Challenging Western and Global North Paradigms in Ed Tech
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By Marie K. Heath
Part of our work in the Civics of Technology project is envisioning and taking action toward more just technological futures. Recently, my colleagues Drs. Benjamin Gleason, Rohit Metha,Ted Hall, and I published a paper arguing that educational technology’s historic (and present) entanglements with the fields of educational psychology, the military-industrial complex, and big tech constrain the imagination of the field. We offer three frames: collective, critical, and ecological, to re-envision educational technology research, and thus the findings, implications, and possibilities of educational technology in learning and society.
We note that an emerging group of scholars and educators across the globe are engaging in critical (Tshuma, 2021), feminist (Atenas et al., 2022; Eynon, 2018), and decolonial (Zembylas, 2021) educational technology work. However, despite these efforts, the organizations which sit in positions of power to influence K-12 educational technology practices and policy, particularly in the US (e.g. ISTE, SITE, US DoE National Educational Technology Plan) rarely attend to this work. Finally, we note that three of the four authors on our article earned degrees specifically designed to research educational technology, but little to none of our preparation included critical or non-western perspectives. We came to this critical work through our own reading, research, and communities. We offer our paper as a resource, for scholars, who, like us, were not prepared to do critical research but would like to find paths to hold institutions to account.
In our paper, we propose possibilities for research and imagine what might change in the futures of education technology if the field widened its gaze and used more interdisciplinary approaches to research. More specifically,
We wonder how the intellectual genealogy and intimate relationship with educational psychology influence the scope and imagination of educational technology research. What does it mean for educational technology’s research questions, methods, and approaches when the field defines learning through individual perspectives of knowing? What other considerations might the field of educational technology honor as knowledge or as an important influence on schools, if it attended to the social and historical traditions of edu- cation research? How would the field develop new conceptions of what is possible with technology if educational technologists, following cultural psychologists (Cole, 1998), focused on authentic practices of mediated activity with technological tools? What if the field took a longer view of cognition in which human development occurs over months, years, or generations—how might this alter the conception of collective activity (Packer & Cole, 2020)? Whose knowledge and traditions are privileged and whose are excluded when educational technologists take this approach? (Heath et al., 2023, p. 4)
To begin addressing these questions, we propose three frames to reimagine technology education research: collective, critical, and ecological. We propose collectivist approaches as encompassing the
anti-colonial, indigenous, Black, and intersectional identities and cultures that have been marginalized (but not defeated) by Eurocentric regimes of domination–generally understand knowledge-building as a relational, holistic, and creative process. In stark contrast to the Cartesian systems of logic in which thought governs the world in objective, material, measurable, linear, and individualistic ways, the collective world presumes relations, and webs of influence embodied with both presence and absence (Gordon, 2008). This world is full of vitality that cannot be contained by reductive, predictable, objective measurement– stories, images, dreams, visions, and even that which cannot be named (i.e., just out of reach of conscious tangibility) serve as the rich place where knowledge is built through metaphor, imagination, and creativity. The collective knowledges go beyond materiality into phenomenology to show relationality between and across material bodies–beings and technologies–and sense the unsensable in the process of knowing. (p. 6)
Critical approaches interrogate white “neutrality” and confront racism embedded in the system of schooling and in technology. Further, critical approaches recognize that racial integration alone will not lead to liberation (Bell, 1995). This approach builds on the work of Black scholars of science and technology studies (Benjamin 2019; Noble, 2018) and critical technology scholars (O’Neill, 2016). Critical theory applied to technology acknowledges the embedded power within technologies themselves, asserting that our technologies reflect and perpetuate racialized injustice (Benjamin, 2019). Finally, ecological approaches acknowledge the central role that digital media, platforms, and ecosystems play in our daily lives (Markham, 2020). From this perspective, scholars acknowledge the centrality of digital media as “the water” in which all of society swims and aims to situate technology itself as embedded in complex, political, cultural, and material relations.
We dive into the philosophical assumptions and methodologies of each of these frames in the paper (please email Marie if you’d like a free downloadable link!). Each of the framings challenges white and western notions of normativity and objectivity, and understands technology to be part of the fabric of reality, not an intervention to be placed into the existing reality.
Adopting any one of the framings demands that scholars consider their own onto-epistemological beliefs about learning, technology, and the extent to which public schools can and cannot lead to social change. New questions, methods, and theoretical framings in educational technology research can yield findings and implications rarely considered by the field, such as an acknowledgement of the role of race and power in technology, pedagogies of liberation that embrace indigenous ways of knowing and challenge global north notions of objectivity. In our paper, we argue that these approaches encourage the field to interrogate whiteness; center Blackness and Indigeneity; engage in collective authoring; imagine storying as technology; and explore networked research. Ultimately, the paper challenges the field to study more than technology as an intervention. We ask what it might be to work toward more just educational futures that dismantle the existing matrix of domination and honor place, space, tradition, culture, narrative, and storytelling.
References
Atenas, J., Beetham, H., Bell, F., Cronin, C., Vu Henry, J., & Walji, S. (2022). Feminisms, technologies and learning: continuities and contestations. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(1), 1-10.
Bell, D. A. (1995). Who's afraid of critical race theory. U. Ill. L. Rev., 893.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Social forces
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Harvard university press.
Eynon, R. (2018). Feminist perspectives on learning, media and technology: recognition and future contributions. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(1).
Heath, M. K., Gleason, B., Mehta, R., & Hall, T. (2023). More than knowing: toward collective, critical, and ecological approaches in educational technology research. Educational technology research and development, 1-23.
Markham, A. (2020). Doing digital ethnography in the digital age. Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. New York University Press.
O'Neill, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown Publishing Group.
Packer, M., & Cole, M. (2020). The institutional foundations of human evolution, ontogenesis, and learning. In Handbook of the cultural foundations of learning (pp. 3-23). Routledge.
Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tshuma, N. (2021). The vulnerable insider: navigating power, positionality and being in educational technology research. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(2), 218-229.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2021). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Tabula Rasa, (38), 61-111.
Zembylas, M. (2021). A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: Strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13.