Pedagogy and Learning with ICT

Researching the Art of Innovation

Bridget Somekh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134129881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bridget Somekh draws on her experience of researching the introduction of ICT into education to look at ICT development over the last twenty years. The book provides a fascinating, in-depth analysis of the nature of learning, ICT pedagogies and the processes of change for teachers, schools and education systems. It covers the key issues relating to the innovation of ICT that have arisen over this period, including:

• the process of change
• educational vision for ICT
• teacher motivation and engagement
• the phenomenon of 'fit' to existing practices
• systemic constraints
• policy and evaluation of its implementation
• students' motivation and engagement
• the penetration of ICT into the home
• online learning and the 'disembodied' teacher.

Part I
Understanding innovation

The three chapters in this section represent my current thinking about the possibilities for transforming schooling with the digital information and communication technologies available in the twenty-first century. The emphasis is on pedagogy and learning and how innovation happens in social settings, such as classrooms and schools, that have developed traditions of practice that are ritualistic – in the sense that they perform the identities of participants: how you should behave as a teacher, as a student, as a parent, as a headteacher. Changing these ritual practices is disruptive and evokes strong passions because it is either threatening or inspiring, often depending on the ways that it opens up new spaces of power for some and closes down the existing power bases of others. Students are at the heart of this process, and innovation in schooling is in part determined by the constructions of childhood that are prevalent in the society of which schools are part.

The three chapters are designed to be read together. The socio-cultural theories that enable us to understand innovation are explored in Chapter 1 and illustrated with examples of transformed pedagogy and learning; these are drawn from countries where the education system has enabled the development of a shared vision and its implementation in schools through exploratory research-informed practice. In Chapter 2 I have used socio-cultural theories to draw key understandings from research into the use of ICT mainly in English schools, where the education system since 1988 has adopted a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to change; this seeks to drive innovation by setting clear targets, inspecting schools’ performance and ‘naming and shaming’ those showing ‘serious weaknesses’, and encouraging competition between schools on the basis of their students’ performance in national tests and examinations (published in comparative league tables). In Chapter 3 I focus on two research studies we have carried out in the Centre for ICT, Pedagogy and Learning at Manchester Metropolitan University, in which we have observed the extent to which transformation in pedagogy and learning is possible in the English education system by researching prototype innovative practices informed by socio-cultural theories of innovation.

These three chapters seek to establish that innovation depends on social processes between inter-related phenomenal levels of the national and educational cultural systems: differences in these cultural contexts shape the possibilities for transforming pedagogy and learning, making ICT powerful as a means of enabling change in some contexts and emasculating its power in others. The transformative power of ICT is illustrated in the changed life styles it has opened up for increasingly large numbers of young people in their out-of-school world, among them my grandchildren, Laurel, Jake, Lucy and Hector, to whom this book is dedicated.

1 Insights from socio-cultural theory

A framework for research and analysis

The aim of policy-makers and teachers is to transform education – that is to make radical improvements to its processes and outcomes–so that more students reach higher levels of achievement. For most the goal is also to make education more personally fulfilling for students, to nurture their creativity, develop their cognitive abilities, and give them purpose and autonomy as life-long learners in a rapidly changing world. Potentially, the change to students’ learning processes can be transformative as they find ways of using ICT that both extend their capabilities and fit their preferred style of working; but the process of innovation is rarely sufficiently understood to generate the necessary flexibilities in how adults, and the education system as a whole, expect students to work. For example, the emerging social practice of ‘multi-tasking’ between several applications running simultaneously on the computer using the ‘windows’ environment designed for that very purpose, is so radically different from the traditional assumption that learning requires the mind to focus on one thing at a time, that it is routinely discouraged by teachers and equally routinely practised covertly by students using the ALT+TAB window-switching facility.

In this chapter I will draw on theories of innovation derived from action research, socio-cultural psychology, activity theory and complexity science, since these provide theoretical frameworks for researching innovation by intervening in socio-cultural practices in order to change them. This is an approach to research which combines the design of models or prototypes of new ways of working with research into their implementation, using participatory methods which develop practitioners’ knowledge so that they are able to make informed choices.

Theories with explanatory power for understanding the process of change

The cultural practice known as ‘education’ occurs within and among complex systems that span several phenomenal levels: there are individuals, therefore collectives of individuals (including classrooms, schools etc.), there are communities in which schools exist, and there are larger cultural contexts.

