How do we differentiate the emulation of structural factors in schooling from sound institutional design and policy? A more nuanced understanding of educational institutions as institutions provides the opportunity of new critical insights into examining both how and why policies and programs work within education. Importing policies into a new cultural and functional context is always fraught, but modification and recontextualization are vital in our increasingly globalized world. As it stands, education research and policy do not adequately utilize tools of analysis common in other fields. Concepts of isomorphic pressure or mimicry have a great potential value in explaining the real problems of contemporary schooling, and are yet absent. Teacher professional development time, higher administration involvement, and overall school structuring are useful elements of understanding schools, but they run the risk of being misunderstood as the causes of school success as opposed to correlates. This means the proliferation of school policies which seek to only emulate successful policies of other locales, often with little consideration of how or why such policies exist in the first place, thus creating a mimetic isomorphism. Understanding this as a logical error inherent to the intersection of observation and institutions provides valuable opportunities for the advancement to the field of educational research.
This research provides a theoretical framework through which concepts like isomorphism and institutional theory can be directly applied to how we observe and understand schooling.

Authors:
Richard McLawhorn, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Richard McLawhorn is a PhD student at the National Taiwan Normal University. His research interests are semiotics, education, and postmodernity.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-mclawhorn-2b5550325

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Mclawhorn

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