Technology Refusal and the
Organizational Culture of Schools
Steven Hodas
University of Washington
Citation: Hodas, S. (1993, September 14). Technology refusal and the
organizational culture of schools. Education Policy
Analysis Archives, 1(10). Retrieved [date] from
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n10.html.
Abstract
Analyses of the deployment of technology in
schools usually note its lack of impact on the day-to-day values
and practices of teachers, administrators, and students. This is
generally construed as an implementation failure, or as resulting
from a temperamental shortcoming on the part of teachers or
technologists. It is predicated on the tacit assumption that the
technology itself is value-free. This paper proposes that
technology is never neutral: that its values and practices must
always either support or subvert those of the organization into
which it is placed; and that the failures of technology to alter
the look-and-feel of schools more generally results from a
mismatch between the values of school organization and those
embedded within the contested technology.
THE CULTURE OF SCHOOLS
For nearly a century outsiders have been trying to introduce
technologies into high school classrooms, with remarkably
consistent results. After proclaiming the potential of the new
tools to rescue the classroom from the dark ages and usher in an
age of efficiency and enlightenment, technologists find to their
dismay that teachers can often be persuaded to use the new tools
only slightly, if at all. They find further that, even when the
tools are used, classroom practice--the look-and-feel of schools
--remains fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, the last technologies
to have had a lasting impact on the organization and practice of
schooling were the textbook and the blackboard.
What is often overlooked, however, is that schools
themselves are a technology, a way of knowing applied to a
specific goal, albeit one so familiar that it has become
transparent. They are systems for preserving and transmitting
information and authority, for inculcating certain values and
practices while minimizing or eliminating others, and have
evolved over the past one hundred years or so to perform this
function more efficiently (Tyack, 1974). Since schools do not
deal in the transmission of all possible knowledge or the
promotion of the entire range of human experience but only a
fairly stable subset thereof, and since their form has remained
essentially unchanged over this time, we can even say that
schools have been optimized for the job we entrust to them, that
over time the technology of schooling has been tuned. When
schools are called upon to perform more "efficiently," to
maximize outputs of whatever type (high school or college
graduates, skilled workers, patriotic citizens, public support
for education and educators) from a given set of inputs (money,
students, staff, legal mandates, public confidence), it is their
capacity to act as technologies, as rational institutions, that
is being called upon. It is expected that, after analyzing the
facts at hand and determining that a problem exists (high
drop-out rates or functional illiteracy, for instance) and within
the limits of their discretion (since they are not free to act
however they wish), schools will attempt to implement an optimal
solution, the one that yields the most bang for the buck. This
expectation, too, derives from the assumption that schools, since
they are purpose-built machines, will pursue the rational,
deductive means-ends approach that characterizes rational
pursuits. Following this, it is also expected that schools will
embrace, indeed will clamor for, any technology that would help
them increase their productivity, to perform more efficiently and
effectively. It seems natural that they should employ the same
tools that have led the world outside the classroom to become a
much more information-dense environment, tools like film,
television, and computers. Certainly many educational
technologists reflexively expect such a response, and are both
miffed and baffled when it is not immediately or abundantly
forthcoming.
But schools are not simply technologies, nor are they purely
or even mainly rational in the ways in which they respond to a
given set of conditions. They also have other purposes, other
identities, seek other outputs. They are, perhaps first and
foremost, organizations, and as such seek nothing so much as
their own perpetuity. Entrenched or mature organizations (like
the organisms to which they are functionally and etymologically
related) experience change or the challenge to change most
significantly as a disruption, an intrusion, as a failure of
organismic defenses. This is true ten-fold for public schools
since they and their employees are exempt from nearly every form
of outside pressure which can be brought to bear on organizations
that must adapt or die (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Friedman, 1962).
Organizations are not rational actors: their goal is not to
solve a defined problem but to relieve the stress on the
organization caused by pressure operating outside of or
overwhelming the capacity of normal channels. Their method is not
a systematic evaluation of means and ends to produce an optimum
response, but rather a trial-and-error rummaging through Standard
Operating Procedures to secure a satisficing response. As
organizational entities, schools and the people who work in them
must be less than impressed by the technologists' promises of
greater efficiency or optimized outcomes. The implied criticism
contained in those promises and the disruption of routine their
implementations foreshadow, even (or especially) for the most
dramatic of innovations, are enough to consign them to the
equipment closet. What appears to outsiders as a straightforward
improvement can, to an organization, be felt as undesirably
disruptive if it means that the culture must change its values
and habits in order to implement it. Since change is its own
downside, organization workers must always consider, even if
unconsciously, the magnitude of the disruption an innovation will
engender when evaluating its net benefit and overall
desirability. This circumspection puts schools directly at odds
with the rational premises of technologists for whom the
maximization of organizational culture and values almost always
takes a back seat to the implementation of an 'optimal' response
to a set of conditions defined as problematic. Indeed, a
characteristic if unspoken assumption of technologists and of the
rational model in general is that cultures are infinitely
malleable and accommodating to change. As we'll see later,
schools' natural resistance to organizational change plays an
important (though not necessarily determining) role in shaping
their response to technological innovation.
Organizations are defined by their lines of flow of power,
information, and authority. Schools as workplaces are
hierarchical in the extreme, with a pyramidal structure of power,
privilege, and access to information. (Indeed, proponents of the
"hidden curriculum" theory of schooling propose that acceptance
of hierarchy is one of the main object lessons schools are
supposed to impart.) At the bottom, in terms of pay, prestige,
and formal autonomy are teachers. Next up are building-level
administrators, and finally, district-level administrators.
Although students have even less power than teachers, and
state-level actors more power than district administrators,
neither of these groups is considered a part of school
organizational culture (Fullan, 1991). Any practice (and a
technology is, after all, a set of practices glued together by
values) that threatens to disrupt this existing structure will
meet tremendous resistance at both adoption and implementation
stages. A technology that reinforces existing lines of power and
information is likely to be adopted (a management decision) but
may or may not be implemented (a classroom-level decision). The
divergence of interests between managers and workers, and the
potential implementation fissures along those lines, is a source
of much of the implementation failure of widely-touted
"advances."
Finally, in addition to their rational and organizational
elements, schools are also profoundly normative institutions.
Most obviously, schools are often both actors and venues for the
performance of significant shifts in social mores and policy.
Within the lifetime of many Americans, for example, schools have
institutionalized successive notions of separate-and-unequal,
separate-but-equal, equal resources for all, and, most recently,
unequal resources for unequal needs as reifications of our
shifting cultural conceptions of "fairness." Because schools are
the ubiquitous intersection between the public and the private
spheres of life, feelings about what "values" should and should
not be represented in the curriculum run deep and strong among
Americans, even those without school-age children. When thinking
about values, however, it is crucial to remember that schools
generally do not seek this contentious role for themselves. More
often than not it is imposed upon them by legislators, the
courts, community activists, and others whose agenda, though it
may to some degree overlap with that of the schools', has a
different origin and a different end (See Note 1). For if
anything, the norms of school culture are profoundly
conservative, in the sense that the underlying mission of schools
is the conservation and transmission of pre-existing, pre-defined
categories of knowledge and being. As David Cohen points out, the
structure of schools and the nature of teaching have remained
substantially unchanged for seven hundred years, and there exists
in the popular mind a definite, conservative conception of what
schools should be like, a template from which schools stray only
at their peril (Cohen, 1987).