(Sumara and Davis 1997, p. 418)

The difficulty in understanding the process of innovation is that we see it necessarily from our own standpoint. We need to make meaning of the activities we are engaged in, but can only attempt this in terms of our own experiences. We have to imagine the future in terms of the meanings we have constructed to make sense of our own past. But our own agency – that is, our ability to exercise some control of today’s activities and play an active part in planning and implementing future activities – is contingent on the socio-cultural context within which we are living and working, across all the ‘phenomenal levels’ listed above by Sumara and Davis. This difficulty often applies as much to those researching innovations as it does to those participating in them, since researchers tend to specialise in working at specific phenomenal levels, for example on teaching and learning (mainly at the classroom level), school improvement (mainly at the whole-school level) or policy analysis (mainly at the national level). Research which spans all phenomenal levels is necessarily large-scale and unattractive to sponsors because of its cost and supposed lack of focus. In order to understand the innovation of ICT in education, and in particular the mechanisms which enable innovative work with ICT to transform pedagogy and learning, I will draw as much as possible in this chapter on research which focuses on the inter-relationships between local phenomena and the wider socio-cultural context. However, it is possible to create a larger analytic framework using socio-cultural theories which clarify the relationships between levels, and to use this as a lens for understanding the significance of knowledge from a larger range of research studies at different phenomenal levels and I will use the framework in this way in Chapter 2. Inevitably I will also draw in both chapters on my own experience as a researcher and evaluator of innovative ICT programmes, since relationships between phenomena at different levels become clearer when one develops a sustained programme of research made up of a number of projects within the same field but with different specific foci (see Chapters 4–10 of this book).

I want now to describe the analytic framework that I am using to understand innovation. It brings together ideas from a number of writers who adopt different theoretical perspectives which have considerable overlaps between them. All are concerned with understanding the actions of individuals and groups and how these are co-constructed and contextually shaped and mediated, hence they all have direct relevance to understanding change processes. Their points of overlap serve to highlight those features which have the greatest explanatory power, and the variations between the theoretical perspectives create sensitivities to factors which might have been lost by working with only one. This deliberately heterogeneous approach to theory is described more fully in an article written with my colleague, Matthew Pearson (Pearson and Somekh 2006, pp. 528–31). It can be seen as akin to Levi-Strauss’s notion of the ‘bricoleur’ who works with tools that come to hand, bringing them together in ways that are creative rather than following an agreed orthodoxy.

My starting point is action research which integrates research and action in a cyclical process of inquiry, action, reflection and evaluation (Somekh 2006b). Its theoretical origins are in the work of Lewin whose ‘force field’ theory focused on analysing the relationship between social context and behaviour (Lewin 1951). Cole quotes Lewin’s proposition that behaviour at time ‘t’ is a function of the situation at time ‘t’ only, ‘hence we must find ways to determine the properties of the lifespace at a given time’ (Cole 1996, pp. 222–7). Action research, therefore, focuses on human behaviours in specific contexts and develops understandings of the factors that shape behaviour rather than generalisable truths. It places participants at the heart of any attempt to adopt an innovation within a social situation. By playing an active and leading role in researching their own practice they generate unique ‘insider’ knowledge which informs the change process. In part this is through making their tacit knowledge of pedagogy and learning explicit (Polanyi 1958), coming to understand other points of view and observing both the intended and unintended consequences of their actions. Through reflection on research data they are able to understand their own interconnectedness with other participants – for example teachers come to understand that their pedagogy is co-constructed with their students and colleagues – and by undertaking a new role as researchers they learn to use knowledge to inform the planning and implementation of action steps, and evaluate their impact. Action research emphasises participation and mutual respect between participants at different levels in an organisation and facilitators or coresearchers from outside the organisation. It shifts the traditional balance of power, enabling participants to develop new kinds of agency by positioning themselves politically and strategically to form new relationships. Through methods such as interviewing and observation (often using audio-or video-recording) action research generates new insights into the relationship between self and others and often reveals the unintended consequences of actions. Through the high degree of reflexivity that this work engenders action research integrates personal learning with the process of changing professional practice. For a fuller statement of eight methodological principles for action research see Somekh (op. cit., pp. 6–8).

