New Publication Preview Of “What Relationships Do We Want with Technology?”
Civics of Tech Announcements
Our blog posts are a little off schedule this week and next, but we’ll be back to our regular Sunday blog posts after the new year.
Next Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 02/06/24. 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, February 6th, 2023 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Spring Book Clubs Announcement!: We will hold three book clubs in spring 2024, including two of the most influential books on our project with a new book sandwiched in between them. We often talk about how Neil Postman’s work influenced our ecological perspective and Ruha Benjamin’s work has influenced our critical perspective that we take up in much of our work. Yet, we’ve never held book clubs over either. We’re excited to return to those two classics and also dive into Joy Buolamwini’s highly anticipated new book. You can find all our book clubs on our Events page.
Register to join us on February 15th as we discuss Neil Postman’s classic, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology;
Register to join us on March 21st as we discuss Joy Buolamwini’s new book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines.
Register to join us on April 25th as we discuss Ruha Benjamin’s instant classic, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code .
by Jacob Pleasants, Dan Krutka, and Phil Nichols
How can we get critical perspectives on technology to be taught in K-12 schools? It’s a vexing question, and we are not the first ones to take it seriously. Neil Postman, who has influenced our thinking, once proposed that critical examinations of technology be made into its own core subject, to be taken up by all public school students. Alas, it was not a successful proposal. And his was not the only (unsuccessful) one.
Perhaps it was out of sheer stubbornness that the three of us decided to take another stab at this question. More likely, it was the conviction that the question is simply too important to abandon. And thus, the three of us embarked on a project of trying to learn lessons from the past to develop a new way of thinking about how to teach about technology in schools. The product of this collaboration is our new article published a couple weeks ago in Harvard Educational Review. In that article, we do the following:
Argue that technology education needs to occur as part of core subject area instruction, not as a separate subject or class.
Trace prior efforts in the core subject areas to address the interactions between technology and society, and why those efforts failed to take root.
Propose technoskepticism as a unifying goal that can bring coherence to the ways that technology is taught across the core subject areas.
Introduce the Technoskepticism Iceberg, and associated terminology, as conceptual and pedagogical tools to assist with that unified project.
Writing this paper was truly a learning process for us. All three of us have an enduring interest in bringing critical views of technology into our respective disciplinary spaces (Science, Social Studies, English Language Arts). Our perspectives overlap in many ways, but each of us also brings distinctly different ways of thinking about technology education and how it aligns with our disciplinary spaces. What this paper represents is the fruit of our efforts to establish a common language and way of thinking about technology education that is flexible enough to be relevant across disciplinary contexts, but consistent enough to align multiple distinct efforts.
You can read the full paper here. We also added the Technoskeptical Iceberg to our Curriculum page. If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already introduced the Iceberg when our shorter, practitioner article was published earlier last year in Phi Delta Kappan. However, this HER article goes into much more depth and adds much more historical context.
Putting our ideas into action is an ongoing project, and our ongoing collaboration continues to be a generative space for us to do that work. We hope that more will join us as we continue to advance technoskepticism - and critical perspectives on technology - in our educational spaces.
Reference
Pleasants, J., Krutka, D. G., & Nichols, T. P. (2023). What relationships do we want with technology? Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 486–515. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.486