When parents or others speak with disapproval of the
"values" that are or are not being transmitted to children in
schools they largely miss the point. For the values that
predominate most of all, that indeed must always predominate, are
less the set of moral and social precepts which the critics have
in mind than the institutional and organizational values on which
the school itself is founded: respect for hierarchy, competitive
individualization, a receptivity to being ranked and judged, and
the division of the world of knowledge into discreet units and
categories susceptible to mastery (Dreeben, 1968). To a very
great extent these values are shared in common with our other
large-scale institutions, business and government. Indeed, if
they were not, it seems most unlikely that they would predominate
in schools. They are, in fact, the core values of the bourgeois
humanism that has been developing in the West since the
Enlightenment, and it is these norms and values, more than the
shifting and era-bound constructions of social good, that schools
enact in their normative capacity. There is a tight coupling
between these values and schools-as-a-technology, just as there
is between any technology and the values it operationalizes.
Given this linkage it's often difficult to say with certainty
whether school values predate the technology of schools-as-
we-know-them, in which case the technology is a dependent tool
dedicated to the service of an external mandate, or whether the
technology produces, sui generis, a set of values of its own
which are then propagated through society by school graduates.
When it is this difficult to extract a technology from its
context, you know you have found a tool that does its job very,
very well.
SCHOOL WORKERS
In manifesting its culture, school places teachers and
administrators in an unusual and contradictory position. They are
subjected to many of the limitations of highly bureaucratic
organizations but are denied the support and incentive structures
with which bureaucracies usually offset such constraints. School
workers are the objects of recurring scrutiny from interested and
influential parties outside of what is generally conceived of as
the "school system," many of whom have conflicting (and often
inchoate) expectations for what schools should accomplish. Their
means, ends, and abilities are regularly called into question by
parents, politicians, social scientists, the business community,
and any group with an ideological axe to grind, not least by
those who consider themselves to be allies of schools. Yet
teachers and administrators almost always lack the rights of
self-definition and discretionary control of resources (time,
money, curriculum) that generally accompany this kind of
accountability to give it form and meaning. Despite their
strident protests school workers are treated more as day laborers
than as professionals.
At the same time, even the most complacent bureaucracies
direct some incentives at their workers. These may be monetary,
in the form of performance bonuses or stock options, career
enhancing in the form of promotions, or sanctions like demotion
and the consequent loss of authority and responsibility. Schools
generally offer none of these. Instead they proffer to good and
bad alike a level of job security that would be the envy of a
Japanese sarariman: unless you commit a felony or espouse views
unpopular in your community you are essentially guaranteed
employment for as long as you like, no matter what the quality of
your work. Teachers cannot be demoted: there is no position of
lesser authority or responsibility within schools.
Just as students are essentially rewarded with promotion for
filling seats and not causing trouble, so teachers are paid and
promoted on the basis of seniority and credentials rather than
performance. Providing they have not violated some school norm,
it is not uncommon for teachers or administrators who demonstrate
incompetence or worse at their assigned tasks to be transferred,
even promoted, to off-line positions of higher authority rather
than being fired, demoted, or retrained. Perversely, the only
path to formally recognized increase in status for dedicated,
talented teachers is to stop teaching, to change jobs and become
administrators. Some schools and states are starting to create
Master Teacher designations and other forms of status enhancement
to address the need for formal recognition of excellence, but the
overwhelmingly dominant practice provides no such acknowledgement
for outstanding practitioners, thus lumping all teachers together
into an undifferentiated mass. This pervasive deskilling of and
condescension towards the teachers' craft is central to the
organizational culture of schools, and teachers' reaction against
it forms the base of their suspicions of the motives and values
of technologists who claim to be able to improve education by
substituting the output of a teacher with that of a box.
As with any organization possessed of a distinct and
pervasive culture, schools attract and retain either those most
comfortable with their premises and conditions, those without
other options, or those who care deeply about the organizational
mission and are willing to accept the personal disadvantages that
may accompany a "calling." Most beginning teachers identify with
the latter group, and approach their nascent careers with
excitement and commitment. Indeed, they are prepared to work for
not much money under difficult conditions in order to pursue this
commitment. It's in the nature of people and organizations,
however, for workaday values and practices to replace idealism as
the defining experience of place and purpose. This means that
over the long term the idealism and enthusiasm of the novice
teacher must necessarily give way to the veteran's acquiescence
to routine. It is this willingness to accept the values of the
organizational culture and not the nature of the personal rewards
that determines who remains in teaching and who fails or leaves.
In plumbing the nature of a bureaucratic organization, we
must take into account the personalities and skill sets of those
who seek to join it. According to studies cited by Howley et al,
prospective teachers have lower test scores than do prospective
nurses, biologists, chemists, aeronautical engineers,
sociologists, political scientists, and public administrators
(Howley, Pendarvis & Howley, 1993). They also cite studies which
demonstrate a negative correlation between intellectual aptitude
and the length of a teacher's career. Recognizing that there are
many reasons to dispute a correlation between standardized test
scores with intellectual capacity, depth, or flexibility, Howley
cites Galambos et al. to demonstrate that
teachers, as compared to arts and sciences graduates, take
fewer hours in mathematics, English, physics, chemistry,
economics, history, political sciences, sociology, other
social sciences, foreign languages, philosophy, and other
humanities. (Galambos, Cornett & Spitler, 1985)
She reports other studies which show that teachers read no
more, and probably less, than the average middle class person
(approximately three to eight books per year) and that their
reading tends overwhelmingly to be popular material rather than
scholarly or scientific work (Duffey, 1973, 1974; Vieth, 1981).
The fact that teachers are not, as a group, accomplished or
engaged intellectuals does not require that they be resistant to
change. It does suggest, though, a certain comfort with stasis
and a reluctance to expand both the intellectual horizon and the
skill set necessary to achieve proficiency with new technologies.
This may help to explain the unusually long latency required to
master personal computers that has been reported to Kerr and
Sheingold by teachers who have incorporated technological
innovations into their practice (Kerr, 1991; Sheingold, 1990).
Given that long-term school workers are well adapted to a
particular ecosocial niche it is understandable that their first
response to attempts at innovation would be one of resistance.
Calls for change of any kind are seen as impositions or
disturbances to be quelled as soon as possible, as unreasonable
attempts to change the rules in the middle of the game. Larry
Cuban has described the position of teachers as one of
"situationally constrained choice," in which the ability to
pursue options actively desired is limited by the environment in
which teachers work (Cuban, 1986). While this is true as far as
it goes, I prefer to see the process as one of gradual adaptation
and acquiescence to the values and processes of the organization,
rather than the continued resistance and frustration implied by
Cuban; in other words, as one of situationally induced
adaptation. This, I think, more easily explains the affect and
frame of mind of most veteran teachers and administrators, and
accommodates the likelihood that the average teacher is no more
heroic or enduring than the average office worker.
