Notes From the Digital Field: New Technologies and Change in Educational Policy Research

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Can Educational Research Influence Educational Change? AERA, New Audiences, and New Modalities for Influencing Change

Abstract

Objectives:
The main objective of this paper is to highlight and bring into conversation new research that examines educational policy perspectives via digital modes of communication. In light of this year’s AERA theme, this paper asserts the importance of exploring the development and application of innovative, online research methods and capabilities, and argues that educational policy initiatives should incorporate the local knowledge shared by practitioners in publicly available digital spaces such as blogs, discussion forums, and micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and social media updates.

Statement of Problem:
hile policy directives largely drive educational change, the process of policymaking often excludes or disregards teacher input (Cohen & Barnes, 1993; Cuban, 1998; Elmore, 1980; Hargreaves, 1998; Ingersoll, 2003; Stein, 2004), and the result is a constantly moving target, or, as Fullan (2001) put it, a series of “disconnected, episodic, fragmented, superficially adorned projects” (Fullan, 2001, p. 21) that amount to little consistent change in student achievement, teachers’ working conditions, or school quality (Apple, 2006; Rousmaniere, 1997; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). As ever widening channels of communication continue to grow, practitioners’ expertise and local knowledge are more readily available than ever to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. In the last six years, the number of bloggers globally has risen by 500% (Perlmutter, 2007, p. 78; Pingdom, 2013), and teachers’ participation in blogging and other online social media has risen along with the rest of the population (Greene, 2013). Data in recent research studies that examine online discussion substantiates the claim that practitioners provide a wealth of local knowledge that can and should inform future policymaking efforts (Donovan, 2013; Greene, 2013; Sosnowy, 2013).

Modes of Inquiry:
This paper offers a review of recent and emerging research that suggest alternative, digital modes of gathering data and engaging with practitioners to inform the practice of creating educational policy. Recent research that explores blogging; social networking updates such as on Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, etc.; online replies to editorials about schooling; and other public, digital forums, are examined in this paper in order to reframe, rethink, and reimagine new approaches to educational policymaking.

Significance and Implications:
Teachers are held accountable for a set of paradoxical, shifting policy expectations that they do not initiate or control (Greene, 2013; Stone, 1997). Each new educational policy provides a new set of concepts and directives that escalate teachers’ work demands and create a state of what Richard Elmore (1980) once described as “long on description and short on prescription” (p. 601). Teachers are both consumers and producers of content in digital fields, and a growing percentage actively write about their experiences of policy in the classroom in public, digital media. It is up to researchers and policymakers to explore these new channels through time and space into the classroom, for “as the technological imperative continually bears down on the various realms of public and private life, the need to better understand how new communication and media technologies are used to mediate and reframe our everyday experiences becomes greater” (Song, 2009, pp. 2-3).

Author

• Kiersten Greene, SUNY - College at New Paltz