ICT, Pedagogy and the Curriculum

Subject to Change

Viv Ellis, Avril Loveless

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134567102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the impact new information and communication technologies are having on teaching and the way children learn. The book addresses key issues across all phases of primary and secondary education, both in the UK and internationally.

ICT, Pedagogy and the Curriculum looks at the relationship between ICT, paradigms of teaching and learning, and the way in which curriculum subjects are represented. Three principal areas are addressed:

* the wider perception of ICT in society, culture and schooling
* the challenges to pedagogy
* the way in which ICT not only supports learning and teaching but changes the nature of curriculum subjects.

The tensions between the use of technology to replicate traditional practices, and the possibilities for transforming the curriculum and pedagogy are explored, offering an original and distinctively critical perspective on the way in which we understand ICT in education.

It will be of interest to all primary and secondary teachers and those in initial teacher training who are concerned about current technology initiatives in education and how to respond to them.

Part I

The cultural context

Chapter 1

ICT, the demise of UK schooling and the rise of the individual learner

Jack Sanger

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.

(Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia,
by Arthur Conan Doyle)

INTRODUCTION

This is a chapter that deals with United Kingdom educational futures, and as such it would be dubiously regarded by Sherlock Holmes. On the other hand it may be regarded as a useful exploration of vital current educational issues, and as contributing to the debate concerning the rethinking of teaching and learning over the oncoming years. Essentially, it begins with a critical view of what education has achieved in the British experiment in mass schooling over the last 100 or so years. Against this backdrop, the rise and rise of ICT, together with a view of education as a consumer market for corporate provision, is seen to pose a threat to stagnating educational systems. The chapter then explores briefly examples from what is happening in the higher education sector, with threats emerging from corporate and virtual provision, as evidence of changes that are already under way at the higher end of the educational spectrum. This is followed by the application of a scenario-building technique to infer four visions of what might happen to the schooling process in the early part of the twenty-first century, based on present evidence. It ends with the author's own view of which of these, currently, is the most likely to occur.

We are coming to the end of the great experiment in mass schooling. The Government's continuation of the regressive crusade of its predecessors to control the teaching and learning processes through an outdated National Curriculum will soon seem like some stubborn but ill-conceived effort to hold back the tide. In Canute's case it was a deliberate attempt on his part to demonstrate the inexorable force of nature over the powerlessness of the human individual. In the Government's it is a demonstration to the people of its faith in a system of mass education: a system which, on a daily lived basis, has seen far more failure than success, has produced generations of spectacularly unskilled workers, with absurdly high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy and which extinguishes the desire to continue to learn in so many, young and old. The beginning of the new millennium will see the need to re-think the cost of schooling, the plant, the teachers, the support systems, as ICT becomes cheap and more easily accessible to the everyday user. How long will we support a Victorian system that tends to produce a meritocratic elite and a mass of barely educated, disenfranchised and uninterested also-rans?

We belong to an emerging society in which schools increasingly attune their activities to the pursuit of ‘objectives’ or ‘outcomes’, dislocated from the everyday lived world of their charges. The prescriptive focus of the National Curriculum on redundant content, skills and competences is not a dream for the future, or a survival kit for the present but, rather, a fundamentalist nostalgia for a time when every worker had his or her place, followed a single occupational future and when morality was constructed by an establishment of Church and State. The exception is the concentration on literacy and numeracy as being ‘process-oriented’ essentials in any citizen's armoury.

Meanwhile, our students live in a world of pluralist morality, constantly evidenced in TV talk shows, designer clothes, soaps, sex, unplanned births, sexually transmitted disease, recreational drugs, music, computer games and videos. They are the consumers of expensive ads and the objects they advertise belong to the world of entertainment and edutainment. Every minute of any day they can enter high-gloss mediated worlds that cost astronomically more to construct than any of their experiences in the classroom. For them a PC is a leisure window. But a cultural airlock separates the two worlds. In schools the PC is a work tool. Schools provide no routes for young students to understand, navigate and deconstruct media-induced experience, unless they are taking media studies or sociology. Nor are they allowed to be creative with it. In the main, teachers disown popular media as shallow entertainment, likely to cause more ill than good, the source of children's illiteracy, lack of concentration, violence or premature sexual drive (Sanger et al. 1997).

