extols reflective practice, is not aware of the ‘wicked’ nature of the problems which confront teachers and schools. The paper argues for a fresh understanding of the underlying nature of problems in education so that more appropriate approaches can be devised for their resolution. This is particularly important at a time when the government in England is planning to make teaching a masters level profession, briefly defined by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) benchmark statement as ‘Decision‐making in complex and unpredictable situations’. The paper begins by locating the argument and analysis of ‘wicked problems’ within the nature of social complexity and chaos. The second part of the paper explores implications for those involved in policy formation, implementation and service provision. Given the range of stakeholders in education, the paper argues for a trans‐disciplinary approach recognising the multiple perspectives and methodologies leading to the acquisition of reticulist skills and knowledge necessary to boundary cross.
Highlights
The concept of ‘wicked issues’, originally developed in the field of urban planning, has been taken up by design educators, architects and public health academics where the means for handling ‘wicked issues’ has been developed through ‘reflective practice’
We argue that there has been a lack of a crossover between parallel literatures, one from the field of planning, design and design education which has been adopted by those involved in research into health, and the other from education and schooling
Given the range of stakeholders involved in education, we argue for the development among professionals of a trans‐disciplinary approach, recognition of multiple perspectives and methodologies, the acquisition of reticulist skills, i.e., a rather special skill‐set reflecting an awareness of other disciplinary domains and an ability to recognise the significance of these, rather than just being some form of social engagement implied by networking, and the knowledge essential in order to boundary‐cross
Summary
History provides us with a useful ‘rear view’ of complexity. As Herbert Butterfield ) identifies that in the field of design problems there must be a balance between what is needed by marketing, and what can be built, or done, by the production team If this fundamental polarity is applied to the social context, it represents on the one hand what is needed by government, i.e., electability, and on the other what can be done at the lowest level of policy implementation, what we have termed the micro level, by the social actors on the shop floor, the professionals and those for, and with, whom they work. An absence of the recognition of key elements of social complexity can lead the policy developer and the professional practitioner into misunderstanding both the problem they wish to address and the possible ‘solutions’ they might apply. ) alert us to the importance of acknowledging heterogeneity when addressing wicked health problems resistant to resolution They argue that the emergence of complexity theory in the 1970s resulted in a challenge to mechanistic models of the world by those that were dynamic and process‐oriented. Implications of ‘wickedity’ in the arenas of policy formulation and professional practice
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