"Theory of change" is a looser term, describing the practices an institution or group of individuals go through to develop, implement and evaluate action-oriented transformation. Success can result in a grounded model of what works to bring about an updated, better or improved state of affairs. The approach gets written and subsequently publicized. It becomes a must-follow technique and is soon adopted wholesale, regardless of the context. On a bigger picture, "theory of change" means the large-scale project of developing and spreading these iterative models of transformation. Put differently: change is necessary, change can happen, and change can be managed, directed and effective towards pre-conceived outcomes.
What do these two ideas have in common? Why discuss them together? Because education reform needs more theory of mind and less theory of change.
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I like to think of empathy, the heart of theory of mind in action, as both process and disposition rather than a state of being or an outcome. By this definition, we must actively and continually position take with another person, trying to understand their experience from within their ways of knowing. Max van Manen depicted this as trying to make thoughtful sense of the meaning the other's experience has for the other as well as for our view. We need to seek out to the fullest extent how contexts and conditions and norms shape thought and meaning. That we try is crucial; we are slated to fail, because an undeniable gulf exists between what I experience and what you do. R. D. Laing puts this well:"I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience ... I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on."
And so on. Or, we strive to understand another and the willingness to do so, despite failing, marks our humanity. We are disposed to try, always in novel ways. With and through empathy, I change. But change comes without prior theory or expectation. I do not know how I will change. At some fundamental level, who I am alters in ways non-predicated or foreseeable. It makes sense that some refrain from seeing another fully, experiencing the gulf between self and other as a challenge, a lack, a sign of our own incomprehensible understanding of ourselves. We risk when we empathize, for we make the sense of ourselves as full experienced and conceived vulnerable.
All this means that a theory of mind pulls us more intimately into our own experience; the more we recognize the fullness of others, the more transitional and incomplete we find ourselves. What results from that awareness is education.
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Educational reform (the whole bag of iterative examples of addressing needed change in schooling, too many to list) posits this idea that something better can be conceived and achieved. It makes theory of change an outcome-oriented concept, rather than a process of reaching understanding, or inquiring into the conditions of and elements of experience in schooling. It puts the ends (a better school) in front of the means (what is experienced and school and what are its outcomes?); we know where to go before we know what why we are going. Put another way, when theory of change ignores theory of mind, understanding is not possible, and meaning is inscribed by above, politically and ideologically and from hegemony.That imposition matters if we are to view schooling as partaking in the formation of the whole person. When the process by which we nurture and, well, educate successions of citizens and fellowmen and women models a top-down administration of experience, we teach students that one need not work at empathy, or on themselves. Rather, just climb to a position of authority and dictate from on high the meanings you demand that others adopt. Outcome-based education reform (as opposed to, but not different from, outcome-based education theory and practice; the medium is the message) can therefore strangle empathy, and render human relationships into instrument object-use relationships. The other is for me a vehicle for my own self-interest. Mutual recognition becomes Hobbesian and narcissistic; empathy erodes.
With loss of the possibility of empathy, the self grows complacent and settled. The openness needed for life-long learner - Socratic wisdom - vanishes; we are finished and oriented against and opposed to the world. What results from that kind of self is not education, however much we make it into what schooling does.