THE CULTURE OF TECHNOLOGY
If the State religion of America is Progress, then surely
technology provides its icons. It is largely through the
production of ever-more marvelous machines that we redeem the
promise of a better tomorrow, confirm the world's perfectibility,
and resorb some to ourselves and to our institutions. As Cohen
succinctly puts it,
"...Americans have celebrated technology as a powerful force
for change nearly everywhere in social life...[and] are fond of
picturing technology as a liberating force: cleaning up the
workplace, easing workers' burdens, making the good life broadly
available, increasing disposable income, and the like."
(Cohen, 1987, p. 154)
But it goes further than that. Our machines not only signal
and refresh our modernity, they serve as foundational metaphors
for many of our institutions, schools among them (See Note 2).
Machines corporealize our rationality, demonstrate our mastery.
They always have a purpose and they are always _prima facie_
suited to the task for which they were designed. Every machine is
an ideal type, and even the merest of them, immune to the
thousand natural shocks the flesh (and its institutions) is heir
to, occupies a pinnacle of fitness and manifests a clarity of
purpose of which our institutions can only dream. They reflect
well on us, and we measure ourselves by their number and
complexity. It is nearly inconceivable that we would imagine a
school to be complete, no, to be American, that was without a
representative sample of these icons of affirmation. It is
absolutely inconceivable that we would trust our children, our
posterity, to anything less than a machine, and so we
relentlessly build, and generally fill, our schools.
For although they often seem so ageless and resilient as to
be almost Sphinx-like in their inscrutability, schools as we know
them are both relatively recent and consciously modeled on that
most productive of all technologies, the factory (Tyack, 1974).
For at least the last hundred years, schools have been elaborated
as machines set up to convert raw materials (new students) into
finished products (graduates, citizens, workers) through the
application of certain processes (pedagogy, discipline,
curricular materials, gym). It is this processing function that
drives the rationalist proposition that schools can be tuned well
or poorly, can be made more or less efficient in their operation.
Although it seldom articulates them overtly, this view is
predicated on the assumptions that we know what we want schools
to do, that what we want is unitary and can be measured, and that
it can be affected by regular, replicable modifications to one or
more school processes. It presumes that the limits of education
are essentially technological limits and that better technology
will remove them. It is the most generic and encompassing theory
of "educational technology," since it embraces all curricular,
instructional, and material aspects of the school experience. In
its more comprehensive and embracing instantiations such an
attitude does not limit its concerns only to the school plant.
For early progressive educators (and again today) students'
readiness-to-learn, in the form of adequate nutrition, housing,
and medical care, was seen as a proper concern for school
"technologists."
So far we can detect at least two impetuses for wanting to
bring machines into schools. The first is the desire of the
central planner and social scientist to have these social
crucibles be as modern as the world of tomorrow they help conjure
into being. Cuban details how each new development in the
popularization of information and entertainment technology
(radio, film, television, computers) in society at large brought
with it a corresponding insistence that the deployment of this
revolutionary machine into schools would, finally, bring the
classroom out of the dark ages and into the modern world (Cuban,
1986). Attempts to deploy technology that follow this pattern
seldom specify how the machines will be used, and if outcomes are
discussed at all it is in vague, incantatory language that
employs words more as talismans than as descriptors. The
connection between such scenarios and the outcomes they believe
they strive for is essentially semio- magical, using up-to-date
machinery to signify modernity and believing that the
transformative power resides in the box itself rather than in the
uses to which it is put. Given their non-rational character, it's
not surprising that these initiatives originate with elected
officials, school administrators, community groups (business,
parents) and others for whom the signalling function is
important. They tend not to originate with technologists or
classroom teachers, who have very different (if very differing)
agendae.
By "technologists" I mean those whose avowed goal is to make
schooling more efficient through the manipulation of its objects
or processes. "Efficiency," however, is not the straightforward,
value-free quantity that those who most embrace it suppose it to
be. An industrial-revolution coinage, the concept of efficiency
was intended to denote the relative quantity of useless energy
consumed during manufacturing or processing, contexts in which
such things can be easily and unambiguously measured. Clearly,
the socially-situated diffusion of skills and values that is our
system of education presents a very different case, one that is
more complex, more contested, more informed by subjectivity. In
order to apply the concept of efficiency to such a messy world
technologists and others must narrow their gaze to focus on one
particular element of the process. (Under "others" I include
economists, those technologists-without-machines, whose
persistent attempts to discover and apply a production function
to education in the face of piles of their own unambiguous
evidence, ranks with the alchemists' persevering search for the
philosopher's stone as one of rationality's great cul de sacs.)
Technologists have therefore tended to focus on the transfer of
information to students, partly because it is one of the few
processes in schools that can be measured, and partly because it
is one of the few functions that everyone agrees schools should
perform. What they discovered almost immediately was that when
judged simply as knowledge-transfer machines schools are just not
very good. It seems to take an awful lot of workers, money, and
other resources to transfer a relatively small amount of
information. By framing the question in this way, technologists
(re)cast education as a fundamentally didactic process, and
problems with education as problems of "instructional delivery."
This didacticism posits education as the transfer of information
from a repository to a receptacle, a cognitive diffusion gradient
across a membrane constituted not by the rich, tumultuous,
contradictory social processes that situate the student, the
teacher, and the school within society, but solely by the
"instructional delivery vehicle." By this light, of course,
nearly any organic, indigenous school practice or organization
will be found wanting, since schools intend to promote many
outcomes ahead of information transfer.
The second concern of technologists has been
standardization. Schools are supposed to produce the same outputs
year after year. They are supposed to ensure that seventh
graders, say, will emerge at essentially the same age with
essentially the same sets of skills and broad values this year as
last. If they do not then important categories like "seventh
grade" or even "common school" lose their meaning. Signalling
functions aside, the explicit reason given for modelling schools
on factories was their promise of standardization, of uniformity
of outcome. Technologists and planners have long realized that
the weakest link in this chain is the last, "the instructional
delivery vehicle," the teacher. Standardization of curricula, of
facilities, of teacher certification requirements, means little
once the classroom door is closed and the teacher is alone with
her students. The inefficiency and variability of this last
crucial stage undoes all prior ratiocination. For this reason,
educational technologists have tended to produce solutions
designed not to aid the teacher, but to recast, recapitulate, or
replace her, either with machines or through the introduction of
"teacher-proof" curricula (See Note 3).
Yet all these attempts to modernize, to rationalize, to
"improve" the schools by making them more efficient have had very
little effect. Textbooks, paperbacks, blackboards, radio, film,
film strips, airplanes, television, satellite systems and
telecommunications have all in their time been hailed as
modernizers of American education (Cuban, 1986). Cohen, for his
part, demonstrates how, with the exception of the textbook and
the blackboard, none of these much vaunted exemplars of modern
efficiency have had any significant effect on school organization
or practice (Cohen, 1987). They have not made schools more
modern, more efficient, more congruent with the world outside the
school, or had any of the myriad other effects their advocates
were sure they would have. Why is this so?
THE CULTURE OF REFUSAL
Technology can potentially work change on both the
organizational and practice patterns of schools. That change can
subvert or reinforce existing lines of power and information, and
this change can be, for the technologist or the school personnel,
intentional, inadvertent or a combination of the two. Since
schools are not monolithic but composed of groups with diverse
and generally competing interests on the rational,
organizational, and symbolic levels, adoption and implementation
of a proposed technology are two very different matters.
