Designing for Critical Technology Literacy in Teacher Education

• In Event: Educating Techno-Skeptics: Critical Approaches to Educational Technology in a Dystopian World

Abstract

New technologies, whether freely available printed books, instructional radio, or distance learning via television, are regularly professed to be the silver bullet for any problem in education and the racial achievement debt is no different (Ladson-Billings, 2006). But technologies are created and recreated within existing social structures and their ensuing ideologies with new exemples reinscribe ongoing power structures (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). For example, a large “digital use divide between learners who are using technology in active, creative ways to support their learning and those who predominantly use technology for passive content consumption” (Cullata 2016, p.5) exists in American schools--that digital use divide exacerbates the disparate access to educational technology between affluent suburban districts which have a “10-year head start on urban and poor districts that didn’t have any money to buy technology…” only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Online Equity Would Require More than Chromebooks, 2020).
This portion of the symposium reports on design principles derived from a study of teacher candidate learning during a required technology course in an urban teacher residency program. Building on the work of Hall (1996), Kellner and Share (2007), and Postman (2011), the course design focused on identifying ideologies baked into digital tools so teachers could build integrated plans for educational technology in their classrooms without losing their own commitment to providing an excellent, equitable, and transformation-oriented education. The design principles include: (1) playful and productive failure; (2) focus on teacher histories and identities related to technology; and (3) accountable talk structures to bring the digital and critical perspectives to bear.
Engaging with new digital tools in ‘badly structured’(Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012) manner with plenty of safe opportunities to have digital tools fail helped teachers identify creative uses for digital tools rather than static steps to follow. Relatedly, personal and professional technology identities mediate teacher use of digital tools which is deeply consequential for teachers learning to use and critique educational technology (Author, under review). Finally, because of the need for playful enactment and complex intersections between teacher identity, classroom context, and digital tool availability, it is important to structure teacher learning around critical practices rather than lists of tools. Engaging in accountable talk structures provide opportunities to make connections between the digital and social justice realms.
Taken together these three design principles provide a road map for future iterations and expansions of technology courses in teacher education programs that are committed to social justice. Incomplete technology preparation leaves novice teachers unprepared for the current contested educational terrain of educational technology and likely to perpetuate the use gap. To counteract the current failure, we can engage apprentice teachers in developing an integrated practice-based identity as transformation-oriented social justice educators prepared to teach in a technology-rich world.

Author

• Jamie D. Gravell, California State University - Stanislaus