MacFormat 1995 April/macformat-023.iso/Shareware City/Info/technology-within-curriculum/integrating tech/integrating tech.rsrc/TEXT_151.txt

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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.