And yet each battle is essentially the same battle. The
technologists' rhetoric is remarkably consistent regardless of
the specifics of the machine at issue. So too is their response
when the technologies in question meet with only a lukewarm
response: to blame the stubborn backwardness of teachers or the
inflexibility and insularity of school culture. While elements of
both of these certainly play their part in what I'll call
'technology refusal' on the part of schools, it behooves us to
remember that all technologies have values and practices embedded
within them. In this respect, at least, technology is never
neutral; it always makes a difference. From this perspective, the
reactionary response on the part of schools (by which I mean the
response of individuals within schools acting to support their
institutional function) perceived by technology advocates makes a
great deal more sense than the pig-headed Luddism so often
portrayed. Further, technology refusal represents an immediate
and, I believe, fundamentally accurate assessment of the
challenges to existing structures and authority that are embodied
or embedded in the contested technology. I believe further that
the depth of the resistance is generally and in broad strokes
proportionate to the seriousness of the actual threat.
Change advocates, of whom technologists are a permanent
subset, often try to have things both ways. On the one hand, the
revolutionary potential of the innovation is emphasized, while at
the same time current practitioners are reassured (implicitly or
explicitly) that their roles, positions, and relationships will
remain by and large as they were before. The introduction of
computers, for example, is hailed in one discourse (directed
towards the public and towards policy makers) as a process which
will radically change the nature of what goes on in the
classroom, give students entirely new sets of skills, and
permanently shift the terrain of learning and schools. In other
discourse (directed towards administrators and teachers)
computers are sold as straightforward tools to assist them in
carrying out pre-existing tasks and fulfilling pre-existing
roles, not as Trojan Horses whose acceptance will ultimately
require the acquisition of an entirely new set of skills and
world outlook. Since school workers and their practice do not
(indeed, cannot) fully maximize instructional delivery, the
"remedies" or alternatives proposed by technologists necessarily
embody overt or implicit critiques of workers' world view as well
as their practices. The more innovative the approach the greater
its critique, and hence its threat to existing principles and
order. When confronted with this challenge, workers have two
responses from which to choose. They can ignore or subvert
implementation of the change or they can coopt or repurpose it to
support their existing practices. In contrast to generalized
reform efforts, which Sarason maintains are more likely to be
implemented the more radical they are, these efforts by
technologists to change the institution of schooling from the
classroom up make teachers the objects rather than the subjects
of the reformist gaze (Sarason, 1990). The more potent and
pointed technologists' ill-concealed disinterest in or disregard
for the school-order of things, the less likely their suggestion
are to be put into practice. The stated anxiety of teachers
worried about losing their jobs to machines is also a resistance
to the re-visioning of the values and purposes of schooling
itself, a struggle over the soul of school. It is about
self-interest, to be sure, but it is also about self-definition.
Much of the question of teacher self-definition revolves
around the anxiety generated by their unfamiliarity and
incompetence with the new machines. The fear of being embarrassed
is a major de-motivating factor in the acquisition of the skills
required to use computer technology in the classroom (Honey &
Moeller, 1990; Kerr, 1991; Sheingold & Hadley, 1990). This is an
area where institutional and individual interests converge to
produce a foregone effect. The (self) selection for teaching of
individuals who by and large show neither interest nor aptitude
for ongoing intellectual development buttressed by the condition
of lifetime employment almost guarantees a teacher corps that is
extremely reluctant to attempt change. This, in turn, suits the
interests of school management whose job is made considerably
simpler with a population of workers whose complacence acts as a
buffer against change. Since teachers' situationally-reinforced
lack of motivation inhibits their action as change agents, school
administrators are relieved of the responsibility for developing
the creative management skills that would be required for
teachers to develop new classroom skills.
There are technologies which are suited perfectly to such a
climate; those that either actively support the organization of
schools or are flexible enough to readily conform to it (Cohen,
1987). Not surprisingly, they are the ones that are so
ubiquitous, so integrated into school practice as to be almost
invisible. On the classroom level we would expect to find tools
and processes that both ease the physical labor of the teacher
while maintaining her traditional role within the classroom. The
blackboard, the duplicating machine, and the overhead projector
come immediately to mind. All enhance the teacher's authoritative
position as information source, and reduce the physical effort
required to communicate written information so that more energy
can be devoted to the non-didactic tasks of supervision,
arbitration, and administration. This type of technology seldom
poses a threat to any of the teacher's functions, is
fundamentally supportive of the school-values mentioned earlier,
and reproduces locally the same types of power and information
relationships through which the teacher herself engages her
administrators. We might also consider the school intercom
system. Ideally suited to the purposes of centralized authority
and the one-way flow of information, it is as ubiquitous in
classrooms as its polar opposite, the direct-dial telephone, is
rare. Technologies such as these will seldom meet with
implementation resistance from teachers because they support them
in the roles through which teachers define themselves, and
contain no critique of teachers' practice, skills, or values. In
general, resources that can be administered, that can be made
subject to central control and organization, will find more favor
from both administrators and teachers than those that cannot.
These examples of successful technologies confirm the
requirement of simplicity if a technology is to become widely
dispersed through classrooms. This has partly to do with the
levels of general teacher aptitude described above, partly with
the amount of time available to teachers to learn new tools, and
partly with the very real need for teachers to appear competent.
As with prison administration and dog training, a constant
concern in the running of schools is that the subject population
not be reminded what little genuine authority supports the power
its masters exercise. Although there are more complex models for
understanding the diffuse polysemous generation of power and
status that comprise the warp and woof of institutional fabric
(see Foucault on medicine or prisons, for example), for our
purposes here a simple model of authority- as-imposition will
suffice. In this tradition, French and Raven describe the five
sources of power as follows:
- Reward, the power to give or withhold something the other
wants;
- Coercive, the power to inflict some kind of punishment;
- Legitimate, the use of institutionally-sanctioned position or
authority;
- Referent, the use of personal attraction, the desire to be
like the other, or to be identified with what the other is
identified with;
- Expert, the authority that derives from superior skill or
competence. (French & Raven, 1968).
Short of insurrection, the only form of power accessible to
students is Expert power. Thus, an unfortunate (but hardly
unforeseeable) consequence of school organization is that
teachers for whom authority is important must prevent their
students from acquiring or demonstrating mastery of a degree or a
domain that would reflect unfavorably on the teacher. Although
some teachers handle it with more grace and maturity than others,
most dread the occasions when they are "shown up" by their
students, and we have all witnessed or experienced those awkward,
lingering out-of-time moments when the teacher must voluntarily
cede authority to the student who knows how to thread the
projector or connect the VCR. At such times the brittle
consensual veneer of adult expertise is cracked, the order of
things briefly disrupted (confirmed by the sudden eruption of
murmuring in the classroom), and casual but alert attention
directed by teacher and students alike toward the performance of
the evanescent student expert.