In the world outside the classroom the young consumer is gradually being educated in ways a school does not begin to recognise. Using entertainment technology, the young user can develop hand–eye co-ordination, spatial relations, graphical awareness, parallel reading from non-linear scripts, multi-line plots and problem solving. They can browse the internet to satisfy the quixotic desires of anarchism, fetishism or consumerism. Edutainment opens immediate access to gender politics, the bizarre and the dysfunctional, the disillusionment with work and the new profiles of family life, the cross-cultural, the interracial, the nature of war and suffering, abuse, poverty, famine, disease, the hypocrisy of politicians and the lies of adults. In other words, a child has an entree, through the vast array of available technology, into the same Pandora's box with which adults have to grapple. Edutainment knows no national borders. It is a dynamic Escher lithograph of surfaces and depths, hiding, revealing, distorting and making constantly ambiguous.

In schools, rules and conventions constrain you in what you say and do and think. They determine what is knowledge, what is useful, what is moral, what is right for the child at this time, at that age. But the child moves through an airlock into the unregulated world beyond, feeling the sudden withdrawal of the steadying hand on the shoulder, to be left to stumble upon, to discover, to explore the unrestricted. Young people inhabit, more and more, media-rich bedrooms (Livingstone and Bovill 1999) with video recorders, cable TV, games machines and PCs. The domestic market for technology has outstripped any possibility of schools keeping up. The marketing of domestic merchandise is now so accurate that consumers can buy goods whose ‘lean manufacture’ is designed to individual requirement, whereas, in schools, the basic unit of consumerism is ‘the class’. Just as teachers do not, in their classrooms, venture into popular culture, except in the specialist areas of sociology or media studies, in the main, parents don't interfere that much in their children's lives, since all of this is ‘since their time’ and the technology is bemusing and/or intimidating.

UNIVERSITY FUTURES IN THE USA

Given this brief scenario of the present state of technology and education, what futures are likely to stem from it? How can we make predictions from it? A University of Michigan website provides a possible methodological route forward.

This University of Michigan site uses a brainstorming approach to delineate four possible future scenarios for higher education in the USA. It describes the rationale of creating a structured matrix from the brainstorm:

The four scenarios that grew out of this structuring matrix can be seen as explorations of the four corners of the possible. They are meant to provoke thought and discussion about the future of higher education and scholarly communication.

(http://www.si.umich.edu/V2010/matrix.html)

Their original brainstorm produced the following list:

• cost containment

• productivity of the faculty (staff members)

• faculty work rules and practices

• teaching–research balance

• competitors, present and potential

• new collaborations, public and private

• the nature of knowledge work

• digital literacy/kinds of knowing

• educational technology

• digital copyright

• physical v. digital space

• certification

• student testing-quality control

• worldwide student demography

• public accountability.

The brainstorm suggests to those involved that higher education will undoubtedly be under very significant threat from external pressures and internal complacency:

As a result, we believe education represents the most fertile new market for investors in many years. It has a combination of large size (approximately the same size as health care), disgruntled users, low utilisation of technology, and the highest strategic importance of any activity in which this country (USA) engages. . . . Finally, existing managements are sleepy after years of monopoly.

(http://www.si.umich.edu/V2010/matrix.html)

Resulting from this immersion in debate about the key forces that may affect higher education in the early part of this new century, they produce quadrants whose axes are competition and digital literacy. At the high end of the competition axis, education is a market open to all-comers, public and private. At the low end, it remains a market competed for by present university interests.

And so they move to the development of the four scenarios. On the website, these scenarios are written in four different formats to maximise drama, from the anecdotal first-person ruminations on the demise of a tradition to the third-person post hoc analysis of market change. For example, one begins:

You are all aware of my deep regret, my personal sense of loss on this occasion. I've been with this institution for 22 years, and it's a small enough place that I know all of you personally. So enough of the official talk of falling enrolments and bad investments and infrastructure debt overload. . . . But we underestimated both the drop in the life span of a college degree and the price students would pay to have that degree renewed again and again.

Another states:

Multimedia pushed Chavez and Pinsky into the new realm of faculty stars. A select few of these digerati pulled in multimedia dollar incomes from their digital packagings, whether CD-ROMs or online courses. Many universities positioned themselves well in this area by taking on the role of ‘studio’ to their stars – acting as production company and distributor. The star system increased competition among faculty and began to make the AAU look in some respects like the NFL – a few superstars demanding and getting outrageous salaries and bonuses.

The narrative augmentation is stripped away, edited and summarised here, in order to give a sense of some of the issues that underpin each scenario.

