Deschooling Educational Technology: Assessing the Conviviality of Special Tools in a Cosmetology Learning Web

• In Event: 61.068 - MTCC Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 61.068-8 - Deschooling Educational Technology and Expectations

Abstract

This paper uses the lens of “conviviality” to address Ivan Illich’s challenge that “learning webs” require access to “ordinary” and “special” things. It uses data from a participatory ethnographic research project with a community of predominantly African-American cosmetologists that aimed to connect practices and tools in their salons with tools for computing, chemistry, and engineering. In analyzing field notes and interviews on the design and use of programmable software, a pH visualizer, and a tensile strength device, my findings suggest that the convivial bridging of ordinary and special things is best accomplished when tools can be designed and used for locally defined entrepreneurial purposes. Therefore, deschooling educational technology means creating strategies that support the ordinary things of established learning webs.

Author

• Michael L Lachney, Michigan State University