Success and Failure of Innovation and Transformation Processes in Teaching with Digital Media

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Digital transformation and educational equity in the German education system: Perspectives on opportunities and challenges in school and classroom development

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged teachers to redesign instruction using technological artifacts and new, innovative digital tools (Sliwka & Klopsch 2020). At the same time, with a heterogeneous student body, teachers are faced with the task of adapting lessons to the different learning requirements and needs of learners in order to provide the most individualized support possible. Today, technological artifacts are present in almost all areas of life and increasingly shape social interaction. In the culture of digitality, they are changing teaching and learning situations in schools, not least because of the developments brought about by the pandemic. Technological artifacts enable a temporal and spatial decoupling of learning and create potential for individualized and self-organized learning processes. However, these digital innovations cannot be reduced to their technical or material dimension. Rather, technological innovations emerge from social processes and depend on their application (Stalder 2016). Against this background, we speak of socio-technical innovations that have the potential to change teaching and learning in the long term. The project ‘UDIN’ focused on the development of such digital and inclusive learning scenarios in Germany. Over a period of three years, teachers, master’s students and researchers worked together in so-called Research Learning Communities to develop digital learning arrangements and implement them in schools. The overarching goal was to contribute to greater educational equity by linking inclusion and digitization in the classroom. One subproject used ethnographic observation protocols to study interaction with digital media, on which this contribution is based. The article is dedicated to the empirical investigation of how such socio-technical innovations have been implemented in the context of the crisis and the culture of digitality, and how they reconfigure teaching. It focuses on ethnographic observation protocols from two schools, which are analyzed using grounded theory. The empirical data show how teachers applied digital technologies to respond to pandemic-related restrictions while taking into account the individual learning needs of students. The contribution focuses on crisis management and examines the contrast between successful and failed innovation processes in classroom organization. Special emphasis will be placed on the analysis of methodological strategies used to examine the relationship between organization and innovation. Looking at the relationship between inclusion, digitalization and educational equity, it becomes clear that digital transformation processes in education are not only technical, but also social challenges. The presentation can therefore make an important contribution to the discussion on the role of digital transformation in education and its potential impact on educational equity. The results of the project underline the need to combine digital and inclusive approaches in order to harness the opportunities of digitalization for a more equitable educational society.

Author

• Marion Schwehr, Universität Siegen