The Politics of Education and Technology

Conflicts, Controversies, and Connections

N. Selwyn, K. Facer, N. Selwyn, K. Facer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137031983
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

This book examines the struggles over technology's use in education, digging into what the purpose of education is, how we should achieve it, who the stakeholders are, and whose voices win out. Drawing on theoretical and empirical work, it lays bare the messy realities of technology use in education and their implications for contemporary society.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Need for a Politics of Education and Technology

Neil Selwyn and Keri Facer

Introduction

Digital technology is now a prominent feature of education provision and practice in many countries and contexts. Mobile telephony, internet use, and other forms of computing are familiar, everyday tools for many people in developed and developing nations. Billions of personally owned digital devices are in almost continuous use, and billions of others are used communally in shared, public settings. Governments of nearly every country in the world now have well-established policy drives and programs seeking to encourage and support the use of digital technologies in schools, colleges, and universities. Digital technology is a topic that is of significance to a global educational audience.

Yet for such a significant issue, there remains relatively limited analysis of the politics, the economics, the cultures, and the ethics of digital technology in education. Academic study of educational technology, such as that found in leading journals such as Computers and Education, for example, has developed into a field dominated by psychological (usually social-psychological) perspectives on learning and teaching. Many educational technology researchers proudly align themselves with the “learning sciences” rather than the social sciences. This research is therefore often concerned primarily with matters relating to individual behaviors, individual development, and classroom practice. The predominance of these concerns has led to a rather restricted view of technology use led by enthusiasms for social-constructivist and sociocultural theories of learning. This tends to offer a very localized concept of the “social” contexts in which technology use is situated. Despite regular calls for theoretical expansion and sophistication (e.g., Hlynka & Belland, 1991; Livingstone, 2012), the educational technology research field ventures rarely from these concerns. Indeed, it could be argued that even as it approaches middle-aged respectability, educational technology is an area of academic study that remains stuck stubbornly in its ways—dominated, at best, by an optimistic desire to understand how to make an immediate difference in classrooms and, at worst, in thrall to technicist concepts of “effectiveness,” “best practice,” and “what works.”

Of course, despite the preponderance of this sort of work, it is worth noting that other traditions of research in this field draw on cultural studies, media and communication studies, and sociology of digital culture (e.g., Facer et al., 2003; Valentine & Holloway, 2003; Jenkins, 2006). These alternative analyses are often concerned with understanding and documenting the lived digital cultures and experiences of young people and are frequently used to shine a light on the failures of mainstream education, in particular in its capacity to recognize and engage with diverse learning cultures. This research should be credited, in particular, for making visible the creativity and talents of marginalized communities in ways that disrupt the confident assertions of the school or university as monopoly authority on educational value or agent for social justice. However, such research, where it operates without a broader political and sociological account of education, risks colonization as it is recontextualized in practice. For example, celebratory ideas of young people as “digital natives” can be used to obscure the economic and social differences in young people’s lives and have been recruited as justification for political projects from individualized learning to the marketization of education systems. At its worst, much of the political, cultural, and economic critique implicit in this research is lost in favor of simplified calls to appropriate digital cultural tools to engage recalcitrant youth in unchanged and unchallenged educational goals. The work becomes, too often, a set of “tips for teachers” that is disconnected from its rich, disruptive, and uncomfortable connections with the realities of life beyond the school walls. While there are researchers who resist such taming (e.g., Margolis, 2010; Mahiri, 2011) many of these who seek to retain an analysis of the politics of education and technology increasingly work outside, and are therefore arguably marginalized from, the debate about mainstream education.

As a consequence, educational technology can be a frustrating area of academic scholarship for the politically inclined reader to follow. On the one hand, thousands of hours and millions of dollars are directed each year toward the optimistic exploration of how technology is capable of supporting, assisting, and even enhancing the act of learning. On the other hand, as anyone involved with the day-to-day realities of contemporary education in its different guises will attest, many of the fundamental elements of learning and teaching remain largely untouched by the potential of educational technology. As such, an obvious disparity between rhetoric and reality runs throughout much of the past 25 years of educational technology scholarship. As Diana Laurillard (2008, p. 1) observed wryly, “Education is on the brink of being transformed through learning technologies; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.”

