Overview
This research comes out
of my goal to understand the uses of technology in primary and secondary
education: to understand how we can take the versatile, malleable substance of
the digital – and increasingly networked – world and use it to improve learning
and students’ lives. Even more specifically, it comes out of my experience
visiting schools (sadly, when I attended school and later when I taught school
for a brief period, there was little in the way of digital technology available,
unless you count that TRS-80 computer we had once-per-week access to in high
school). If I had to trace the origins of this research to a single day, it
would be to a pair of high school visits I made one day in the Fall of 2012.
That day, I visited two
very different high schools. Let’s call them School X and School Y. My day
started at School X, which was located in an affluent and desirable
neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown Austin. The school entrance was
beautiful and airy – the buildings let in lots of sunlight and the landscaping
was immaculate. The school has previously rolled out an extensive iPad program,
so students were carrying these devices around, which was readily evident as
you passed them in the hallways. I met with several school leaders in the
library, a beautiful book-filled space which had a sunlit, windowed café where
we sat, and discussed the iPad program. What was it for? Where was it going?
What I learned was more or less what I expected: student devices were intended
to “activate learning,” make it more “participatory,” provide access to school
resources 24/7, to “personalize learning.” These themes were almost verbatim
from any education industry magazine – you could read an issue of Education
Week and understand what School X was trying to accomplish.
That afternoon I drove
to School Y, which was situated next to a busy highway. From the outside, you
could sense the difference from School X: the walk from the parking lot took
you along a vast concrete tongue that recalled to me walking down a series of
stormwater culverts funneling you down to a door and security checkpoint.
Inside, the sense was of a prison – a vast concrete and cinder block monolith
extending far up and to each side. To get a vistor’s badge I was no longer
sitting in a comfortable office with an affable office assistant as in School
X: this time, in School Y, I was negotiating my visit through a plexiglass
window that afforded no small talk let alone human contact. When classes were
dismissed and students made their way to the next class, the feeling was of
barely-contained chaos. And there were no technology devices visible at all, cell
phones and tablets having been banned by school policy.
I was eventually
escorted to my destination: the presence of “technology” in this school, which
was the purpose of my visit. What I found there surprised me a great deal: here
a teacher had with great effort carved out a space for students enabled by
digital technology. But this was very different from School X: this was not
iPads and personalized learning. The focus here was firmly on creativity and digital
production: students were designing digital narratives, making movies, writing
scripts, doing animation. This was not a pedagogy of consumption, but a
pedagogy of creativity. And the focus was more clearly on student
appropriation: the subject of all this production was the students themselves:
their lives (often difficult lives too), their issues, their experience, the
things they cared about. This was education based around the concepts of “authenticity”
and “advocacy,” as developed by Gary Anderson in his book Advocacy
Leadership: that is, education that seeks to be embedded in the lives and
concerns of students and the community (“authenticity”), and that seeks to
inspire representation for and of these individuals (“advocacy”).
What I perceived in
that day was two different learning communities from very different economic
backgrounds making two very different uses of technology, ones most appropriate
for them. While it is of course not safe to generalize from a single sample to
universal lessons, this visit stuck to me as illustrating that while there are
dominant ideas about technology and school – ones in particular more aligned
with School X – we should be cautious about overly prescriptive accounts of how
technology can be used to improve education and particularly about accounts that
claim universality and claim to know what is best for everyone.
From Practice to Theory
This paper seeks
theoretical understandings of how different communities – like those described
in my story above - may employ digital technology in schooling; it explores
theories about how technology can be employed to improve education, and how the
underlying models of those theories consider questions about inequality. The
concern here is principally on primary and secondary education and draws most
heavily but not exclusively from research focused on education in the United
States.
I first look at three
theories of pedagogy and classroom activity often connected to the use of
technology: personalized learning, constructivist pedagogy and constructionism.
For each model, I describe critical features including how they imagine
classroom interaction, the role of the teacher, and the overall organization of
primary and secondary education. For each model, I also offer an analysis of
how that model considers questions of what constitutes equality in education.
