continued from Technology Refusal, 2 of 3

THE CULTURE OF REFUSAL 

Technology can potentially work change on both the organizational and 
practice patterns of schools. That change can subvert or reinforce 
existing lines of power and information, and this change can be, for the 
technologist or the school personnel, intentional, inadvertent or a 
combination of the two. Since schools are not monolithic but composed of 
groups with diverse and generally competing interests on the rational, 
organizational, and symbolic levels, adoption and implementation of a 
proposed technology are two very different matters. 

And yet each battle is essentially the same battle. The technologists' 
rhetoric is remarkably consistent regardless of the specifics of the 
machine at issue. So too is their response when the technologies in 
question meet with only a lukewarm response: to blame the stubborn 
backwardness of teachers or the inflexibility and insularity of school 
culture. While elements of both of these certainly play their part in 
what I'll call 'technology refusal' on the part of schools, it behooves 
us to remember that all technologies have values and practices embedded 
within them. In this respect, at least, technology is never neutral; it 
always makes a difference. From this perspective, the reactionary 
response on the part of schools (by which I mean the response of 
individuals within schools acting to support their institutional 
function) perceived by technology advocates makes a great deal more sense 
than the pig-headed Luddism so often portrayed. Further, technology 
refusal represents an immediate and, I believe, fundamentally accurate 
assessment of the challenges to existing structures and authority that 
are embodied or embedded in the contested technology. I believe further 
that the depth of the resistance is generally and in broad strokes 
proportionate to the seriousness of the actual threat. 

Change advocates, of whom technologists are a permanent subset, often try 
to have things both ways. On the one hand, the revolutionary potential of 
the innovation is emphasized, while at the same time current 
practitioners are reassured (implicitly or explicitly) that their roles, 
positions, and relationships will remain by and large as they were 
before. The introduction of computers, for example, is hailed in one 
discourse (directed towards the public and towards policy makers) as a 
process which will radically change the nature of what goes on in the 
classroom, give students entirely new sets of skills, and permanently 
shift the terrain of learning and schools. In other discourse (directed 
towards administrators and teachers) computers are sold as 
straightforward tools to assist them in carrying out preexisting tasks 
and fulfilling preexisting roles, not as Trojan Horses whose acceptance 
will ultimately require the acquisition of an entirely new set of skills 
and world outlook. Since school workers and their practice do not 
(indeed, cannot, under the assumptions and constraints of school 
organization) fully maximize instructional delivery, the "remedies" or 
alternatives proposed by technologists necessarily embody overt or 
implicit critiques of workers' world view as well as their practices. The 
more innovative the approach the greater its critique, and hence its 
threat to existing principles and order. When confronted with this 
challenge, workers have two responses from which to choose. They can 
ignore or subvert implementation of the change or they can coopt or 
repurpose it to support their existing practices. In contrast to 
generalized reform efforts, which Sarason maintains are more likely to be 
implemented the more radical they are, these efforts by technologists to 
change the institution of schooling from the classroom up make teachers 
the objects rather than the subjects of the reformist gaze (Sarason, 
1990). The more potent and pointed technologists' ill-concealed 
disinterest in or disregard for the school-order of things, the less 
likely their suggestion are to be put into practice. The stated anxiety 
of teachers worried about losing their jobs to machines is also a 
resistance to the re-visioning of the values and purposes of schooling 
itself, a struggle over the soul of school. It is about self-interest, to 
be sure, but it is also about self-definition. 

Much of the question of teacher self-definition revolves around the 
anxiety generated by their unfamiliarity and incompetence with the new 
machines. The fear of being embarrassed is a major de-motivating factor 
in the acquisition of the skills required to use computer technology in 
the classroom (Honey & Moeller, 1990; Kerr, 1991; Sheingold & Hadley, 
1990). This is an area where institutional and individual interests 
converge to produce a foregone effect. The (self-) selection for teaching 
of individuals who by and large show neither interest nor aptitude for 
ongoing intellectual development buttressed by the condition of lifetime 
employment almost guarantees a teacher corps that is extremely reluctant 
to attempt change. This, in turn, suits the interests of school 
management whose job is made considerably simpler with a population of 
workers whose complacence acts as a buffer against change. Since 
teachers' situationally-reinforced lack of motivation inhibits their 
action as change agents, school administrators are relieved of the 
responsibility for developing the creative management skills that would 
be required for teachers to develop new classroom skills. 

