Session Information
13 SES 07, Educational Technology
Long Paper Session
Contribution
There is an underlying belief by governments, policy makers and education management that digital technologies are—in some way—capable of improving learning and teaching. Integrating technology into education stems from an aspiration among most educational stakeholders to improve student learning.
Nevertheless, this paper argues that an over-zealous commitment to using technology by education management has become an all-encompassing—hegemonic—feature of progressive education. Management consistently initiate policies, which aim to accelerate the integration of technology into education, however, a noticeable feature of such policies is that they are disconnected from the knowledge and practices of educators.
Teachers have minimal control over their teaching in the current situation. This has worrying implications for student learning and also has significant implications for the provision of initial and ongoing teacher education.
This presentation offers a set of related arguments that support a more democratic and equitable reorientation of policy development in education technology. Central to the arguments is the need for teachers to have a stronger, more valued voice in policy formation and for the practices of critique to be an important element of teacher education (Brindley, 2013). To do this a discussion based on standpoints taken from the work of philosopher Jacques Ranciere (1999, 2004) is presented. Philosophy is rarely drawn on in theorizations of educational technology however Ranciere’s work stimulates reflection on issues of power, control and resistance, which teachers are experiencing in the field of educational technology. The points Ranciere presents are political therefore I argue they are very relevant to educational technology policy processes and reorientations to more democratic practices in this field.
Jacques Rancière considers democracy in terms of the agency of the people. In his theorisation he categorises those who define and police policy as the group with power. Given their authority, Ranciere broadly labels this group as police. In educational technology, they can be the IT companies and governments whose neoliberal interests are being served by the policies they develop. The police’s authority is further enhanced by measures which legitimate policies and practices and detract resistance from those who are allotted the role of accepting and enacting policy. Ranciere (2004) refers to this group as the demos. The demos are marginalised, have no commercial interest or a particular stake in the economic system and therefore have minimal power. In educational technology the teachers can be considered the demos. They are unrepresented in policy development and their expertise is not valued.
The concepts of police and demos are useful for reflecting on who has agency in ways technology can and should be used in education, and who does not. Interestingly technology has been promoted as great alleviator of social inequality in education however the processes, which are increasingly prioritised to drive it reproduce the very inequality and exclusion, we seek it to overcome. In addition, empowerment and equality have generally been positioned in this field in terms of access to technology and technological skills. However approaches to policy development and the implications for teaching and learning is a different issue of democracy that this paper brings to light.
Ranciere’s uses the concept of politics to describe actions that serve to break and reconfigure allocated identities and power imbalances in a group. He explains that this can be achieved when we bring together two unconnected entities as this action brings to light to issues around inequity that marginalised groups experience. An aim of this presentation is to argue that teacher education initiate and support a movement of critique, which inspires and authorizes teachers to speak back and democratize policy and organizational practices for educational uses of technology.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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