The second body of theory I draw upon is complexity theory which is described by Sumara and Davis (1997) specifically in relation to action research. As will be clear from the quotation from their work at the beginning of this section, complexity theory emphasises the ‘interrelationship of things’. It draws on a wide range of disciplines, such as physics, biology, economics and psychology, to illustrate how even the most complex systems have a capacity for ‘spontaneous self-organisation’. Just as human beings seek to find meanings and relationships between phenomena, as is illustrated by the way that languages are deeply embedded with metaphorical usage of terms, so any system with or without the human mind’s capacity for consciousness will respond to additions/events/disruptions by adapting to maintain its own coherence. In this sense complex systems ‘embody their histories’ (quotations are from Sumara and Davis 1997, pp. 416–17). In a later article, Davis and Sumara (2005) describe how complexivists in recent years have gone beyond using these theories to describe and explain existing systems and increasingly turned their attention to ‘the deliberate creation and nurturing of complex systems’. They set out the four ‘key conditions’ that need to be present in complex systems to enable ‘nurturing’, hence interventions in an existing system (say a school and its wider context) need to set out purposefully to create these conditions. There must be a number of people involved so that there is opportunity for interaction; there must be ‘some level of diversity’ of participants and activities so that ‘novel responses’ are possible; they must have ‘a means by which individual agents can affect one another,’ and have ‘a distributed, decentralised control structure’. These match well with the conditions that are established through engagement in action research which, as described above, encourages collaboration and dialogue among participants, changes in their roles, a shift in the power balances towards more democratic decision-making, increased flexibility of working practices and the development of unique, data-informed, insider knowledge of the patterns of social interaction. Other important concepts from complexity theory are that change in complex systems is not predictable, hence nurturing is a responsive, opportunistic process that cannot be reduced to a set of agreed procedures; and that complex systems are characterised by ‘emergent phenomena’ which are studied to gain ‘enhanced understandings of the common features of complex systems, while preserving the particularities of those systems’ (quotations are from Davis and Sumara 2005, p. 457).

In many ways complexity theory is akin to chaos theory. Kompf (2005, pp. 226–7), in an essay review of three books on ICT in education published between 2001 and 2003, describes how processes of globalisation and ‘the concomitant alternative ways of knowing provided by ICT’ have radically changed the way we judge the validity of knowledge, and ‘how it is learned and subsequently reconstructed by learners’. He characterises theories of knowledge and learning as ‘a complex adaptive system’ drawing on chaos theory rather than complexity theory as a framework for analysis. Taking the human characteristic of searching for meaning as his starting point he sees ICT as having created a large number of perturbations in what was previously an accepted order underpinning social mores and customs. The interconnectedness of the order of things which is illustrated by fractal patterns in mathematics, and the concept originating with Lorenz that tiny movements such as the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can affect the inter-related meteorological patterns of the whole world, leading to changes in the weather in Texas (Wikipedia, accessed 7.9.06), means that the Internet has created an environment of challenge. ‘Such challenges have introduced an element of chaos into the intellectual and social order that had previously provided a stable, predictable, and secure environment’ (Kompf 2005, p. 277). As described by Kompf, ICT is not an innovation in the sense commonly used by Rogers (2003) and Fullan and Stiegelbauer (1991) of an initiative introduced purposefully into an existing system in order to bring about improvement, but a major perturbation that has destabilised the existing order and led to a large number of unpredictable changes. Kompf warns that while we lag behind in our understanding of ‘the full impact of ICT on learning and teaching’ the self-organising capacity of an ICT-rich social order may, itself, lead to control over education passing out of the hands of educators ‘into the hands of administrators and corporate opportunists’ (Kompf 2005, p. 233). This is certainly plausible. While it is true that there have been many initiatives in many countries which have attempted to control and use the power of ICT to develop and improve existing education systems, these have been set in the context of ICT’s massive and unpredictable impact on the larger social order, which is increasingly creating a ‘backwash’ of unexpected challenges for schools. Kompf’s description of changes brought about within universities, and society as a whole, by access to the Internet, fits well with McLuhan’s conception of ‘electric technology’ having gone beyond all previous technologies which ‘extended our bodies in space’ and become an extension of the human mind and consciousness:

We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man (sic) – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.