There are technologies which are suited perfectly to such a climate; 
those that either actively support the organization of schools or are 
flexible enough to readily conform to it (Cohen, 1987). Not surprisingly, 
they are the ones that are so ubiquitous, so integrated into school 
practice as to be almost invisible. On the classroom level we would 
expect to find tools and processes that both ease the physical labor of 
the teacher while maintaining her traditional role within the classroom. 
The blackboard, the duplicating machine, and the overhead projector come 
immediately to mind. All enhance the teacher's authoritative position as 
information source, and reduce the physical effort required to 
communicate written information so that more energy can be devoted to the 
non-didactic tasks of supervision, arbitration, and administration. This 
type of technology seldom poses a threat to any of the teacher's 
functions, is fundamentally supportive of the school-values mentioned 
earlier, and reproduces locally the same types of power and information 
relationships through which the teacher herself engages her 
administrators. We might also consider the school intercom system. 
Ideally suited to the purposes of centralized authority and the one-way 
flow of information, it is as ubiquitous in classrooms as its polar 
opposite, the direct-dial telephone, is rare. Technologies such as these 
will seldom meet with implementation resistance from teachers because 
they support them in the roles through which teachers define themselves, 
and contain no critique of teachers' practice, skills, or values. In 
general, resources that can be administered, that can be made subject to 
central control and organization, will find more favor from both 
administrators and teachers than those that cannot. 

These examples of successful technologies confirm the requirement of 
simplicity if a technology is to become widely dispersed through 
classrooms. This has partly to do with the levels of general teacher 
aptitude described above, partly with the amount of time available to 
teachers to learn new tools, and partly with the very real need for 
teachers to appear competent before their students. As with prison 
administration and dog training, a constant concern in the running of 
schools is that the subject population not be reminded what little 
genuine authority supports the power its masters exercise. Although there 
are more complex models for understanding the diffuse polysemous 
generation of power and status that comprise the warp and woof of 
institutional fabric (see Foucault on medicine or prisons, for example), 
for our purposes a simple model of authority-as-imposition will suffice. 
In this tradition, French and Raven describe the five sources of power as 
follows: 

1. Reward, the power to give or withhold something the other wants; 

2. Coercive, the power to inflict some kind of punishment; 

3. Legitimate, the use of institutionally-sanctioned position or 
authority; 

4. Referent, the use of personal attraction, the desire to be like the 
other, or to be identified with what the other is identified with; 

5. Expert, the authority that derives from superior skill or competence. 

(French & Raven, 1968).

Teachers are fully authorized to make use of each of these sources of 
power. Indeed, those teachers most respected by their peers and their 
students deploy some situationally optimal combination of these. For 
students, however, the only authorized form of power is Expert power, 
expertise the only legitimated field on which to contest adult authority 
within the school. Thus, an unfortunate (but hardly unforeseeable) 
consequence of school organization is that many teachers are threatened 
by students' acquisition or demonstration of mastery that is equal to or 
greater than the teacher's own within a shared domain. Although some 
teachers handle it with more grace than others, most dread the occasions 
when they are "shown up" by their students, and we have all witnessed or 
experienced those awkward, lingering out-of-time moments when the teacher 
must voluntarily cede authority to the student who knows how to thread 
the projector or connect the VCR. At such times the brittle consensual 
veneer of adult expertise is cracked, the order of things briefly 
disrupted (confirmed by the sudden eruption of murmuring in the 
classroom), and nervous, alert attention directed by teacher and students 
alike toward the performance of the evanescent student expert. 

It is one thing for students to demonstrate expertise in areas that are 
not expected to be a formal part of teachers' skill set, like threading 
16mm projectors. If technologists have their way, however, teachers will 
be expected to know how to use computers, networks, and databases with 
the same facility they now use blackboards and textbooks, and with 
greater facility than the roomful of resourceful, inquisitive students 
who were weaned on the stuff. The pressure towards competence and the 
acquisition of new skills, which is generally not a feature of school 
culture or the employment contracts under which teachers work, will be 
strong. It will come from unexpected directions: from below (from the 
"tools" themselves) and from within, as teachers struggle to retain 
mastery over their students. It's easy to see why teachers would resist 
this scenario. Administrators, for their part, have equally few 
organizational incentives for inviting this disruption into schools. Not 
only would they be required to respond to teachers' demands for the time 
and resources needed to attain proficiency, they themselves would need to 
attain some minimum level of competence in order to retain authority over 
teachers. Since there is no way for the system to reward this kind of 
involved, responsible management, nor any way to penalize its absence, 
school authorities' most sensible route is to ignore or quell demands for 
the implementation of such potentially disruptive processes. 

