Raising Tech Consciousness: An Article and a Lesson
Civics of Tech Announcements
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!
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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.
By Jacob Pleasants
I often think about the work of the Civics of Technology community as one of consciousness raising. How can we draw attention to issues around technology, schools, and society? How can we raise people’s awareness to the multifarious impacts that technology has on us and on our planet? How can we complicate the stories that are told about technology and help people take on alternative perspectives and ways of thinking? How do we help people develop critical perspectives on technology?
On this topic, I have two things to share.
First is a research study that I conducted as part of the wonderful team of Dan Krutka, Xiaoning Gui, Charles Logan, and Marie Heath. The paper is titled “Coming to Critical Technology Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study of Educators” and was recently published in Learning, Media, and Technology. In this study, we wanted to gain insight into how educators develop critical perspectives on technology. We decided to study that process retrospectively by gathering stories (in writing and interviews) from individuals who had managed to develop critical views. You may recall seeing our invitation to participate in this story-gathering effort last year - our sincerest gratitude to all those who shared their stories with us!
We used Freire’s (1970) theory of Critical Consciousness as an interpretive lens in our study, and we identified several pathways by which those educators came to their views on technology. Particularly interesting were the “change agent” experiences that most of our participant described that prompted them to take on more critical orientations. The most common change agent experiences occurred during graduate school and/or in while working in or adjacent to the EdTech industry (several participants described profoundly disillusioning experiences). Our participants’ stories help us see how critical technology consciousness can come about, which has been informative for us as we think about how to engage in our collective consciousness-raising projects.
Second is a lesson that I recently developed and used with a group of undergraduate engineering and environmental sustainability students. I wanted to get those students thinking critically about data, particularly from non-human subjects. Think: measurements of water quality or traffic volumes or electricity usage. Data like these are not governed by human subjects research ethics, and yet are morally significant all the same. How might we go about raising students’ consciousness of the ethical issues that can arise?
I invite you to explore the lesson that I put together, which you can find here and on our curriculum page. It draws deeply from D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism (2020), which was one of our previous book club reads!
I hope that you will find these resources useful in your own consciousness-raising work.
References
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury.
Pleasants, J., Gui, X., Krutka, D. G., Logan, C., & Heath, M. K. (2024). Coming to critical technology consciousness: a phenomenological study of educators. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2024.2438925