It is one thing for students to demonstrate expertise in
areas that are not expected to be a formal part of teachers'
skill set, like threading 16mm projectors. If technologists have
their way, however, teachers will be expected to know how to use
computers, networks, and databases with the same facility they
now use blackboards and textbooks, and with greater facility than
the roomful of resourceful, inquisitive students who were weaned
on the stuff. The pressure towards competence and the acquisition
of new skills, which is generally not a feature of school culture
or the employment contracts under which teachers work, will be
strong. It will come from unexpected directions: from below (from
the "tools" themselves) and from within, as teachers struggle to
retain mastery over their students. It's easy to see why teachers
would resist this scenario. Administrators, for their part, have
equally few organizational incentives for inviting this
disruption into schools. Not only would they be required to
respond to teachers' demands for the time and resources needed to
attain proficiency, they themselves would need to attain some
minimum level of competence in order to retain authority over
teachers. Since there is no way for the system to reward this
kind of involved, responsible management, nor any way to penalize
its absence, school authorities' most sensible route is to ignore
or quell demands for the implementation of such potentially
disruptive processes.
The machines of the day are microcomputers and microcomputer
networks. Having inherited the mantle of modernity from
instructional television and computer-aided instruction, they are
presently charged with the transformation of schools. As school
technologies, however, they are unusually polyvalent: they can
both support and subvert the symbolic, organizational, and
normative dimensions of school practice. They can weaken or
strengthen the fields of power and information which emanate from
the institutional positions of students, teachers, and
administrators. It's my thesis that authority and status within
organizations are constituted from two sources: power, itself
sourced as outlined by French and Raven, and control over and
access to the form and flow of information. Authority and status
are singularities, as it were, produced by a particular
confluence of (potentially) shifting fields of power and
information. This is true in the organizational sense for all
bureaucracies, where the person who knows something is as
important as the person who can do something. In schools, though,
facility with information is (in a slightly different sense) at
the heart of key norms, values, and practices as well. As
bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions and as concretizations of
a particular tradition of pedagogy, schools teach and model as
canonical a particular arrangement of paths for the flow of
information. Introducing computers into schools highlights these
assumptions, causes these normally invisible assumptions and
channels to fluoresce.
It is not their capacity to process information that gives
computers this special ability. Data processing systems have
existed in large school districts for decades, helping central
administration to run their organizations more efficiently.
Irregularities of control call attention to themselves and
thereby remind workers that such arrangements are created things,
neither aboriginal nor ahistorical but purpose-built and recent.
To the extent that automation can help existing administrative
processes to run more smoothly and recede into the background,
they help to reintroduce a kind of medieval reassurance regarding
the rightness and permanence of a given order. Schools and school
workers, particularly, seem to prefer this type of
predictability. Such data processing regimes also relieve school
workers of much of the tedium of their administrative work:
scheduling, grading, communication, and tracking are all made
less drudging by automation. The easing of these burdens offered
by the machine fits very well with popular conceptions of these
labor- saving devices and offers workers a benefit in exchange
for their participation in a process which strengthens the
mechanisms of control exerted by the bureaucracy over their daily
lives and practice. To the extent that they are aware of this
bargain at all most are willing to accept it.
This strengthening of administrative priority and control
over teachers is recapitulated by teachers over students when
computers are used for CAI or as "integrated learning systems."
Although they have fallen out of favor somewhat of late, the vast
majority of school-based computer use has taken place in this
context. Kids are brought en masse to a (generally) windowless
room presided over by a man with no other function than to
administer the machines. There they work for between 30 and 50
minutes on drill-and-practice software that compels them to
perform simple tasks over and over until they have reached a
preset level of proficiency, at which time they are started on
new tasks.
This behaviorist fantasy fits neatly into the organizational
model of schools, and into much pedagogical practice as well. The
progress and work habits of each student are carefully tracked by
the server. Reports can be generated detailing the number of
right and wrong answers, the amount of time spent on each
question, the amount of "idle" time spent between questions, the
number of times the student asked the system for help, the tools
she used, etc. Not much use is ever made of this information
(assuming some could be) except to compare students and classes
against one another. Nevertheless, the ability to monitor work
habits, to break tasks down into discrete chunks, and the
inability of the student to determine what she works on or how
she works on it fits quite well into the rationalist model of the
school-as-factory and the technologists goal of maximizing
"instructional delivery."
Such systems were an easy sell. They complemented existing
organizational and practice models, and they signalled modernity
and standardization (Newman, 1992). (Perversely, they were also
claimed to promote individualization, since each student was
tasked and speeded separately from the rest of the group. The
fact she was working on exactly the same problems, with the same
tools and in the same sequence as her classmates seems not to
have mattered.) Since students work in isolation they accord well
with the premise of structured competition. Since mastery at one
level leads relentlessly to more difficult (but essentially
identical) problems the students never have a chance to exhibit
facility of a type that would threaten their teacher, and since
the terminals at which they work are both limited in their
capacities and centrally controlled students have no opportunity
to acquire a disruptive mastery of the technology itself.
Labs like these are prime examples of the non- neutrality of
technology. They do not foster all or even several types of
learning but rather one particular, and particularly narrow,
conception whose origin is not with teachers who work with
children but with the technologists, industrialists, and military
designers who develop "man-machine systems" (Noble, 1991). They
do not encourage or even permit many types of classroom
organization but only one. They instantiate and enforce only one
model of organization, of pedagogy, of relationship between
people and machines. They are biased, and their easy acceptance
into schools is indicative of the extent to which that bias is
shared by those who work there.
The technology I have been describing is not the technology
of computers, or computers-in-schools per se, any more than
armored cars represent the technology of internal combustion or
washing machines the technology of electromagnetic induction.
They are machines, to be sure, but machines require a social
organization to become technologies. Thus the uses of computers
described above for data-processing and "learning labs" are not
examples of computer technologies but of normative,
administrative, and pedagogical technologies supported by
computers.
This distinction is important because many teachers, lay
people, and some administrators have concluded from their
experiences with such systems that computers in school are
anathema to their notions of what schools ought to do with and
for children. Computer-based technologies of the kind described
above are hardly "neutral." Indeed, they are intensely normative
and send unambiguous signals about what school is for and what
qualities teachers ought to emulate and model. Interpersonal and
social dynamics, serendipity, cognitive apprenticeship, and play
all seem to be disdained by this instantiation of machine
learning. The teacher's fear of "being replaced by a computer" is
a complex anxiety. It obviously has a large component of
institutional self-interest, since no one wants to lose their
job. But the notion that it would be possible to be replaced by a
machine cuts deeper, to the heart of teachers' identity and
self-respect. There has evolved among teachers an insular culture
of self-congratulation that attempts to reassure them that they
are competent and selfless professionals, that their social and
institutional function is to develop the very best qualities in
the children they serve. The suggestion that the de-skilled tasks
that teachers are called upon to perform might be better
performed by machines calls this self-image into question in a
manner that is painfully direct. It is hence unwelcome.
Beyond the question of self-respect but intertwined with it
is the frustration that many teachers experience with the
promulgation of a purely rationalist notion of education.
Teachers, after all, are witness and partner to human development
in a richer and more complex sense than educational technologists
will ever be. Schools are where children grow up. They spend more
waking hours in school with their teachers than they do at home
with their parents. The violence that technologists do to our
only public children's space by reducing it to an "instructional
delivery vehicle" is enormous, and teachers know that. To
abstract a narrow and impoverished concept of human sentience
from the industrial laboratory and then inflict it on children
for the sake of "efficiency" is a gratuitous, stunting stupidity
and teachers know that, too. Many simply prefer not to
collaborate with a process they experience as fundamentally
disrespectful to kids and teachers alike.