Personalized learning
In recent years in the
United States, the idea that technology should be used to create personalized
learning experiences has emerged as one of the dominant models for describing
technology integration into pedagogy. The US Department of Education defined
personalized learning as “instruction paced to the learning needs, tailored to
the learning preferences and tailored to the specific interests of different
learners” (US Department of Education, National Education Technology Plan). An example of this trend would be the Federal
“2013 Race to the Top - District” grant competition that cites in its summary:
The
Race to the Top – District competition invites applicants to demonstrate how
they can personalize education for all students in their schools. ...A
successful applicant will provide teachers the information, tools, and supports
that will enable them to meet the needs of each student and substantially
accelerate and deepen each student’s learning. (US Department of Education, “FY 2013 Race to the Top”)
This term “personalized
learning” is usually intended to signal an instructional model where a student
is no longer provided lessons or curriculum as part of an aggregate (usually a
classroom), but rather provided instruction suited to the individual’s learning
needs. According to supporters of this model, this model is more efficient than
one where a teacher “teaches to the middle” of the classroom; that is, to
models whereby instruction is targeted to the majority of a classroom learners,
while struggling learners fall farther behind and learners already aware of the
concepts being taught grow bored. This model of personalized learning is also
frequently connected to technology: digital technology is seen as an efficient
way to scale personalized learning, given the power of algorithms and networks
to analyze student performance and provide to students the exact supplemental
or remedial content needed for the student to make progress along an
educational track.
This is the model
proposed in enormously influential accounts like Christenson, Horn and
Johnson’s Disrupting Class (Christenson et. al.) which envisions a
“student-centric” model developed through technology systems that is opposed to
the “monolithic batch processes” of current school systems (Christenson et.
al., 36). The core of their theory is based off the idea of “multiple
intelligences” as developed by Howard Gardner. This theory simply states that
different individuals have different ways of assimilating knowledge:
“linguistic”, “logical-mathematical”, “spatial”, etc. The problem emerges - according
to Christenson, Horn and Johnson - from the fact that while we assimilate
according to the multiple intelligences we possess, we often only receive
instruction designed for a single intelligence type. The result is the
following situation:
The
question now facing schools is this: can the system of schooling designed to
process groups of students in standardized ways in a monolithic instructional
mod be adapted to handle differences in the way individual brains are wired for
learning? (Christenson, 35)
For some, including
Christenson, Horn and Johnson, the larger problem connected to personalized
learning is our failure as a society to reinvent schools along lines that would
allow for these new models to flourish, and instead try to layer them over onto
broken systems that were formed in the late 19th century and designed to solve
different problems (Hess) These
personalized learning models are often attached to the notion of a “zone of
proximal development” as developed in the work of Lev Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 86).
Equality in Personalized Learning
Personalized learning
envisions equality as a personalized path through a curriculum. That
individualized path is composed of two elements: 1) the path must allow the
student to progress at his or her own rate, permitting remediation and
acceleration where applicable, and 2) the path must provide alternate models of
presenting information so the student can learn it according to the
“intelligences” – means of absorbing and assimilating new concepts – that he or
she possesses.
Essentially, advocates of
“personalized learning” like Christenson, Horn and Johnson and Frederic Hess
are mostly concerned about moving beyond the “industrial” school into a
post-industrial school where curriculum is still set by the society, but the
means of mastering that curriculum is individualized. This dominant cultural
model is an equality of equal opportunity to a standardized curriculum; it
imagines that different students will avail themselves of that opportunity in
different ways and to different purposes – it is not an equality focused on
equality of outcomes, for example.
Constructivist pedagogy
In
general, constructivist models of teaching and learning hold that learning
happens best when the learner is actively constructing knowledge. This model of
learning is often connected to the work of Jean Piaget, who believed that
learning happened best in environments where the learner is not fed knowledge,
but rather actively engaged in activities that allow the learner to experience
and thereby come to make sense of the world through that experience (Mooney,
59-79).[i]
This environment has the added advantage of also stimulating the learner’s
curiosity; learning in these classrooms becomes both created by the learner and
driven by the learner.
Constructivist pedagogy
also finds its origins in the theories of John Dewey who believed as well that
learners should immerse themselves in “primary experience” as a means of
exploring the world and making sense of it (Neubert, 162-4; Prawat, 16). As
Dewey wrote in his article “My Pedagogic Creed’
I
believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the
child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds
himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity,
to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of
himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs.
Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know
what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into
them. (Dewey)
Dewey of course was
concerned more broadly with questions of human cognition and epistemology and
found his way to education as a crossroads with his philosophical explorations.
