Being a Civics of Tech Parent Part 1: Problems and Propositions
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By Allie Thrall
Note: This is part 1 of a 3-part series – and I need your participation! Please consider submitting a short testimonial (here) by November 1, 2024 about your experience with educational technologies as a Civics of Tech parent! Read on for more details!
During my 6-year-old’s short career in public schooling, I, as her mother and as an educator, approach her parent-teacher conferences with a kind of eagerness. What kind of student is my daughter becoming? What of her identities are emerging and shifting in the school environment? What does she love? When is she at her best? And, when is she not? I feel a sense of giddiness around her learning – her quirky writing, her obsessive questioning of the world, her studied attempts at silliness (always a bit off the mark – she’s learning!).
However, I have quickly found such excitement to be unwarranted. Rather than the portrait of a young learner that I hope for, at her conferences I receive piles of data, produced by testing software. While my daughter runs around the room, drawing pictures for me and showing me her favorite classroom knicknacks, the teacher carefully walks me through data point after data point: “This is what we expect of 1st graders, and this is where she is… Don’t worry about this, we haven’t covered this material yet… I don’t like this part of the test because students only get three seconds to answer the question, which feels really fast for them…”
In these packets, I don’t see my daughter. I see numbers, percentiles, scores. Reductions of learning – of her – into metrics.
This should come as no surprise. During our daily after school exchanges, I ask, “How was school today? What did you do?” To which, she regularly replies, “It was fun! I played video games!” I’ve volunteered in the class before, only to watch her and her classmates listen to a read aloud… via YouTube video. Even as I wrote this blog, I asked her, “What apps do you use at school?” She readily recited: Amplify, Dream Box, Zearn, Epic, Prodigy, ST Math…
Educational technologies are already entrenched in her young schooling experience – shaping how, what, and why she learns, and who, as a student, she is.
And, while it might be easy to blame her teacher or school, research has shown that this phenomenon is far from isolated, rather it is a growing, global educational imperative.
As a member of the Civics of Tech community, and an educational researcher focused on the impacts of digital technologies on our civic possibilities, I have my fair share of concerns about this situation. As we know, technologies are not neutral. They have intended and unintended consequences, beset with unevenly distributed costs and benefits, and value-laden designs.
Herein lies the challenge of being a Civics of Tech parent: having cultivated a critical eye toward educational technologies, what are we to do in the face of nearly daily reminders of the ways our children’s education is being overwritten by edtech?
In this three-part blog post series, I hope to start a conversation around this question. While I outline my own concerns and experiences in this essay, in the second essay I invite the Civics of Tech community to broaden this scope by submitting their own testimonials exploring: What have been your experiences as a Civics of Tech parent? Where and how have you seen educational technologies manifest in your child(ren)’s schooling? What do you see as being the benefits and drawbacks? What have you/could we do about it? In the third essay, I will offer forth the tactics compiled to resist and refuse educational technology’s harms based on these testimonials, and that will hopefully serve as a resource to bring this conversation to more educational stakeholders.
Despite my chafing against the paradigm of “parents’ rights” in American education, parents are certainly positioned to pushback on the structures of schooling. However, this is far from straightforward. As per most social causes, the difficulty rarely lies in naming the problem, rather it lies in unifying around coherent and effective solutions.
As a teacher, I became practiced at resisting and refusing the encroachment of edtech into my classroom. Whether I was being tasked with new demands for digital or data management, I knew when and how to use a tactic – from strategic illiteracy (“I don’t even know how to open the app!”), to teaching about technologies (see examples here and here), to outright objection (My last year of teaching 8th grade United States history I was asked to use a test prep software in my class. When I opened it up, the first question it spit out was something to the effect of, “What did Robert E Lee do before he was a Confederate general?” It was a perfect example of how educational technologies not only reinscribe problematic social narratives, like an overemphasis on the life of a Confederate general, relative to other histories, but can also worsen those problems – recalling the life history of Robert E Lee is NOT a state standard. Needless to say, this was broached with administration, and used as fodder for critical analysis with my students.). Ultimately, I felt able to leverage my power as a teacher to assert a critical stance toward educational technologies, even if that meant being a faulty cog in the machine.
As a parent, I grapple with what to do. Do I approach the teacher with these concerns? I am wary of this tactic, as teachers are already juggling, often unmanageable, pressures. Do I approach the school administration? (I’ve already done this and been brushed off.) Do I speak with other parents? Parents have a broad set of dispositions relative to digital technologies and schooling, as they attempt to manage the “risks” around, for instance, the implications of screen time versus the need to prepare their children for imagined technological futures.
However, even removing “risk” from the equation, what stance do we unify around? Even our self-anointed, community Luddites don’t advocate a complete abandonment of our emerging technologies. Surely, some of them do something for us!
So, what do educational technologies do for us? Under what circumstances? How can we know? These are questions that need to be addressed – and parents need to bear the onus of pursuing them, as much as anyone else.
So with that, I leave us with more questions than answers. To contribute to this dialogue, please click here to submit your testimonial about how educational technologies are manifesting in your child(ren)’s schooling by November 1, 2024. If you have ideas, questions, or concerns, please contact me at Allie _ Thrall 1 @ baylor . edu.
I look forward to exploring our collective insights!