The machines of the day are microcomputers and microcomputer networks. 
Having inherited the mantle of modernity from instructional television 
and computer-aided instruction, they are presently charged with the 
transformation of schools. As school technologies, however, they are 
unusually polyvalent: they can both support and subvert the symbolic, 
organizational, and normative dimensions of school practice. They can 
weaken or strengthen the fields of power and information which emanate 
from the institutional positions of students, teachers, and 
administrators. It's my thesis that authority and status within 
organizations are constituted from two sources: power, itself sourced as 
outlined by French and Raven, and control over and access to the form and 
flow of information. Authority and status are singularities, as it were, 
produced by a particular confluence of (potentially) shifting fields of 
power and information. This is true in the organizational sense for all 
bureaucracies, where the person who knows something is as important as 
the person who can do something. In schools, though, facility with 
information is (in a slightly different sense) at the heart of key norms, 
values, and practices as well. As bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions 
and as concretizations of a particular tradition of pedagogy, schools 
teach and model as canonical a particular arrangement of paths for the 
flow of information. Introducing computers into schools highlights these 
assumptions, causes these normally invisible assumptions and channels to 
fluoresce. 

It is not their capacity to process information that gives computers this 
special ability. Data processing systems have existed in large school 
districts for decades, helping central administration to run their 
organizations more efficiently. Irregularities of control call attention 
to themselves and thereby remind workers that such arrangements are 
created things, neither aboriginal nor ahistorical but purpose-built and 
recent. To the extent that automation can help existing administrative 
processes to run more smoothly and recede into the background, they help 
to reintroduce a kind of medieval reassurance regarding the rightness and 
permanence of a given order. Schools and school workers, particularly, 
seem to prefer this type of predictability. Such data processing regimes 
also relieve school workers of much of the tedium of their administrative 
work: scheduling, grading, communication, and tracking are all made less 
drudging by automation. The easing of these burdens offered by the 
machine fits very well with popular conceptions of these labor-saving 
devices and offers workers a benefit in exchange for their participation 
in a process which strengthens the mechanisms of control exerted by the 
bureaucracy over their daily lives and practice. To the extent that they 
are aware of this bargain at all most are willing to accept it. 

This strengthening of administrative priority and control over teachers 
is recapitulated by teachers over students when computers are used for 
CAI or as "integrated learning systems." Although they have fallen out of 
favor somewhat of late, the vast majority of school-based computer use 
has taken place in this context. Kids are brought en masse to a 
(generally) windowless room presided over by a man with no other function 
than to administer the machines. There they work for between 30 and 50 
minutes on drill-and-practice software that compels them to perform 
simple tasks over and over until they have reached a preset level of 
proficiency, at which time they are started on new tasks. 

This behaviorist fantasy fits neatly into the organizational model of 
schools, and into much pedagogical practice as well. The progress and 
work habits of each student are carefully tracked by the server. Reports 
can be generated detailing the number of right and wrong answers, the 
amount of time spent on each question, the amount of "idle" time spent 
between questions, the number of times the student asked the system for 
help, the tools she used, etc. Not much use is ever made of this 
information (assuming some could be) except to compare students and 
classes against one another. Nevertheless, the ability to monitor work 
habits, to break tasks down into discrete chunks, and the inability of 
the student to determine what she works on or how she works on it fits 
quite well into the rationalist model of the school-as-factory and the 
technologists goal of maximizing "instructional delivery." 

Such systems were an easy sell. They complemented existing organizational 
and practice models, and they signaled modernity and standardization 
(Newman, 1992). (Perversely, they were also claimed to promote 
individualization, since each student was tasked and speeded separately 
from the rest of the group. The fact she was working on exactly the same 
problems, with the same tools and in the same sequence as her classmates 
seems not to have mattered.) Since students work in isolation they accord 
well with the he premise of structured competition. Since mastery at one 
level leads relentlessly to more difficult (but essentially identical) 
problems the students never have a chance to exhibit facility of a type 
that would threaten their teacher, and since the terminals at which they 
work are both limited in their capacities and centrally controlled 
students have no opportunity to acquire a disruptive mastery of the 
technology itself. 