Several elements of how
schooling is organized follow from this. One is that teaching is always
indirect: that the purpose of a teacher is not to transmit knowledge, but to
create environments where students are interacting in such a way as to create
new knowledge that is assimilated into the “logic” of his or her world views
(Ackerman, 3). Or as Dewey himself wrote, “Save as the efforts of the educator
connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative
independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from
without” (Dewey). The structure of school still has students and teachers, but
the interactions of these parties are now quite different: the teacher’s role
is to create the conditions for exploration of the world by the student.
As for the organization
of schooling, this model makes some distinctions but does not contribute a full
picture of what schooling should look like on a macro level; it’s stands tend
to be on principles rather than on structures. One implication of
constructivist pedagogy for younger students (i.e. primary education) is that
school should connect to the natural learning processes of the child; that is,
in some ways it should mimic the natural explorations of the child experienced
at home as an infant. At higher levels, of course, the concern of
constructivism is to immerse the learner in authentic interactions. In large
part, of course this means schooling should be immersed in the community, not
in structures divorced from the community or overly concerned with
abstractions. As Dewey wrote,
Education
being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in
which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in
bringing the child
to
share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for
social ends. (Dewey)
Given this
organization, constructivism also as a result tends to be less well grouped
into specific curricular categories, with interdisciplinary work preferred as a
result; this allows for more student-driven explorations as much as it models
the experience of the community that does not makes abstract distinctions on
the basis of subject matter.
Equality in Constructivist Pedagogy
Constructivist pedagogy
poses quite a different starting point when one considers the concept of
equality. For constructivist pedagogy, what is important is that the student be
allowed to self-explore without the imposition of outside order and rules.
Since learning works best when it is managed by the learner, it follows that
equality is essentially granting each learner this opportunity. The student,
and in Piaget’s theories particularly younger students, must be given the
opportunity to build off of his or her own personal experience and world views.
This opportunity
becomes clear when one sees constructivists discuss the management of
schooling. For example, take Seymour Papert’s concept of the “little school,”
developed in his book The Children’s Machine. Little schools are seen by
Papert as the means through which his theories of learning can scale and be
managed by a society
The central feature of the little
school idea is that it permits a group of like-minded people--teachers,
parents, and children--to act together on the basis of authentic, personal beliefs.
Instead of imposing a common way of thinking on everyone, it allows people with
a shared way of thinking to come together. (Papert, 219)
In Papert’s formulation, the “little schools”
concept would provide environments where pedagogy is allowed to take shape
around the student. One key to doing
this seems to be active engagement between the school and its community and
cultural context:
The design of the learning
environment has to take account of the cultural environment as well, and its
implementation must make serious efforts at involvement of the communities in
which it is to operate. (Papert, 221)
It is ironic in some
sense to see the idea of “like-mindedness” as a condition for the “little
school,” since one would assume that the little school would value diversity
given the fact that the purpose of constructivist pedagogy is to value on
student’s own backgrounds. But the primary reason that the little school is
required according to Papert is due to the current challenges with instituting
an alternative pedagogy in a very top-down, “cathedral” educational system.
Constructionist Pedagogy
Constructionism as a
pedagogical concept was created by Seymour Papert and seeks to build off of the
constructivist theory of Piaget. A dominant characteristic of constructionism
is its insistence that learning and knowledge is situated (Ackerman, 5). While
constructivist pedagogy attempts to make space for the mental structures and
life experience of the individual learner, it still presupposes that the result
is certain forms of abstract knowledge. In other words while we may want the
classroom to adapt to the learner and for knowledge to be acquired by active
engagement of the learner with real experience driven by an internal desire to
learn, the result of learning is still a set of abstract concepts drawn from a
curriculum. Constructionism, on the other hand, sees learning as “situated” and
less abstract. As Edith Ackerman writes in her comparison of Piaget and
Papert’s learning philosophies:
To
Papert, knowledge, even in adults, remains essentially grounded in contexts,
and shaped by uses, and the use of external supports and mediation remains, in
his mind, essential to expand the potentials of the human mind – at any level
of development. Papert’s constructionism, in other words, is both more situated
and more pragmatic than Piaget’s constructivism. (Ackerman, 5)
Papert’s is essentially
an epistemological difference with constructivist pedagogy: it argues at its
extreme that learning and knowledge is never quite divorceable from the
contexts in which it is created. For Papert, one implication is to challenge
the idea of a core or required curriculum; as Papert writes in an article with
co-author Idit Harel in an article focusing on the use of technology in
education:
The
presence of computers begins to go beyond first impact when it alters the
nature of the learning process; for example, if it shifts the balance between
transfer of knowledge to students (whether via book, teacher, or tutorial program
is essentially irrelevant) and the production of knowledge by students. It will
have really gone beyond it if computers play a part in mediating a change in
the criteria that govern what kinds of knowledge are valued in
education. (original emphases; Papert and Harel).