While similar tensions between rhetoric and reality can be found within many areas of applied academic study, a particularly resilient strain of cognitive dissonance appears to pervade the educational technology literature. Despite a long history of eagerly anticipated but largely unrealized technological transformation, many studies in the field continue to focus on the “what ifs” and “best case” examples of education and technology—often producing persuasive evidence of educational potential, but only on occasion acknowledging the individual and institutional “barriers” that are presumed to be restricting the realization of this potential in practice. As such, the academic study of educational technology could be accused of having worked itself into an analytic blind alley. This is research and writing that is well able to discuss how educational technologies could and should be used, but less competent and confident in discussing how and why educational technologies are actually being used. Moreover, this is research and writing that is ill equipped to support the building of an achievable political or institutional project to realize desirable change.

Such a focus on potential rather than practice also produces a number of surprising (and increasingly unforgivable) blind spots in the field. For example, while studies of the potential use of digital technologies in the teaching and learning process abound, there has been a near-universal silence on the actual use of technologies for the purpose of data collection, performance management, “learning analytics,” and the like. Rather, it has taken researchers from outside the field to begin to interrogate the proliferation of data, audit, and performance management practices in which the impact of technology has arguably been spectacularly pervasive. As authors such as Jenny Ozga (2009) have noted, we are now witnessing educational systems that are based around the creation and use of data that support the organization of political relations through communication and information, with digital technologies supporting well-established systems of self-evaluation, development planning, and performance. The intentions of this data turn are deliberate—not least, the intentional move toward what Ozga (2009) terms “governing education through data” and the shift from central regulation to individual self-evaluation. In this sense, digital technologies are now an integral component of the new governance of educational institutions and those who work within them along neoliberal principles of decentralized and devolved forms of control. Educational technologists, however, have remained conspicuously silent on the role of technology in face of the “conservative modernization” of education and the emergence of a data-driven “audit culture” (Apple, 2010).

Crucially, then, educational technology remains a field of academic endeavor in which instrumentalist accounts dominate and in which the reader of much of the academic literature gains very little purchase on the social, economic, political, or cultural nature of educational technology. This matters first, because we are left with an inadequate picture of what educational technology means in and for education today. More importantly, it matters because it leaves us without the detailed and ultimately more useful accounts of educational technology that are needed to really understand and address the implications of digital technology in education for issues of social justice. Against this background, there is clearly scope to reassess and perhaps broaden the ways in which the academic study of educational technology is understood.

The question of what forms this reassessment and retuning might take is addressed throughout this book. While a number of themes are developed during the course of the book’s 11 chapters, it is fairly obvious at even this early stage of our discussion that such reassessment involves moving beyond asking questions of how digital technologies “could” or “should” be used in educational settings, or speculating on the “potential” of technology to change learning. Instead, we need to take a deliberately critical approach that approaches the topic of education and technology in relational terms. As Michael Apple (2010) reminds us, the relational approach involves producing accounts that situate educational technology within the analysis of unequal relations of power elsewhere in society today, within the lived realities of dominance and subordination that are currently ongoing, and within the conflicts that are generated by these relations. Thus, instead of being distracted by our own (often privileged) personal experiences of digital technology, this book starts from the premise that we need to work instead toward understanding and acting on educational technology in terms of its complicated and often unjust connections to the larger society. In short, we need to develop a more politically aware and sociologically grounded narrative of change. This, then, will be the approach that shall be pursued throughout all of the proceeding chapters.

Education and Technology: The Need for a Political Perspective

This book starts from the contention that the design and use of digital technology in education is a profoundly political concern—inevitably raising questions of how new educational practices are being negotiated through the introduction and use of new technologies, and who benefits from such new settlements. Indeed, the use of digital technology in education introduces a complex mix of public and private actors into the education arena. These include the designers and developers of new tools, the multinational corporations that they often work for, new networks of consultants and advisors, along with new generations of ostensibly “digitally active” young people, the businesses and practices of digital youth cultures, and the families and communities within which young people lead their lives.

In this context, educational technology needs to be understood as an intense site of negotiation and struggle between these different actors. These are struggles that take place across a number of fronts—from the allocation of resources to the design of curriculum, from the maximizing of profit and political gain to attempts to mitigate patterns of exclusion. Put bluntly, as technology-based education and “e-learning” continue to grow in societal significance, it follows that the use of digital technology in education needs to be understood in distinctly political terms of societal conflict and struggle over the distribution of power. For instance, this includes acknowledging the clear linkages between educational technology use and “macro” elements of the social structure of society such as global economics, labor markets, and political and cultural institutions. Similarly, at the “micro” level of the individual, the act of technology-based learning also needs to be understood as being entwined with the “micropolitics” of social life. As such, many of the questions that surround education and digital technology are familiar from longstanding debates around education and society—in other words, questions of what education is, and questions of what education should be.

