What Is Just Technology Integration? Fostering Change While Reconciling Reality

• In Event: Critical Perspective on Technology Integration in Secondary and Higher Education

Abstract

Technologies are often uncritically framed as positive and efficient solutions, ignoring the ways they foster inequity, promote racialization, and cultivate carceral pedagogy. This theoretical paper investigates the complexities of just technology integration. Using a conceptual framework of technologically embedded injustice, informed by Black feminist theory, we argue educational technologies are tools of the oppressor, made by the oppressor, with power baked into their designs. From this premise, the question of “bridging the digital divide” presents as a colonialist solution to a problem of systemic oppression. Access is an important area of need; however, we assert that justice runs deeper than access. We close with recommendations for critical approaches to teaching about technology in education for cultivating more equitable educational systems.

Authors

• Sumreen Asim, Indiana Univ. Southeast

• Marie K. Heath, Loyola University Maryland

• Natalie B. Milman, The George Washington University

• Jessa Henderson, George Washington University