Toward Research Futures in Year Two
Civics of Tech announcements:
First “Talking Tech” Monthly Meeting one week from Tuesday!: We are launching a new monthly event called “Talking Tech” on the first Tuesday of every month from 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. These Zoom meetings will include discussions of current events, new books or articles, and more. Participants can bring topics, articles, or ideas to discuss. Our first meeting is Tuesday, February 7th. Register on our Events page or click here.
Book Club Reminder: Our next book club will discuss the 2020 book Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein on Thursday, March 16th, 2023 from 8-9:30pm EST/7-8:30pm CST/6-7:30pm MST/5-6:30pm PST. The book is available in multiple formats, including audiobook, and a paperback version was just released! Register on our Events page or click here.
by Daniel G. Krutka, Jacob Pleasants, & Marie K. Heath
One of our ongoing goals that we want to make a focus for 2023 is to harness the insights and expertise of the Civics of Technology community to have an impact on schools through practice and research. In this week’s blog post, we invite our growing community to help us think through strategies for making this happen.
Our overarching aim is to help students wrestle with a core idea of our project: Technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced. Members of our community have developed and continue to create curricula that pursue that goal. We need to increasingly examine how those curricula help teachers and students think critically about technology. We need to understand how teachers might use or modify our approaches to teach about technology, and how students interact with and learn from those lessons. Most research tends to be taken up by individuals or small groups, but we are wondering what it might look like to have an organization intended for support and collaboration. Is this something we can do together?
Below, we sketch a few of the ideas that we have for the coming year. We are currently trying to think through the different contexts in which we might do this work, the possibilities that each context provides, and the challenges that exist. Some of the questions on our mind include:
What would technology education look like in these different spaces?
What could we learn from each of these spaces?
How would we go about studying our work in these spaces?
Who is already doing this kind of work?
Who wants to be doing this kind of work?
As we ponder these questions, we invite you to contact us with ideas, partnerships, or invitations into classrooms to conduct research. We hope to report back on these research projects, but we also hope we find more partners in the work. Let us know if that’s of interest to you.
The Higher Education Context: Because many of us—and the three authors of this article—teach courses for pre-service teachers, this is often the most accessible space to incorporate CoT ideas. There are a couple of different contexts in which we might do this:
Educational Technology Course: Most teacher education programs have a required ed tech course, though they vary in focus and length. This is a very relevant place to address the CoT for the purpose of preparing teachers who will think critically about the educational technologies they use in their classrooms, which could include one of our four educational technology audits. This is also possibly a space to address how to teach K-12 students about technology. Many ed tech courses address topics like digital citizenship, media literacy, and digital ethics—any of which can provide a space to talk about technology education more generally.
Subject-Specific Methods Course: For most of our future teachers, if they are going to teach students about technology, it’s going to happen as part of their instruction in a core subject area (e.g., Social Studies, Science). Even though technology is often overlooked within those subject areas (ref to our work here), there are also many opportunities that exist with standards and curricula. For example, Dan has developed a module and is planning to research how a technology module in their elementary social studies methods class might affect their ideas for teaching critically about technology.
The Informal K-12 Education Context: When it comes to working with K-12 students, one approach is to work with them outside of formal school structures. Free from the constraints of curricula, standards, assessments, and other school routines, this is a space where technology education can be the focus. It’s a space to test novel approaches and learn from and with students. On the other hand, these are places where our reach will often be limited. Students would be joining us voluntarily and our approaches might not readily translate to general education environments. There are pros and cons to consider. There are many different informal spaces in which we might work, but two that come to mind:
Work with after-school programs that already exist: There is usually existing infrastructure here that can help connect us with students. Perhaps add on to something that is happening in a computer science or robotics club or a makerspace. Or just add some technology education programming to a set of options that are already being offered. Although we would have to fit our approaches into existing structures, it still offers much more freedom than a general education classroom.
Develop a dedicated summer program: This would be something more intensive, focused on technology education, and custom-built. It would involve taking on the logistics of recruiting students, finding learning spaces, and much more. Alternatively, as with the previous option, we could leverage a summer program that already exists and add to it rather than create something new. We have already started applying for grants to hopefully make this a reality.
The Formal K-12 Education Context: This is probably the most challenging space to gain access to, given all of the institutional constraints. But it is ultimately the space that we want to most want to impact. Getting technology education into formal K-12 schools is our long-term goal, and at some point we will need to tackle its hurdles and challenges. What are the most likely points of entry?
Partnering with an interested teacher: If there are teachers who are already trying to do things that are aligned with CoT—and there certainly are—connecting with those people and making a Research-Practice Partnership happen would be ideal (e.g., Ryoo et al. 2021). Perhaps we could work with a teacher to study the effects of what they are already doing, or work with them to further develop lessons and units that they want to teach.
Partnering with a whole school: Here the point of contact would be an administrator, and our work would need to align with one of their perceived needs. Maybe it’s a school that wants to make better use of educational technology, or address some kind of tech-related issue. This has the potential to be high impact, but also requires that quite a few pieces align.
We have consistently found that students are concerned with the role of technology in their lives. From the varied effects of smartphones to the disproportionate effects of algorithmic bias, students often have a strong sense of justice. We hope to hear and learn from students about the technology education they want.
Reference
Ryoo, J., Flapan, J., Hadad, R., Margolis, J., Amalong, J., Aranguren, L., ... & Zuchowicz, M. (2021, March). Learning with Leadership: Perspectives from a Statewide Research-Practice Partnership Focused on Equity-Oriented Computing Professional Development for K-12 Administrators. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 317-318).