Labs like these are prime examples of the non-neutrality of technology. 
They do not foster all or even several types of learning but rather one 
particular, and particularly narrow, conception whose origin is not with 
teachers who work with children but with the technologists, 
industrialists, and military designers who develop "man-machine systems" 
(Noble, 1991). They do not encourage or even permit many types of 
classroom organization but only one. They instantiate and enforce only 
one model of organization, of pedagogy, of relationship between people 
and machines. They are biased, and their easy acceptance into schools is 
indicative of the extent to which that bias is shared by those who work 
there. 

The technology I have been describing is not the technology of computers, 
or computers-in-schools _per se_, anymore than armored cars represent the 
technology of internal combustion or washing machines the technology of 
electromagnetic induction. They are machines, to be sure, but machines 
require a social organization to become technologies. Thus the uses of 
computers described above for data-processing and "learning labs" are not 
examples of computer technologies but of normative, administrative, and 
pedagogical technologies supported by computers. 

This distinction is important because many teachers, lay people, and some 
administrators have concluded from their experiences with such systems 
that computers in school are anathema to their notions of what schools 
ought to do with and for children. Computer-based technologies of the 
kind described above are hardly "neutral." Indeed, they are intensely 
normative and send unambiguous signals about what school is for and what 
qualities teachers ought to emulate and model. Interpersonal and social 
dynamics, serendipity, cognitive apprenticeship, and play all seem to be 
disdained by this instantiation of machine learning. The teacher's fear 
of "being replaced by a computer" is a complex anxiety. It obviously has 
a large component of institutional self-interest, since no-one wants to 
lose their job. But the notion that it would be possible to be replaced 
by a machine cuts deeper, to the heart of teachers' identity and 
self-respect. There has evolved among teachers an insular culture of 
self-congratulation that attempts to reassure them that they are 
competent and selfless professionals, that their social and institutional 
function is to develop the very best qualities in the children they 
serve. The suggestion that the de-skilled tasks that teachers are called 
upon to perform might be better performed by machines calls this 
self-image into question in a manner that is painfully direct. It is 
hence unwelcome. 

Beyond the question of self-respect but intertwined with it is the 
frustration that many teachers experience with the promulgation of a 
purely rationalist notion of education. Teachers, after all, are witness 
and partner to human development in a richer and more complex sense than 
educational technologists will ever be. Schools are where children grow 
up. They spend more waking hours in school with their teachers than they 
do at home with their parents. The violence that technologists have done 
to our only public children's space by reducing it to an "instructional 
delivery vehicle" is enormous, and teachers know that. To abstract a 
narrow and impoverished concept of human sentience from the industrial 
laboratory and then inflict it on children for the sake of "efficiency" 
is a gratuitous, stunting stupidity and teachers know that, too. Many 
simply prefer not to collaborate with a process they experience as 
fundamentally disrespectful to kids and teachers alike. 

Finally, there is the issue of the reshaping and redefining of teaching 
practice to suit the needs of technology. Cuban and Cohen maintain that 
technologies that are not sufficiently flexible to suit the existing 
strictures of classroom practice have little chance of significant 
implementation (Cohen, 1987; Cuban, 1986). While this may be true for 
"instructional delivery vehicles" like educational films or television, 
it doesn't hold for the myriad other educational technologies whose 
domain and deployment are not circumscribed by an individual classroom. 
The most obvious example is standardized testing. There is an extensive 
body of literature which shows that this technology, seldom supported and 
often resisted by teachers, has nevertheless had profound consequences on 
their classroom practice (Shepard & Dougherty, 1991; Shepard, 1991). 
Teachers have significantly reoriented the content and method of their 
instruction to facilitate capture by these instruments. Despite the 
absence of formal institutional sanctions, teachers have succumbed to 
strong pressure from their administrations for students to perform well 
on these tests, and have restructured their practice accordingly. The 
dictum that, "when the classroom door closes teachers can do what they 
like," doesn't apply when crucial technologies of assessment reside 
outside the classroom (See Note 4). Teachers are hence understandably 
concerned that the introduction of computers in the form of a technology 
with its own built-in assessment capabilities will not function to 
provide them with another tool they can use or not as they wish, but 
rather that it might force them to tailor the content and style of their 
teaching to suit the technology.