This book therefore seeks to look beyond apolitical portrayals of educational technology. Instead, it focuses on the areas of tension, contradiction, and conflict that underlie the discourses, the practices, and the technologies that constitute any instance of digital technology use in education. The forthcoming discussions therefore encompass—but are in no way restricted to—a set of interrelated issues and concerns, that is,

• the political economy of educational technology;

• the role of critical theory in the discussion of education and technology;

• educational technology, inequalities, and social justice;

• educational technology, neoliberal ideology, and emancipatory discourses;

• education technology, material resources, and resilience;

• configuring the “ideal user” of educational technologies;

• democracy, surveillance, resistance, and voice; and

• questions of who benefits from technology use in educational settings.

In exploring and examining these issues, all the chapters in this book seek to develop a set of related arguments on the theme of supporting what can be termed the critical study of educational technology. The role of the remainder of this introductory chapter is to provide a justification for what is to follow. As such, the chapter will now go on to outline the terms of reference for a critical approach, justifying the need for academic work that focuses on the social conflicts and politics of educational technology use at individual, institutional, and societal levels of analysis. In this sense, we seek to position the book alongside the burgeoning tradition in education scholarship for critical and democratically minded analyses of education. As Gert Biesta and others have argued, making sense of contemporary education entails focusing on a range of issues “beyond learning”—not least the political and democratic dimensions of education that are often overlooked in the relentless asking of “questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of the educational process” (Biesta, 2006, p. 22). This need to force the focus of educational technology away from the dominant discourses of “learning” and the attendant learning sciences is a fundamental task, and one that Norm Friesen and Ben Williamson undertake in the proceeding section of this book. Only by giving greater credence to critical questions of politics and democracy, it is reasoned, can academic writers and researchers then go on to develop meaningful proposals for changing educational technology provision and practice.

Steps toward the Critical Study of Educational Technology

It is important to note at this point that adopting a politically aware “critical” approach toward educational technology does not necessarily entail a dogmatic adherence to any particular theoretical stance, school-of-thought or “-ism.” Rather the critical perspective is rooted in a broader recognition of technology and education as a set of profoundly political processes and practices that are usefully described in terms of issues of power, control, conflict, and resistance. As such, much of the underlying impetus for a critical approach toward educational technology stems from a desire to foster and support issues of empowerment, equality, social justice, and participatory democracy (see Gunter, 2009). These ambitions are perhaps best summarized by Amin and Thrift (2005, p. 221) in their four-point agenda for critical scholarship as follows:

First, a powerful sense of engagement with politics and the political. Second, and following on, a consistent belief that there must be better ways of doing things than are currently found in the world. Third, a necessary orientation to a critique of power and exploitation that both blight people’s current lives and stop better ways of doing things from coming into existence. Fourth, a constant and unremitting critical reflexivity towards our own practices, no one is allowed to claim that they have the one and only answer or the one and only privileged vantage point. Indeed, to make such a claim is to become a part of the problem.

As Amin and Thrift’s brief manifesto suggests, a critical approach involves asking a number of questions about education and technology that seek to draw attention specifically to a critique of power and exploitation in this arena. Such a critique is not, importantly, conducted in a self-indulgent fashion for its own sake or as a detached academic exercise, but is fundamentally oriented toward opening up a better understanding of the barriers, opportunities, and resources for “a better way of doing things than are currently found in the world.” To that end, we would propose the following approaches toward a critical study of educational technology.

Moving beyond a “Means-End” Way of Thinking

First and foremost, the critical study of technology and education is underpinned by a rejection of any commonsense understanding of the imperatives and potentials of educational technology or, in fact, education in general. As Boody (2001, p. 7) points out, many of the discussions of the benefits of digital technology in education take the form of “means-end thinking”—that is, thinking that starts from a given end and then strives to find the means of accomplishment. Consider, for example, the way in which the introduction of digital technologies into education has been seamlessly incorpor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Need for a Politics of Education and Technology
• Part I Recognizing the Politics of “Learning” and Technology
• Part II The Politics of Technological Opportunity and Risk
• Part III The Global Politics of Education and Technology
• Part IV The Politics of Education and Technology: Extending beyond “the Digital”
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index