Finally, there is the issue of the reshaping and redefining
of teaching practice to suit the needs of technology. Cuban and
Cohen maintain that technologies that are not sufficiently
flexible to suit the existing strictures of classroom practice
have little chance of significant implementation (Cohen, 1987;
Cuban, 1986). While this may be true for "instructional delivery
vehicles" like educational films or television, it doesn't hold
for the myriad other educational technologies whose domain and
deployment are not circumscribed by an individual classroom. The
most obvious example is standardized testing. There is an
extensive body of literature which shows that this technology,
seldom supported and often resisted by teachers, has nevertheless
had profound consequences on their classroom practice (Shepard &
Dougherty, 1991; Shepard, 1991). Teachers have significantly
reoriented the content and method of their instruction to
facilitate capture by these instruments. Despite the absence of
formal institutional sanctions, teachers have succumbed to strong
pressure from their administrations for students to perform well
on these tests, and have restructured their practice accordingly.
The dictum that, "when the classroom door closes teachers can do
what they like," doesn't apply when crucial technologies of
assessment reside outside the classroom (See Note 4). Teachers
are hence understandably concerned that the introduction of
computers in the form of a technology with its own built-in
assessment capabilities will not function to provide them with
another tool they can use or not as they wish, but rather that it
might force them to tailor the content and style of their
teaching to suit the technology.
CULTURAL CHANGE
In this essay I've painted a rather depressing picture of
schools as grim, self-perpetuating systems of repressive
mediocrity for their employees and their students. I've described
how technologies are variously embraced and resisted in the
effort to perpetuate this system and maintain the organizational
status quo. I've tried to make clear that since schools are
complex organizations not all their component members or
constituencies have identical interests at all times; that a
technology that is favorable to one faction at a given moment may
be resisted by another which might favor it for different reasons
under different circumstances. Most importantly, I've tried to
show that technologies are neither value-free nor constituted
simply by machines or processes themselves. Rather, they are the
uses of machines in support of highly normative, value-laden
institutional and social systems.
I don't believe that decisions to deploy or not deploy a
given technology are made with diabolic or conspiratorial intent.
I don't believe that teachers and administrators consciously plot
to consolidate their hegemony. Rather, I believe that the mental
model under which they operate forecloses some options even
before they can be formally considered, while making others seem
natural, neutral, and, most dangerously, value- free. It is those
latter options, those 'easy' technologies that are adopted and
implemented in schools. If one accepts this framework, there are
only two ways to imagine a relationship between an introduction
of technology into schools and a substantive change in what
schools do and how they do it. The first is to believe that some
technologies can function as Trojan Horses; that is, that they
can engender practices which schools find desirable or acceptable
but which nevertheless operationalize new underlying values which
in turn bring about fundamental change in school structure and
practice.
The second is to hope that schools will come to re-evaluate
the social purposes they serve, the manner in which they serve
them, or the principles of socially-developed cognition from
which they operate. The impetus for this change may be internal,
as teachers and administrators decide that their self-interest in
serving new purposes is greater than their interest in
perpetuating the existing scheme of things. It may be external,
as powerful outside forces adjust the inputs available to and
outputs desired from the schools. It may be institutional, as
restructuring initiatives encourage schools to compete with one
another in a newly-created educational marketplace.
To a certain extent all these processes are underway, albeit
slowly, unevenly, and under contestation. On the Trojan Horse
front, there are more and more reports of teachers taking
physical and pedagogical control of computers from the labs and
the technologists. They are being placed in classrooms and used
as polymorphic resources, facilitators, and enablers of complex
social learning activities (Newman, 1990, 1992; Kerr, 1991). As
computers themselves grow farther from their origins as
military-industrial technologies, educational technologists
increasingly are people whose values are more child-centered than
those of their predecessors. This is reflected in the software
they create, the uses they imagine for technology, and their
ideas about exploration and collaboration (Char & Newman, 1986;
Wilson & Tally, 1991; Collins & Brown, 1986). If students,
parents, and teachers are all pleased with the cognitive and
affective changes induced locally by working with these types of
tools (and it is by no means certain that they will be), it may
become difficult to sustain the older, more repressive features
of school organization of which centrally-administered and
imposed technology is but one example.
The second possibility, that schools will re-evaluate their
means and ends, also seems to have momentum behind it, at least
within a somewhat circumscribed compass. Teachers and
administrators are taking steps to secure the autonomy neccesary
to re-engineer schools-as-technologies, though not all are happy
with this unforeseen responsibility and some choose to abdicate
it. Nevertheless, for the first time practitioners are being
given the chance to re-design schools based on what they've
learned from their experiences with children. Given that chance,
many teachers and administrators are demonstrating that schools
and school technology can support practices of the kind which
reflect values described by Wendell Berry in another context as
care, competence, and frugality in the uses of the world (Berry,
1970). This, in turn, precipitates a re-visioning of the purposes
and organization of school technologies away from the top-down,
centrally-administered, instantiations which have failed so
remarkably in the past.
Most importantly, however, I believe that the dominant
mechanical metaphor on which we model our institutions is
changing. As we move from machine to information models we will
inevitably require that our institutions reflect the increased
fluidity, immanence, and ubiquity that such models presuppose
(See Note 5). As we change our medieval conceptions of
information from something that is stored in a fixed, canonical
form in a repository designed exclusively for that purpose and
whose transfer is a formal, specialized activity that takes place
mainly within machines called schools, schools will change too.
They will not, as some naively claim, become redundant or
vestigial simply because their primacy as information-processing
modelers is diminished (Perelman, 1992). Rather, they will
continue to perform the same functions they always have: those
relating to the reproduction of the values and processes of the
society in which they're situated.
What this underlines, I think, is that machines can indeed
change the culture of organizations, even ones as entrenched and
recalcitrant as schools have proven to be. But they do it not, as
technologists have generally imagined, by enabling schools to do
the same job only better (more cheaply, more efficiently, more
consistently, more equitably) but by causing them to change their
conception of both what it is they do and the world in which they
do it. This shift is not instigated by the machines deployed
within schools but by those outside of it, those that shape and
organize the social, economic, and informative relationships in
which schools are situated and which they perpetuate. This is not
the same as saying that machines which are widely used outside
the classroom will automatically diffuse osmotically into the
classroom and be used there: history shows that this is clearly
not the norm.
What is happening, simply put, is that the wide, wet world
is rapidly changing the ways it organizes its work, its people,
and its processes, reconceptualizing them around the metaphors
and practices enabled and embodied by its new supreme machines,
distributed microcomputer networks. Archaic organizations from
the CIA to IBM to the university have fundamentally rearranged
themselves along the lines I've outlined in the notes to this
report. Schools have been out of step with this change, and it is
this misalignment more than anything else that causes us to say
that schools are "failing" when in fact they are doing exactly
the jobs they were set up and refined over generations to
perform. It is the world around them that has changed, so much so
that the jobs we asked them to carry out now seem ridiculous, now
make us angry.
The fundamental instinct of durable organizations is to
resist change: that is why they are durable. As schools scurry to
serve the new bidding of the old masters, and as they induct
younger workers raised and trained under the auspices of new
models and new practices, we discover-- not surprisingly - -that
schools too are reorienting themselves along the lines of the
latest dominant machine and, consequently, welcome those machines
inside to assist in their nascent realignment of means and ends.