It is clear from the
article that there is more at stake than just the idea of a standardized curriculum
as well. At stake is also the ability to assert identity: the extreme claim is
that allowing for knowledge to be situated allows it to be personal or cultural
as well. As Papert writes in the same article, drawing a distinction between
the “nature of knowledge” and the “nature of knowing” can help enable people
“the right not only to think what they please, but to think it in their own
ways” (Papert and Harel).
Equality for Constructionist Pedagogy
Equality in
constructionism possesses some of the same characteristics as in constructivism,
but it results in different outcomes. What it shares with constructivism of
Dewey or Piaget is the idea that schooling needs to begin from the student’s
own experience and build off of the natural processes of exploration begun as a
child. In this sense, the equality is one of equal respect for the – however
nascent – world views and concepts that the student brings to the school. Like
with constructivism, the student is expected to build off of whatever is there
already, so there is no “right” or “wrong” conceptual material to start with.
The role of the school is to make space for all possibilities.
However, in
constructivism, the outcomes of schooling are seen as different. Whereby
constructivism does not necessarily reject the idea of a superset of curricular
concepts to be mastered, constructionism asserts that meaning is always
situated in local contexts. At the extreme this would mean that knowledge is
always personal, but Papert seems to allow that meaning may also be cultural –
that the knowledge thereby constructed by individuals has particular value for
groups, particularly marginalized groups challenged by dominant ideological
formulations (Papert and Harel). A frequent example in Papert’s writing is the
formulation of computing as a “masculine” activity and attempts to recast it in
a feminist mode.
Equality in
constructivism must therefore also be seen to include making space for the
construction of alternate “ways of knowing.”
Ackerman,
Edith. “Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the
difference?” Accessed online at: http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf
Anderson,
Gary L. Advocacy Leadership: Toward a Post-Reform Agenda in Education.
Routledge. New York, NY. 2009.
Christenson,
Clayton M., Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson. Disrupting Class: How
Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. McGraw Hill,
2008.
Dewey,
John. “My Pedagogic Creed.” School Journal vol. 54 (January
1897), pp. 77-80. Accessed at: http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm
Hess,
Frederick M. "Doing the Same Thing Over and Over." AEI Online.
November 17, 2010. http://www.aei.org/article/education/k-12/doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/.
Mooney,
Carol Garhart. Theories of Childhood: An Introduction of Dewey, Montessori,
Erikson, Piaget and Vygotsky. Redleaf Press. St Paul, MN, 2000.
Neubert,
Stefan. “Pragmatism, Constructivism and the Theory of Culture.” John Dewey
Between Pragmatism and Constructivism. Fordham University Press. New York.
2009.
Papert,
Seymour. The children's machine: rethinking school in the age of the
computer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge. 1993.
Papert,
Seymour ad Idit Harel. “Situating Constructionism.” Accessed online at: http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html
Prawat,
Richard S. “Dewey and Vygotsky Viewed Through the rearview Mirror-and Dimly at
That.” Educational Researcher. Vol 31, No 5, pp 16-20.
United
States Department of Education. “FY 2013 Race to the Top - District, Executive
Summary.” August 2013. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-district/2013-executive-summary.pdf
United
States Department of Education. Transforming American Education: Learning
Powered by Technology. National Education Technology Plan 2010. U.S.
Department of Education. Office of Educational Technology. November 2010. http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/netp2010.pdf
[i] I
am indebted to the summary of Piaget’s work from the volume Theories of
Childhood: An Introduction of Dewey, Montessori, Erikson , Piaget and Vygotsky,
p.59-79.
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