Reconsidering change and ICT: Perspectives of a human and democratic education

1
Reconsidering change and ICT Perspectives of a
human and democratic education

• Helen Drenoyianni
• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
• School of Education

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ICT changes education The rhetoric

• Presence, evolution and use of ICTs bring about a
  new kind of society, namely Information or
  Knowledge society
• Knowledge and information are products
• Demands new class of knowledgeable citizens and
  multi-functional workers
• Schools fail to prepare children for this future
  role

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Radical change?

• Progressive shift in teaching and learning
  methods
• Higher academic standards
• More rigorous centralized curricula
• National performance driven testing
• Emphasis on accountability of all
• Use of ICT with a pedagogical incentive

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Radical change through ICT? Facts and
figures(Eurydice, 20042005 OECD, 2006 Cuban,
2001)

• Information Society An ideological construct ?
  (Webster, 2002 Webster and Robins,1999)
• Pedagogical assumptions about change due to ICT
  are not substantiated in the reality of
  classrooms
• Access Students and teachers have far more
  access to ICT tools and equipment compared to the
  past and levels of home and school
  computerization are steadily rising

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Radical change through ICT? Facts and
figures(Eurydice, 20042005 OECD, 2006 Cuban,
2001)

• Frequency of use Primary pupils claim they do
  not use computers very often at school, but
  almost 2/3 of 15 year-olds say that they use
  computers very regularly at school. In Silicon
  Valley schools, students reported serious or
  occasional use of computers in tech-heavy classes
  (computer science, multimedia, etc), but reported
  little or no use of computers for instruction.
• Type of use Most typical activities are
  electronic communication (56), looking things up
  on the Internet information searching (55),
  playing games (53) and word processing (48). In
  Silicon Valley schools, use of ICT was peripheral
  and limited to completing assignments, finding
  information in CD-ROMs and conducting Internet
  searches

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Radical change through ICT? Facts and
figures(Eurydice, 20042005 OECD, 2006 Cuban,
2001)

• Changes due to ICT use In Silicon Valley
  schools, ICT is used to maintain rather than
  transform prevailing practices. When it promotes
  student centered and project based practices, it
  is because these practices were there even before
  technology came along.
• OECD, 2006 Frequency of computer use vs
  mathematical literacy scores students, who
  used computers widely, performed on average worse
  than those with moderated usage it is the
  quality of ICT usage rather than the quantity
  that may contribute to higher student outcomes

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Measures proposed

• A slow evolution or slow revolution
  explanation
• Increase of investment on teacher training,
  software and hardware development and use,
  equipment purchasing and infrastructure
• Yet,questions about the role of ICT as a change
  agent, do not address technical issues and How
  to matters, but the very core of the Why and
  What questions of education

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A different view

• Educational media and tools can only strengthen,
  further and reinforce established educational
  goals, curriculum contents, teaching learning
  methods. As such,
• Their use is normally assimilated into current
  practices and structures
• As their use is assimilated it brings about,
  reflects and sometimes stresses contemporary
  educational and socio-economic problems and
  conditions.

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ICTs reflections

• The multidisciplinary or artificially
  trans-disciplinary nature of curriculum content
  organization and the dominant epistemological,
  ideological and economical beliefs about subject
  knowledge.
• The consequences of applying economic logic to
  schools, simplistic input-output measurement
  and continuous accountability, which may be
  responsible for the formation of a mediocrity
  culture in education
• The effects of the teachers de-skilling process
  and its further extension through pre-packaged
  electronic materials
• The extensive range of existent class, racial and
  gender inequalities.

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If this is all the new, transformative and
revolutionary that ICT brings to education, then
why should one bother with it?
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Success stories

• Michael, an 8-year-old boy, could hardly read
  and write. He often hit hard, smacked and beat
  other children in and out of class. One day,
  after an incident of serious injury, Michael
  confessed to his teacher that he has been very
  angry for a long time. He was not seeing enough
  of his father, who lived far away from him and
  his mother. His teacher showed him how to use
  e-mail at school, so as to send to and receive
  messages from his father. In 6 months time,
  Michael became a fluent reader and a capable
  writer

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Progressive possibilities of ICT

• Can support collective work
• Can motivate inert and discouraged learners
• Enable the disadvantaged to access learning
• Enable all to
• Develop ideas and construct things
• Express in multi-modal and multi-semiotic ways
  and create their own cultural forms
• Interact in critical, challenging and provoking
  ways
• Make meaning through communicating, questioning
  and inquiring and engaging in discussions of
  public issues
• Participate in the production of culture

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So what about change?