The norms and procedures of entrenched bureaucratic
organizations are strong and self-reinforcing. They attract
people of like minds and repel or expel those who don't share
them. Schools are technologies, machines with a purpose. They
embed their norms and processes in their outputs, which in the
case of schools helps them to further strengthen their cultural
position and resist marginalization. But they can never be
independent of the values of society at large: if those change,
as I believe they are beginning to, then schools must too. If
they do not, then they will be replaced, relegated to the
parts-bin of history.
Notes
- This usage of the schools to promote an "outside" agenda
once again invokes their role as a transmission technology even
as it fails to take into account the schools' own values and
culture. It shares the technologists' instrumentalism, albeit to
different ends.
- Although we may apotheosize this habit we didn't invent it.
The desire to apprehend the complexity of the world, to encompass
it in a more immediately accessible form, gives Western culture a
long, albeit narrow, history of mechanical and neo-mechanical
metaphor. The shift from one metaphor to another generally lags
technology itself by a generation or so, and each shift to a new
metaphor drastically effects the way cultures view the natural
and human worlds.
- Until the fourteenth century there were no such metaphors.
Indeed, the rope of nearly all metaphor, metonymy, and analogy
was tied to the natural or supernatural rather than to the
created world, simply because there were no complex machines as
we understand them today. The invention of the astrolabe, and its
close and quick descendant, the clock, provided the first
tangible human creation whose complexity was sufficient to embody
the observed complexity of the natural world. It's at this time
that we start seeing references to the intricate 'workings' of
things and of their proper 'regulation,' usually of the cosmos
and nature, although occasionally of human systems as well. The
clock, with its numerous intricate, precise, and interlocking
components, and felicitous ability to corporealize the
abstraction of temporality, shaped western perceptions of the
world by serving as its chief systemic metaphor for the next five
hundred years.
- In the early nineteenth-century, the metaphor of the clock
was gradually replaced by that of the engine, and somewhat more
generally, by the notion of the machine as a phylum unto itself.
The figures shift from those of intricacy and precision to those
of 'drive' and 'power,' from regulation to motivation. In the
early twentieth-century, as technology became more sophisticated,
the concepts of motivation and regulation were to some extent
merged in the figure of the self-regulating machine. This is
essentially the dominant metaphor with which we've grown up, the
notion of a 'system' which contains the means of both its own
perpetuity and its own governance, and this metaphor has been
applied to everything from political science, to nature, to the
human body, to the human mind. The enginic 'drive' of the
Freudian unconscious, Darwinian evolution, and the Marxian
proletariat give way to 'family systems,' ecosystems, and
political equilibria as the Industrial Revolution lurches to a
close.
- The edges of a new metaphor for complex systems can be seen
emerging, however, one which is able to embrace the relativity
and immanence which stress mechanical metaphors to the point of
fatigue: that of the computer and its data networks. We see, and
will see more, large-scale shifts away from the concepts of drive
and regulation to those of processing and transmission. The raw
material upon which processes act will be regarded not as objects
and forces but as data, which is not a thing but immanence
itself, an arbitrary arrangement given temporary and virtual
form. The action will be seen as a program, a set of
instructions, allowing for more or fewer degrees of freedom.
Interrelationships will be embodied in paths, arrangements, and
pointers rather than linkages (creakingly mechanical) through
which objects transmit force. Important phylogenic distinctions
will be made between hardware (that which is
fixed/infrastructure) and software (that which determines use and
function).
- This has tremendous consequences for our notions of
property, of originality and authorship, of privacy and
relationship. It may, perhaps, be less limiting than the
mechanical metaphors it will largely displace.
- It is neither possible nor desirable to ignore the issue of
gender here. It may be coincidence that the classroom, the one
place where women have historically had a dominant institutional
place, is repeatedly characterized by technologists as a place of
darkness and chaos, stubbornly resistant to the enlightening
gifts of rationalized technology. It may be coincidence that
educational technologists are as a group overwhelmingly male but
direct their efforts at transformation not at the powerful (and
overwhelmingly male) community of planners and administrators but
at the formally powerless and (overwhelmingly female) community
of practitioners. It may be coincidence that the terms used to
describe the insufficiency of the classroom and to condescend to
the folk-craft of teaching are the same terms used by an
androgenized society to derogate women's values and women's work
generally. But that's a lot of coincidence.
- Kerr discusses the differences in world-view and values
between the teachers who deal with children and the technologists
who approach the classroom from industrial and, as Noble
demonstrates, often military backgrounds as well (Kerr, 1990;
Noble, 1991). He stops short of characterizing what may perhaps
be obvious but nevertheless should be acknowledged: the casual,
pervasive, pathetic misogyny which characterizes the attitude of
dominant culture towards any environment or activity that is
predominantly female. It is perhaps for this reason that we never
see proposals to replace (mostly male) administrators with
machines. The usage of computers to perform administrative tasks
should pose no more, and probably fewer, value dilemmas and
conflicts than their usage to define and practice teaching.
- The question of capture processes in education deserves
more exploration than I can give it here. As put forth by Agre,
"capture" describes the restructuring of workplace practices to
facilitate the capture of information by a ubiquitous network
technology. It contrasts with the surveillance model, which
relies on visual metaphors, is surreptitious, and is centrally
organized. Capture processes, on the other hand, don't watch what
you do but continuously interact with it. They are about as far
from surreptitious as you can get, since they involve the active
reorganization of activities for the explicit purpose of
gathering information. Rather than being centrally directed they
are (re)enacted by individuals as they perform a
socially-embedded set of tasks. Agre cites as examples Automatic
Vehicle Identification for highway toll collection, and the
organization of large restaurant chains where every action from
the greeting of customers to the taking of orders to the
preparation of food is designed around the needs of computerized
information capture (Agre, 1993).
- In the shift from a mechanical to a digital organization of
society we can expect the following changes in the social
construction of relationship: Information, not authority;
networks and pointers, not linkages; inexpensive ubiquity, not
dear scarcity; simultaneous possession, not mutually- exclusive
ownership; instantaneity/timeshifting, not temporality; community
of interests, not community of place; distributed horizontality
not centralized verticality. I don't contend that we thereby
usher in Utopia. These new structures will bring new strictures.
But they will be very, very, different.
About the Author
Steven Hodas is now with the National Aeronautical and Space
Administration.
His email address is hhll@universe.digex.net.
References
Agre, P. E. (1993). Articulated Tracking and the Political
Economy of privacy. In The Third Conference on Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy, (pp. 9.3-9.5). San Francisco.
Berry, W. (1970). A CONTINUOUS HARMONY: ESSAYS CULTURAL AND
AGRICULTURAL. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Bowles, S.,& Gintis, H. (1977). SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA:
EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ECONOMIC LIFE. New
York: Basic Books.
Char, C. A.,& Newman, D. (1986). DESIGN OPTIONS FOR INTERACTIVE
VIDEODISC: A REVIEW AND ANALYSIS. Technical Report No. 39. Center
for Technology in Education
Chubb, J. E. & Moe, T. M. (1990). POLITICS, MARKETS, AND
AMERICA'S SCHOOLS. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
Cohen, D. K. (1987). EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, POLICY, AND
PRACTICE. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9,
(Summer), 153-170.
