Education Authenticity and Technology

I've been thinking a lot recently about education and technology following digging into some of the research of the Llano Grande Research Center. What I find so interesting about this research is the positioning of the role of technology.

In many accounts of education technology, the role is seen as providing supplemental or additional resources to students. That is, the fundamental model is to provide some external resource that enables the child to make more rapid (or deeper) progress through a curriculum. Khan Academy and many online resources are fundamentally in this model: the idea is they bring both new content (instructional videos) and capabilities (content recommendations and individual assessment) to improve education. This model I would characterize as "outside-in."

What I see in the Llano Grande Research is quite different positioning of the role of technology. First, the role is fundamentally more creative: the whole programmatic focus of the Llano Grande Center on "digital storytelling" falls in this model (see their "Transformative Education" article). Technology is not something you consume, it is something you adopt to create (look at the picture of the video camera on the center's home page in fact). But more importantly than just creation, technology is something that you use to amplify local assets. In this case, the idea behind "digital storytelling" is that students use technology in order to take a local assets - history and stories of their community - and engage with those (i.e. develop them through digital media) in a way that amplifies them - increases their impact to students and the local community by drawing attention to them.

This strikes me as a very different model of how one leverages technology, one quite different than we see in many of the leading, dominant accounts of how to use technology to improve education. Instead of outside-in, it is inside-out: it is about adopting, developing and re-purposing existing community assets. it seems to me this has a lot to do with Anderson's concepts of authenticity as well: the idea that education needs to be embedded into local concerns, both ones shared by the student individual and ones shared by the community the student lives in.

Shields on Jane Addams - What would this change look like?

The Patricia Shields article on Jane Addams (Shields, Patricia M.  "Democracy and the Social Feminist Ethics of Jane Addams: A Vision for Public Administration." Administrative Theory & Praxis. Vol 28, No. 3, 2006:418-443.) is very compelling. It is easy to see how this philosophy of public administration and participatory democracy would have its roots in someone who was disenfranchised from participation and equality in so many ways, and so choose to explore alternative models for social administration. As Shields raises the challenge to think about this formulation as an alternative to current practice of public administration, it is challenging to consider what that would mean - would it mean different kinds of programs? or instituting different "cultures" for these institutions? how would one train these individuals? In other words, how would we get there from here in practical terms.

I may have more thoughts about this and will update this post if so.

One final note: I find Shields's prose incredibly easy to read and understand. These are complex topics to explain and yet she makes them easy to follow. In part, I think this follows from her preference for simple sentence structure. She sparingly uses verbose formulations, compound sentences or other grammatical structures that often make academic work difficult to follow.

Labaree on the Three Competing Goals of US Public Education

The Labaree article “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals.” (American Educational Research Journal 34 (1) (March 20): 39 –81. doi:10.3102/00028312034001039.) presents us with quite a powerful and insightful ways of understanding the forces that shape public education as well as the ongoing reforms to public education. The tripartite goals of democratic equality (equal access, preparing citizens), social efficiency (preparing a workforce) and social mobility (using education to capture private gains) seems a very useful tool to consider the goals of various reforms. 

However, when Labaree himself tries to use this tool to classify recent education reform policy, the results can be somewhat confusing and even seem muddled. For example, he argues that the coalition of democratic equality and social mobility define the "core consensus of aggressive educational politics in this country for the last century and a half" (61), but earlier in the article he was citing the importance of the social efficiency goals as witnessed in A Nation at Risk and similar ongoing reports, coalitions and policy that continue to argue that the United States education system if failing in critical ways to train the workforce needed for social efficiency (the recent focus on STEM education and groups like Change the Equation would serve as recent examples of how this efficiency goal remains strong). However, this also seems to be the point: that this social equivocation about educational goals results in "muddled" systems that constantly undermine themselves (70-71).

The part I had the most difficulty with was the sections on credentialing. I have to confess that I have not studied this area nor reviewed the research. However, my "lived" experience suggests to me that while credentials are important, they are mostly important as a barrier to entry than as a determinant of position after entry. My experience in the US labor market is that it values capabilities, skills and outcomes far more than credentials (example: of all the dozens of colleagues I work with on a regular basis, I could not cite either the educational institutions or credentials of a single person, with one exception, a person I have worked with for 5 years). This is not a distinction (determinant vs barrier to entry) that Labaree makes, but again, as I have noted, I have no particular theoretical or other background in this area.

Citations

Citations mentioned in class:

Shields, Patricia M.  "Democracy and the Social Feminist Ethics of Jane Addams: A Vision for Public Administration." Administrative Theory & Praxis. Vol 28, No. 3, 2006:418-443.

Redford, Emmette S.  Democracy in the Administrative State. pg 5-9.  ("section: Basic Tenets of Democratic Morality")

Week 1 Readings - Pragmatism as a Common Theme

A definite theme of this weeks readings is pragmatism: linking thoughts and ideas to their practical effects. This occurs in both the historical readings on the LBJ legacy, in Anderson’s Advocacy Leadership, and in the writing and research method pieces from Shields.

From the readings on LBJ’s legacy this week it was clear how much different the capacity for state-sponsored social change was - how much easier policy ideas moved through political channels and into implementation. It seems that the difference lay in a much more engaged civil society - that the actions of social organizations helped to propel the incredible activity in the political sphere that occurred during the LBJ administration. You can see in the LBJ speeches and legislation that what was possible then is simply not possible today, and the difference seemed to lie in part in the desire of the civil sphere to support and advocate for change. Also noteworthy was how integrated the issues of social justice and economic opportunity were within the political environment. These were seen by leaders (at least) as closely connected, which is a connection made much less often or explicitly today.

Anderson’s basic thesis that neoliberalism has come to dominate education management and policy makes sense given the structures shaping schools today that I have seen. I look forward to more definition of the concept of “advocacy leadership” which is only briefly touched upon in the readings. It is interesting that while Anderson provides the theoretical underpinnings on neoliberalism in this early chapter (i.e roots in Friedman’s economics, etc.) he does not seem to explore as deeply the theoretical roots of his own position (“advocacy leadership”). Instead, he seems to work by example - stating the kinds of things these leaders do, not where their ideas come from. I look forward to more detail in future chapters.

The Shields playbook looks to be a very clear and logical method to developing a deeper and engaged understanding of a topic, and one also rooted in pragmatism. What it shares with the readings on history and is the sense of creating engaged scholars, though Shields does not connect it as clearly yet to community action: though she emphasizes the role of publishing and social networks, so far the work is more about research and transformations of one’s understandings than about applied action.