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Innovative doctrines create dilemmas for teachers. These dilemmas arise because, when teachers decide to adopt new practices, they face new uncertainties about their role in the classroom, the effectiveness of their methods and the purposes of their instruction. The way teachers used the materials of a particular innovation, the Schools Council Integrated Science Project, is described and explained in terms of teacher control over the uncertainties of classroom life. The Project proposals, initially seen by teachers as increasing the diffuseness of their work, were modified by them so that it was clearer to them what was to be accomplished and how it was to be done. At the same time, a functional alignment of goals, techniques and socialrelationships was maintained through teacher influence in the classroom. The translation of the materials into more specific terms meant that important elements of the "doctrine" of the Project were either ignored or redefined in more traditional terms. Such redefinition of innovation in specific terms raises questions about the effectiveness, as instruments of change, of centralized curriculum projects remote from the practical problems of schools. Implications for curriculum policy and research into the dilemmas teachers face in teaching are discussed.

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There is, in the ®eld of education in the English-speaking world, an enduring faith in the capacity of social engineering. Witness the`What works' syndromeÐa quest for assured knowledge to back up pedagogical practice and curriculum-making. The metaphor is that of a machineÐa complex one grantedÐbut a machine nevertheless. It is the sort of machine that Norbert Weiner imagined the body to be, or the way organisms interacted, when he developed his cybernetic model. Ironically, a key to the way his system worked was negative, corrective feedbackÐnot what works but what doesn't. Positive feedback tended to set systems out of control, he said. We can see the e ects of positive feedback in the case of computers which are purchased in great numbers for schools, although little is known about what they contribute to educationÐand least of all what teachers actually do with them.Research in education needs to ®nd out what teachers think of reformÐ to ask those who have intimate knowledge of what happens when grand schemes are launched. Such a need to consult those who do the work can be seen most dramatically in the case of nurses, who, in Canada at least, are now being recognized as sources of important information for purposes of assessing how hospitals work. They, like teachers, can and will in the future provide the negative feedback most often ignored and perilously so. However, does a systemic approach to reform in education appreciate the value of negative feedback. I think not.The systemic approach to reform recognizes that schools are part of a complex system of expectations and that reform plans must recognize the diverse interests at play in any reform. The idea is that when all the parts are pulling together reform will happen. The assumption is that the purposes for schools can be established, and that the technical means identi®ed to achieve those purposes are known. It is a matter of everyone being`on-side'. To me, this sounds like the roll-call and the rallying of j. curriculum studies, 2002, vol. 34, no. 2, 129±137 John Olson is professor emeritus in the

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