Collins, A. & Brown, J. S. (1986). THE COMPUTER AS A TOOL FOR
LEARNING THROUGH REFLECTION. Technical Report No. 376. Center for
Technology in Education.
Cuban, L. (1986). TEACHERS AND MACHINES: THE CLASSROOM USE OF
TECHNOLOGY SINCE 1920. New York: Teachers College Press.
Dreeben, R. (1968) ON WHAT IS LEARNED IN SCHOOL. Reading, Mass:
Addison-Wesley
Duffey, R. V. (1973). TEACHER AS READER. The Reading Teacher
(27), 132-133.
Duffey, R. V. (1974). ELEMENTARY SCHOOLTEACHERS' READING. In
Annual Meeting of the College Reading Association, No. ED 098
554. Bethesda, MD: ERIC Document Reproduction Service.
French, J. R. P., Jr. & Raven, B. (1968). THE BASES OF SOCIAL
POWER. In D. Cartwright A. Zander (Eds.), Group Dynamics (pp.
259-269). New York: Harper Row.
Friedman, M. (1962). CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Fullan, M. G. (1991). THE NEW MEANING OF EDUCATIONAL CHANGE. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Galambos, E. C., Cornett, L. M. & Spitler, H. D. (1985). AN
ANALYSIS OF TRANSCRIPTS OF TEACHERS AND ARTS AND SCIENCES
GRADUATES. Southern Regional Education Board.
Honey, M. & Moeller, B. (1990). TEACHER'S BELIEFS AND TECHNOLOGY
INTEGRATION: DIFFERENT VALUES, DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDINGS
(Technical Report No. 6). Center for Technology in Education.
Howley, A., Pendarvis, M.,& Howley, C. (1993).
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS. Education Policy
Analysis Archives, 1(6).
Kerr, S. T. (1991). LEVER AND FULCRUM: EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN
TEACHERS' THOUGHT AND PRACTICE. Teachers College Record,
93(Fall), 114-36.
Kerr, S. T. (1990). TECHNOLOGY:EDUCATION :: JUSTICE:CARE.
Educational Technology(November 1990).
Newman, D. (1990). TECHNOLOGY'S ROLE IN RESTRUCTURING FOR
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING (Technical Report No. 8). Center for
Technology in Education.
Newman, D. (1992). TECHNOLOGY AS SUPPORT FOR SCHOOL STRUCTURE AND
SCHOOL RESTRUCTURING. Phi Delta Kappan, 74(4), 308-15.
Noble, D. D. (1991). THE CLASSROOM ARSENAL : MILITARY RESEARCH,
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, AND PUBLIC EDUCATION. London; New York:
Falmer.
Perelman, L. J. (1992). SCHOOL'S OUT : HYPERLEARNING, THE NEW
TECHNOLOGY, AND THE END OF EDUCATION (1st ed.). New York: William
Morrow.
Sarason, S. B. (1990). THE PREDICTABLE FAILURE OF EDUCATIONAL
REFORM. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Senge, P. M. (1990). THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE. New York: Doubleday.
Sheingold, K. & Hadley, M. (1990). ACCOMPLISHED TEACHERS:
INTEGRATING COMPUTERS INTO CLASSROOM PRACTICE. Center for
Technology in Education.
Shepard, L. A. (1991). WILL NATIONAL TESTS IMPROVE STUDENT
LEARNING? Phi Delta Kappan, 73(3), 232-38.
Shepard, L. A. & Dougherty, K. C. (1991). EFFECTS OF HIGH-STAKES
TESTING ON INSTRUCTION. In Annual Meetings of the American
Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL:
Tyack, D. B. (1974). THE ONE BEST SYSTEM: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN
URBAN EDUCATION. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Vieth, M. (1981) TIME TEACHERS SPEND READING VERSUS TIME THEY
SPEND WATCHING TV. ERIC Document Resource No. ED 200 922, Kean
College of New Jersey.
Wilson, K. & Tally, W. (1991). LOOKING AT MULTIMEDIA: DESIGN
ISSUES IN SEVERAL DISCOVERY- ORIENTED PROGRAMS. (Technical Report
No. 13). Center for Technology in Education.
Copyright 1993, All Rights Reserved
Copyright 1993 by the
Education Policy Analysis Archives
EPAA can be accessed either by visiting one of its several
archived forms or by subscribing to the LISTSERV
known as EPAA at LISTSERV@asu.edu. (To subscribe, send an email letter
to LISTSERV@asu.edu whose sole contents are SUB EPAA your-name.)
As articles are published by the Archives, they are sent
immediately to the EPAA subscribers and simultaneously archived
in three forms. Articles are archived on EPAA as individual
files
under the name of the author and the Volume and article number. For
example, the article by Stephen Kemmis in Volume 1, Number 1 of the
Archives can be retrieved by sending an e-mail letter to
LISTSERV@asu.edu and making the single line in the letter
read GET KEMMIS V1N1 F=MAIL. For a table of contents of the entire
ARCHIVES, send the following e-mail message to LISTSERV@asu.edu:
INDEX EPAA F=MAIL, that is, send an e-mail letter and make its
single line read INDEX EPAA F=MAIL.
The World Wide Web address for the Education Policy Analysis
Archives is http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa
Education Policy Analysis
Archives are "gophered" at olam.ed.asu.edu
To receive a publication guide for submitting articles,
see the EPAA World Wide Web site or send
an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@asu.edu and include the single
line GET EPAA PUBGUIDE F=MAIL. It will be sent to you by return
e-mail. General questions about appropriateness of topics or
particular articles may be addressed to the Editor, Gene V Glass,
Glass@asu.edu or reach him at College of Education,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2411.
Editorial Board
John Covaleskie Syracuse University |
Andrew Coulson
|
Alan Davis
University of Colorado--Denver |
Mark E. Fetler mfetler@ctc.ca.gov |
Thomas F. Green tfgreen@mailbox.syr.edu |
Alison I. Griffith agriffith@edu.yorku.ca |
Arlen Gullickson gullickson@gw.wmich.edu |
Ernest R. House ernie.house@colorado.edu |
Aimee Howley ess016@marshall.wvnet.edu |
Craig B. Howley u56e3@wvnvm.bitnet |
William Hunter hunter@acs.ucalgary.ca |
Richard M. Jaeger rmjaeger@iris.uncg.edu |
Benjamin Levin levin@ccu.umanitoba.ca |
Thomas
Mauhs-Pugh thomas.mauhs-pugh@dartmouth.edu |
Dewayne Matthews dm@wiche.edu |
Mary P. McKeown iadmpm@asuvm.inre.asu.edu |
Les McLean lmclean@oise.on.ca |
Susan Bobbitt Nolen sunolen@u.washington.edu |
Anne L. Pemberton apembert@pen.k12.va.us |
Hugh G. Petrie prohugh@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu |
Richard C. Richardson richard.richardson@asu.edu |
Anthony G. Rud Jr. rud@purdue.edu |
Dennis Sayers dmsayers@ucdavis.edu |
Jay Scribner jayscrib@tenet.edu |
Robert Stonehill rstonehi@inet.ed.gov |
Robert T. Stout aorxs@asuvm.inre.asu.edu |
|