ANDY HARGREAVES EDITOR-IN-CHIEF’S INTRODUCTION REPRESENTING EDUCATIONAL CHANGE What better time could there be than the opening months of a new Millen- nium to launch a major new educational journal on the subject of change? A new Millennium signals new beginnings, new hopes, new visions for education and those who might benefit from it. The turn of this century is a time when the informational society is taking a more mature shape, when the campaign to pay down Third World debt gives a glimmer of better prospects for educational reform in developing countries, and when across the world, educational reform is itself a huge priority. In effect, educational change is a worldwide Millennium project in the symbolic and substantive ways of investing in the generations of the future. Nations, districts, leaders and sometimes teachers themselves are rushing to be on the leading edge of changes engineered by governments, fash- ioned by districts or financed by charitable foundations. As Michael Fullan argues in this first issue of the Journal of Educational Change, large scale reform in education appears to be back in a big way. Those on the leading edge of change can find the push towards the future to be an energizing, optimistic experience. Historian Gary McCulloch (1997: 89) notes that transformative millennial images “can be used constructively in order to develop coherent and inspiring visions for radical, holistic reform. At the same time though, “they are prone to idealize the future, to build castles in the air that contrast starkly with the intractable dilemmas of the imperfect present” (89). Downtown, in the Canadian city of Montreal, English artist Raymond Mason has created a sculpture ‘Illuminated Crowd,’ the leading members of which are drawn, enthralled towards a bright light. As one moves back through the crowd however, one encounters darker conditions of anger, violence, sickness and death. This sculpture, which represents the flow of human emotions through space, could equally well represent flows of human responses to change. Change puts some people in the spotlight and others in the dark. Some teachers are on the leading edge of change; others are on the sharp edge of it. Change can be novel, original, unique; it can also retread well worn Journal of Educational Change 1: 1–3, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.