Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Stakeholder-Driven Educational Systems Design 733
in the hand of stakeholders. He stresses that the challenge of designing self-governing and selforganizing
societies is not to create and impose coercive societal-level design from the top down
or project the outcome. Banathy focuses on an evolutionary change process; change can be
expected to take time to accomplish. Thus, he only broadly describes the complex task that is set
for individuals in communities in larger social systems rather than prescibing specific procedures.
He concludes his book, Designing Social Systems in a Changing World, with several generalizations
for designers of a new society. They have to (1) transcend the system boundaries that
exist now and learn to think anew about the world, rather than extrapolate from it, (2) create ideal
visions of future society based on shared ideas and values, (3) engage in disciplined inquiry of
design to bring those images to life. In addition, he stresses these caveates: (4) Authentic and
sustainable design must be genuinely participative by individuals at all levels of society; (5) The
design of the design inquiry itself and all the various design processes must be established at
the various societal levels; (6) A prerequisite to design is that a design culture and evolutional
competence must be developed across the society; 7) Design inquiry should ethically; reflectively,
and never-endingly pursue the ideal from multiple perspectives; and 8) Take advantage of existing
and emerging technologies for communicating at all levels of the design inquiry.
Banathy’s educational systems design perspective has influenced a number of systemic change
efforts in education and has lead to efforts to create contexts for stakeholder-based changes.
As the study of systemic change in education has matured, there have been theoretical and
practical efforts to clarify and develop this area of research and practice. Reigeluth’s work has
included clarifying what Banathy and those working with ESD mean by systemic change and how
stakeholder roles at various nested levels of the system are differentiated in the ESD approach.
Distinctions are made between state-wide, district-wide, school-wide and ecological approaches
to systemic change. Banthy’s three “lenses” are used to describe educational systems from this
perspective: a birds-eye lens, a functions/structure lens, and a process lens. The bird’s eye lens
provides an overall view of the relationships in the system environment and context. The functions/
structure lens looks at the purposes and components of any system and their relationships to each
other, and the process lens looks at how the systems’ purposes are attained and how the system
behaves over time. Ecological systemic thinkers view systems as complex, multidimensional
organizations. Systemic change from this view considers change as comprehensive and evolving
from a continuing process of dialogue and self-examination by all who are impacted by the
system—the user-designers.
Reigeluth, Jenlink, Carr, and Nelson have done extensive work over the past several years to
develop specific process guidelines for facilitating change in school districts based on the ESD
approach. They propose some process maps developed from their experiences and that of others
engaged in educational change at the district level. Their guidance system reflects skills and
knowledge essential for process facilitators who are assisting a school district and community in
developing its own changes.
Like Banathy, they define the approach as one that recognizes the interrelationships and
interdependencies among the parts of the educational system. As a consequence desired changes in
one part of the system must be accompanied by changes in any other parts that affect those desired
changes. They recognize the interrelationships and interdependencies between the educational
system and its community: parents, employers, social service agencies, religious organizations,
etc. All these stakeholders are recognized as having ownership of the change effort.
The guidance system describes specific activities that the process facilitator and the community
stakeholders would use in creating the envisioned community. The list of prerequisite beliefs
they propose for the faciltator include, systemic thinking (similar to Banathy’s), inclusivity (all
stakeholders in the educational system are included), stakeholder ownership (all stakeholders
are empowered rather than represented), coevolution (mutal change in concert with interrelated