Being a Civics of Tech Parent Part 2: Testimonials
Civics of Tech Announcements
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 11/12/24 (Note the updated date!). Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, November 12th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Book Club, Tuesday, 12/17/24 @ 8 EST - We’re reading Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality by Roderic N. Crooks. Charles Logan is hosting, so register now to reserve your spot!
Spring Book Clubs - The next two book clubs are now on the schedule and you can register for them on the events page. On February 18th, Allie Thrall will be leading a discussion of The Propagandists' Playbook. And on April 10th Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Building the Innovation School, written by our very own CoT Board Member Phil Nichols.
Call for Chapters: Civics of Tech contributor, Dr. Cathryn van Kessel, asked us to share the following call for chapters: “Rewiring for Artificial Intelligence: Philosophies, Contemporary Issues, and Educational Futurities.” This edited collection seeks to explore how we can critically rewire our approaches to AI, ensuring that it not only integrates “seamlessly” and into and across different educational contexts but also raises “unseemly” philosophical and ethical questions. This volume will focus, in part, on the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence and implications for higher education, teacher education, and/or K-12 public schooling system. Submit proposals here by November 29.
By Allie Thrall and Charles Logan
Last month, Allie began this 3-part blog series by asking Civics of Tech parents to submit testimonials exploring the question: having cultivated a critical eye toward educational technologies, what are we to do in the face of near daily reminders of the ways our children’s education is being overwritten by edtech?
By compiling these testimonials, we hoped to better understand the scope of concerns parents in our community face with regards to educational technologies in their kids’ schooling. We wanted to know what questions arise from those concerns, what forms of advocacy we might cohere around to raise our concerns, and what tensions exist amongst these concerns, questions, and advocacy when approaching the school system from our position as parents.
You can read, in full, the testimonials that we collected from Civics of Tech parents here. While being a fairly contained set of testimonials (8 in total), a number of things became quite clear.
First, the scope of concerns that have arisen from our collective experiences is immense. In these testimonials, you will find worries with the ways edtech reshapes our children’s understandings of themselves; the contestation surrounding research on youth, mental health, and technology use; issues of algorithmic bias; commercialization of education; cyberbullying; lack of accommodations for students with learning differences; data exploitation, technology bans; children’s privacy; surveillance of children and teachers; access to inappropriate online content; the lack of oversight from teachers, administrators, and districts; the questionable learning outcomes of educational technologies; and the way edtech is shifting relationships between teachers and learners. That is quite a number of concerns – and this list hardly captures them all!
The parent testimonials also raised different types of pressing questions. Some questions, for instance, addressed our daily human-technology interactions, such as:
“Is it healthy for me as a parent to be constantly updated in real-time on everything my child does at school?” (Testimonial 1 - Anonymous)
“How to negotiate the use of tech within children's friendship groups - when games and video drive a lot of play at this age and can lead to inclusion and exclusion?” (Testimonial 2 - Anonymous)
Other questions focused on the purpose of education, and where our voices fit in shaping the directions of education:
“How to build community led change with parents and the school that is not driven by fear and panic over dangers of simplified 'screen use', but does acknowledge the very real and problematic ways tech is shaping education and our children's lives?” (Testimonial 2 - Anonymous)
“What are the risks of opening up classrooms to live video, especially a room full of students with no way to consent to the video?” (Testimonial 4 - Michael)
“How does this impact the development of children?... Does this change their perspective of the purpose of school?” (Testimonial 4 - Michael)
We appreciate and can identify with the vulnerabilities parents expressed in articulating these questions, demonstrating the regular challenges of navigating the complexity of parenthood and schooling in the digital age.
In the testimonials you will also note that these multi-scalar questions and their adherent complexity have not dissuaded advocacy efforts. Parents shared their pathways toward making change – often starting with a conversation or an email, and then growing toward building a community, an organization, making public appeals, and reaching toward school partnerships. While parents have found varying degrees of success in their efforts, there remains a shared sense of striving, not only for bettering their own children’s experiences, but for bettering education broadly.
Among the many things to take away from these stories, it is clear that the advance of educational technologies into schools does not stop where the classroom ends, but weighs heavily on parents, who are trying to make sense of and support their children’s educational journeys. And, while the scope of concerns and scale of questions we are asking are quite broad, what Civics of Tech parents are looking for is the opportunity to assess the educational technologies our kids are encountering, and a more democratic approach to decision-making amidst what feels like a ceaselessly cementing process of edtech encroachment in schooling.
In the third part of this series, we will work toward further articulating what we have learned from these testimonials for a broader public audience. While we can see there is no quick or simple remedy for the many concerns we share, we hope to contribute to parents’ advocacy efforts by drafting a coherent and research-supported message with the aim of opening dialogue and making room for the democratic decision-making that we seek.
Want to read the full testimonials? You can read them all here.