Low competition – low digital literacy in HE

Universities stand still. Shrinking student numbers result in higher fees. Academic productivity contracts introduced. Some turn into academies for foreign students. Some develop contracts with corporations to provide accredited training. ‘Life-long learning contracts introduced.’ Some technology introduced on campus but it is peripheral to the old flesh-and-blood pedagogies. Big Ten get bigger and sell their information and resources to others – knowledge retail outlets. Mergers take place. Corporate providers leave the education market alone. Parents begin to look for alternatives to the high cost provision.

High competition – low digital literacy in HE

Fall in parental support for universities. New multimedia providers move in with government support. Leaner, more responsive, faster changing, edutainment-based training and education. Specialised providers develop virtual courses for professional markets. Assessment and certification online. Tied to a continuing professional development on subscription version of life-long learning. Students stay home to study using technology. Big Ten survive. Others quickly die.

High competition – high digital literacy in HE

Most universities can't compete because of increasing professional specialisation. A high proportion go to the wall. Corporate providers do it better: onsite, at work. Universities too expensive for most of the workforce. Digital resources introduce real-time problem solving, modelling and complexity far more graphically than can staff in classes. The best universities survive, offering an education for the whole person – expensively.

Low competition – high digital literacy in HE

The paperless age has dawned, as universities become virtual. They have beaten off the competition from corporate providers. Professors become ‘stars’ as multimedia rights are protected and their work is sold globally. They leave tenure and become educational consultants. Tenure becomes the coinage of second-class lecturers. Borderless provision means huge markets, particularly for United States’ super universities. Actual residency becomes minimal or unimportant for all foreign students. Introduction of team certification and other forms of co-operative certification to meet industries’ needs for certification.

Looking at the four scenarios provokes, perhaps, an uncomfortable feeling of recognition. None of them seems too extreme to be ruled out, at least by this reader. There are many examples of private industry–university collaboration. For example, Deakin University in Australia has a collaborative project with the Coles Myer retail outlet to provide training and qualifications for all staff. Ford has a ‘private’ university in Valencia, Spain, that also involves collaboration with Anglia Polytechnic University in the delivery of Masters’ courses for middle managers. The largest development in Britain involves the siting of the Microsoft research facility next to Cambridge University in order to secure ‘the best brains’. However, these developments follow a traditional pattern that is about to be ruptured by the desire of industry to move beyond collaboration and into the market of education itself. A current collaborative project, involving the Centre for Educational Policy and Leadership at Anglia Polytechnic University and commissioned by the CVCP and HEFCE, is exploring the impact of virtual and corporate universities in Europe and the USA on UK higher education. A parallel study is being undertaken in Australia. The UK study will provide advice to policy makers on how higher education institutions should respond to the new global markets, considering both the opportunities and challenges which are being created and the potential for UK universities to compete in the new environment. The recommendations from the work cover both national policy and the implications for individual institutions in terms of

• the regulatory framework in which the higher education sector operates;

• the changing demands from higher education consumers both in domestic and international markets;

• accreditation and quality assurance issues;

• the organisation and governance of institutions;

• teaching and learning strategies;

• staffing, infrastructure and overall costs.

This enquiry into the threat of virtual and corporate competition is already touching on many of the elements included above. It suggests that most British universities still do not realise that ICT is not just a bolt-on tool to traditional delivery. Nor is it just a convenient distance-learning instrument. Eventually it will provide completely individualised learning opportunities for every world citizen, a true multimedia learning environment in the home and at the touch of a button.

SCHOOLING FUTURES IN THE UK

Following the same analytical approach, what are the main issues facing schools, as a result of technological change, in the UK during the early part of this century? Here are some suggestions:

• The National Curriculum

• children's rights

• multi-ethnicity and religious diversity

• cost containment

• productivity of the teachers

• national conditions of service

• teaching-professional development balance

• competitors, present and potential

• new collaborations, public and private

• the nature of knowledge for working futures

• global economy and national needs

• digital literacy/kinds of knowing

• educational technology

• digital copyright

• physical v. digital space

• qualifications

• student testing/quality control

• worldwide student demography

• public accountability

• parental involvement.

Utilising the same scenario-building techniques as were used for Michigan's website, let us construct four possible schooling futures for around the year 2020. We will use the same axes – competition and digital literacy. They are not ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• ICT, Pedagogy and the Curriculum
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface by Stephen Heppell
• Editors’ introduction
• PART 1 The cultural context
• PART II Pedagogy and ICT
• PART III ICT and the curriculum
• Index