Whose interests do teaching machines serve?
by Charles Logan
I’ve learned a lot from Audrey Watters. Whether it’s her work on challenging the myth of the factory model of education, her description of the ed-tech imaginary, or her conception of a Luddite pedagogy, Watters’ ideas have influenced how I think about technology and teaching, and really, how I think about my identity as an educator interested in how technology might support learning.
When I heard about Watters’ book Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, I excitedly awaited its publication. And sure, I thought, I could read the book alone, but I knew I’d want to talk about it with other people, so I turned to the Critical Ed Tech Scholars Alliance (CETSA), a grassroots group of educators working in higher ed, and asked if anybody wanted to form a book group. The M.I.T. Press site explains that Watters’ book helps understand “how ed tech was born” by turning to the history of “twentieth-century teaching machines—from Sidney Pressey's mechanized test-giver to B. F. Skinner's behaviorist bell-ringing box.”
Image of the cover of Audrey Watters' book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.
Folks from CETSA and beyond ended up meeting several times over the fall of 2021. Out of conversations emerged two resources we’re now happy to share with the world. The first resource is a reading guide (created by Charles Logan) featuring recent interviews with Audrey Watters talking about Teaching Machines plus discussion questions for every chapter. The second resource is an Inquiry Design Model (IDM) lesson plan for Teaching Machines that we have added to the curriculum page of the Civics of Technology site. The detailed lesson plan asks, “Whose interests do ‘teaching machines’ serve?” and includes 11 sources to help students and teachers answer the compelling question. The IDM (created by Dan Krutka, Marie Heath, and Charles Logan) also brings in a contemporary educational technology, Class Dojo, and would be a compelling lesson for an undergraduate educational technology class to think about the ways educational technologies are pitched and taken up in schools. Educators can make a copy of a Google doc of the IDM for use and modification for their contexts.
Watters ends Teaching Machines by returning to the historical and ongoing work of resistance and refusal. From this history and those who’ve pursued other visions of education, she writes, “we can glean ways to construct and share knowledge that depend on humans rather than machines, liberating us from the efficient control of the ‘Skinner box’” (p. 263). We invite you to explore our contribution to this vital project.
References
Watters, A. (2021). Teaching machines: The history of personalized learning. MIT Press.