• Although isolated success stories are sure to
  crop up even under current conditions, like weeds
  in the cracks of the status quo, by themselves
  they are unlikely to have much lasting effect.
  For these growths to flourish into a thriving
  patchwork of alternative practices, it will be
  necessary to modify the terrain (Bromley,
  199822)

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Democratic schools

• They are more than a century old
• Their origins may be found in the legacy of the
  Progressive Education Association, the
  pedagogical and philosophical ideas of radical
  social re-constructionists, social meliorists and
  critical educators (John Dewey, Harold Rugg,
  William Kilpatrick and Paulo Freire)
• Their main, non-negotiable characteristics
• Participatory processes to curriculum development
  (needs, interests, concerns of school community
  and community around the school)
• Establishment of democratic processes and
  structures through the recognition of shared
  purpose and common good as central and necessary
  features of a democratic way of life
• Emphasis on understanding, reflection and
  analysis of social problems, investment on social
  responsibility and action-praxis against
  anti-democratic, unjust and inhuman practices in
  and out of school
• Thematic and integrated strategies to curriculum
  content organization, project-based, experiential
  and anti-racist approaches to teaching and
  learning

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Another success story

• The second trip we did was to the Estado de São
  Paulo newspaper archive. At first, we did
  research about energy in Heliópolis, but soon
  enough students wanted to go beyond that. They
  wanted to see if there was news about their
  theatre group, or about the movie that had been
  shot there. The result of the work was quite
  astonishing. Most of the news they found in the
  archive about their community was about drug
  dealers, violence, fires, accidents, and poverty.
  They were very disappointed about the image that
  they might have to others.
• What about our theatre group? What about the good
  things that happen there? Everyone left Estado
  upset. I felt that they were quite saddened by
  their experience of the day and the realization
  of the public presentation of their community,
  their lives, and their value. They were feeling
  that, not only people considered them as
  favelados (pejorative slant for inhabitants of
  shantytowns), but also their place was the most
  dangerous of the city and nothing more. It looked
  like the visit to Estado took them back to
  reality and their supposedly right position poor
  kids from the favela. However, there was one
  fundamental difference. We were already involved
  in an empowering Learning Atmosphere where they
  had much more control and freedom than usual.
  They were already creating projects of their own
  choice

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Another success story

• Their response was one of the most powerful
  moments of the workshop as the big press was not
  talking in a fair way about Heliópolis, they
  would make their own Jornal da Escola (The School
  Newspaper), to talk about all the cultural
  events, community projects, and other things that
  happen there. A group of about seven girls got
  together for the project. They asked me how to do
  a newspaper. We went to a newsstand and bought
  one. They went through it and designed a plan for
  their publication the sections, the possible
  articles, interviews, formatting etc. They even
  did the economical viability analysis. One of the
  important parts of the newspaper would be a
  special supplement about secure energy
  connections. They realized that it was impossible
  to get rid of the illegal connections, but wanted
  to help people make them safer. They took
  pictures of unsafe connections, crowed poles, and
  transformers, to illustrate the supplement
  (extract from Blistein and Cavallo, 200212)

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Central features

• Curriculum is continuously co-constructed and
  negotiated among participants and around
  community social themes no generalized
  standards, no fixed objectives
• Action-praxis is a necessity for responding to
  unjust and antidemocratic practices and for
  defending community common good
• Teaching and learning approaches are
  child-centered and project-based
• ICT is treated as a valuable tool that is used
  for fulfilling and achieving in the best possible
  way a certain purpose

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The role of ICT

• As pedagogical tools, ICTs
• Are used whenever it is meaningful and purposeful
  to do so and in the context of participatory,
  research-based, and child-centered activities
• Provide access to controversial contents,
  contradictory cultures, diverse ideas values
  and enable students to explore their own own
  social, cultural and historical geographies in
  comparison to those of other people.
• Unlike any other technology, make possible the
  creation, production and public dissemination of
  the students own contents, knowledge
  constructions and projections of the world
• This kind of use enables the natural
  development of ICT skills in an indirect and
  realistic context

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The role of ICT

• As an interesting, challenging and essential
  educational theme and issue, awareness of ICTs
  involvement in the construction of power,
  dominant ideology and supreme culture and
  consideration of the exclusions, oppressions and
  opportunities introduced by their use may
• enable understanding of larger social problems
  that arise in the course of students individual
  and collective lives
• and may help students foster the development of a
  more humane technological future
• Thus, ICT is treated as part of new forms of
  multiple literacy and is discussed through
  generative topics, like life in the future,
  e-gaming industry, e-hate, e-violence,
  consumerism, open-source software, electronic
  journalism, etc

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And the paradox is

• that the many liberating and creative
  capabilities of ICT use have already been
  appraised and realized by a significant number of
  children around the world. Yet,
• these children represent a group of children and
  not all the children
• What these children do, learn, make and
  experience with ICT does not take place inside
  school, but out of it