Using Evaluation to Create ‘Provisional Stabilities’

This article reports the evaluation experience in two SOCRATES (European Union funding mechanism designed to support innovation in teaching and learning) projects focused on change in higher education. The projects were international in scope involving six countries and ten institutions within the last four years. The article reflects on change in institutions specifically, especially those introduced by the use of information and communication technologies, and it suggests the hypothesis that in such a phase of transition, new rules are not yet established and a state of anomie can occur at the level of courses, departments and institutions. The article details what happens in educational institutions in which rules and practices are well established and validated and a new event radically changes or challenges the traditional practices. Instead of the psycho-social notion of ‘resistance to change’, the theory of Durkheim and followers that analyses human responses in times of social change may be of use to interpret situations in which change or the will to change creates conflicting systems of rules and practices. The article will argue for a crucial role for evaluation in negotiating such periods of change.