(McLuhan 1964, p. 3)

New light is shed on these theories from action research, complexity science and chaos theory by a fourth body of theory put forward by Burbules and Smith (2005) in a response to Jim Marshall’s reading of Wittgenstein (Smeyers and Marshall 1995) as ‘a theorist of sociocultural practices, and practices constituted within systems of discursive power’. They begin by emphasising Wittgenstein’s concept that ‘human activity is rule-governed’ which they see as fundamentally important in understanding education. They list four ways in which he uses this concept to develop specific insights. It is key to understanding ‘how young people learn and are initiated into social practices’ which Wittgenstein likens to learning the rules of a game, not by memorising them but by ‘learning how to go on’. It follows that in human activity the priority should always be to find out ‘what rules are at work and how they are being followed’ (original emphasis). Further, Wittgenstein’s concept of rule-following often involves ‘tacit’ knowledge rather than knowledge that can be articulated, indeed that this knowledge ‘may be beyond the capacities of language to articulate’. It follows that it is crucial to seek to understand the rules that govern human activity through developing knowledge from the inside, because it is simply not possible to understand human behaviour by observing it from the outside; and it is, therefore, never possible to generalise from behaviours of people in one setting to predict the behaviours of different people in other settings. The increased interest among policymakers, influenced by writers such as Hargreaves (1996, p. 2), in seeking evidence of ‘what works’ through funding quantitative empirical research and systematic reviews of research literature is therefore seen by Burbules and Smith as ‘simple-mindedness that flies in the face of the Wittgensteinian notion of rule-governedness and its consequences for achieving a useful knowledge of human affairs’.

As in complexity theory, Wittgenstein’s theory shows that social practice is governed by a multiplicity of factors, including unpredictable tacit rules, which mean that controllable features of schooling such as specified teaching methods, tasks, resources and assessment procedures are always insufficient to shape students’ behaviours. The example that Burbules and Smith give is of skate-boarding as a social practice which, although dangerous and to outsiders apparently purposeless, can be understood by ‘conceiving and framing the social phenomenon in a way that presumes its meaningfulness and coherence to its practitioners’. Thus skate-boarding can be understood as a means of young people exercising power vis-à-vis adults and conforming to norms of peer culture (quotations are all from Burbules and Smith 2005, pp. 426–8). Another example from secondary schools in England, noted by Hope, is that the culture of staff surveillance over students’ Internet use gave rise to a culture of resistance among students. As a result, they ‘played online games, accessed recreational material, downloaded pornographic images, utilised chat-lines and accessed sites that had been labelled as undesirable by staff ’, following peergroup rules of ‘ “playfulness” that occasionally challenged staff authority’ (Hope 2005, p. 367). Another important concept in Wittgenstein’s analysis of social practice is seen by Burbules and Smith (op. cit.) to be his understanding of the flexibility of meanings in language. They remind us that this is where Marshall sees Wittgenstein’s philosophy coming closest to the ideas of Foucault and the postmodernists. The meanings of words are always contingent upon the rule-governed tacit knowledge of the social group. Through language, therefore, ‘the mind is essentially public, not essentially private’ (ibid., p. 429) and notions such as what works are always used discursively ‘as exercises of power’ (ibid., p. 427).

I draw also upon a number of writers whose ideas can be loosely grouped as contributing to socio-cultural-historical theories of human activity. Wertsch provides a good starting point when he writes:

The task of a sociocultural approach is to explicate the relationships between human action, on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional, and historical contexts in which this action occurs, on the other.

(Wertsch 1998, p. 24)

Many overlaps with the theories discussed previously begin to emerge from this quotation. Human action takes place ‘in interrelationship with things’ and ‘embodies the histories’ of its cultural and institutional contexts. It is ‘adaptive’ to these contexts and their normative values and organisational structures. Cultural psychology is primarily focused on the development of mind through social interaction, following the Vygotskian concept of mediation of human actions, which Wertsch clarifies may be both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ and ‘may be carried out by groups, both small and large or by individuals’ (ibid., p. 23). Wertsch proposes that for the purposes of analysis human action cannot be sepa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Understanding innovation
• Part II Challenges of change
• Part III Challenges of policy and practice
• Part IV Research methods for ICT in education
• Notes
• References