Power of Myth / BERA sept 04
The power of myth when young men learn computer skills –
thoughts from a cultural analysis of a TLC learning site
Michael Tedder & Gert Biesta
(University of Exeter)
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Manchester, 16-18 September 2004
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The power of myth when young men learn computer skills – thoughts from a cultural analysis of a TLC learning site
Abstract
Learning to use information and communication technology (ICT) appears to be a priority at all levels of education and training in the UK. When asked to justify the importance of ICT in the curriculum, many people accept an instrumental argument that ICT skills are vital for securing and retaining employment. This view has acquired the status of a myth in the sense that it is widely believed to be true and therefore guides decisions and actions. Whether or not the belief is ‘objectively’ true or capable of verification is less important than its widespread acceptance.
One of the TLC learning sites recruits students with low level qualifications from school and provides them with an opportunity to develop their ICT skills. There were indications in both our quantitative and qualitative data that these students have little sense of agency in their lives but interviews in particular have shown that they subscribe to the myth that having ICT skills will lead to employment. Our cultural analysis of the site revealed some of the power of this myth in creating and sustaining the learning culture of the site. While the myth is supported and reinforced by significant others, including parents and college teachers, young male students may respond in a variety of conforming or challenging ways to their situation. Such responses raise questions about course and curriculum practices for teachers and managers in colleges.
Introduction
The education market place appears powerfully driven by ideas about computers and employment prospects for those with computer skills. Yet such ideas rarely appear to receive critical scrutiny. Scarcely a week passes without there being a report somewhere in the educational press of a failed venture in the market place of computer training or computer-based learning. For example, in March 2004 the Times Higher reported on the difficulties of the UK e-Universities (UkeU) company because it attracted only 900 students in its first year rather than the targeted 5,600 and had raised £4.5 million ‘selling degrees online’ rather than an expected £62 million. By June 2004, the Times Higher reported that a House of Commons select committee would investigate the venture. In May 2004 the FE Focus section of the TES reported the failure of a computer training firm leaving ‘hundreds of students out of pocket, dashing their hopes of a career in IT’. Among the claims made by the failed company in its advertisements were that students who finished the course ‘could reasonably expect to earn £45,000 a year immediately’ and that ‘100,000 IT vacancies existed in the UK’. Some of the specialist press, however, were reporting the extensive ‘outsourcing’ of IT jobs to developing countries, that there were significant regional variations in demand for ICT employees in the UK and that market forces were acting to drive down the pay of those with IT skills in most jobs (see, for example, Marshall, 2004). Several years after investors in the stock market lost their enthusiasm for ICT companies, there appears to be a similar critical adjustment in the field of education.
The complex of ideas and beliefs, hopes and fears that people hold about computers and about ICT is a modern myth, an important feature of contemporary culture. As Midgley reminds us:
Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning. (Midgley, 2004, p 1)
This paper looks at the significance of the ICT myth for some male students aged between 16 and 19 while they were students in post-compulsory education. The students were studying one of two ICT courses that were the focus of attention in one of our learning sites during the TLC Project. In the first year, the focus was on a group of students aged between 17 and 35 years who had been recruited to C&G 7261 Information Technology (IT). In the second and third years, the focus was on students taking a one year course, the Intermediate GNVQ in Information and Computer Technology (ICT). The students were not singled out as special or exceptional in any way; these young men agreed to take part in the TLC project and provided the research fellows with some insights into their educational biographies (Domincé, 2000).
The practice of teachers as educational professionals is a complex matter but can be said to include having responsibility for the design and provision of courses and for the quality of relationships established between students and their teachers. Approaching such tasks with the breadth of a cultural perspective on learning can offer insights into learner engagement and learner experiences that are not afforded by more narrowly conceived approaches. Our cultural analysis of the ICT learning site raised questions about the challenge of offering good learning to students who leave school with poor GCSE results and undertake a college vocational course intended to develop their knowledge and skills in computing and computer applications. How should the curriculum be organised? What courses should be offered? What kind of relationships established?
The paper draws on a cultural analysis of the learning site which has attempted to articulate features of the ‘learning culture’ of the site. Some of the project directors have written:
we can now define a learning culture not as the environment in which people learn, but as the social practices through which people learn. A cultural understanding of learning implies, in other words, that learning is not simply occurring in a cultural context, but is itself understood as a cultural practice. (Hodkinson et al., 2004, p 4, emphasis added))
The role of research within the project is:
to try to understand how learning cultures come into existence and stay in existence, how they are produced and reproduced through interaction and communication, and what kind of learning takes place through participation in a learning culture. From a cultural point of view the central question is what kind of learning becomes possible through participation in a particular learning culture and also what kind of learning becomes difficult or even impossible as a result of participation. (Hodkinson et al., 2004, p 14)
There follows a brief review of some related research and an overview of the learning site to suggest the range of factors that contribute to the continuity of its learning culture. There are four short case studies illustrative of the manner in which the ICT myth has affected the thinking and learning of some of these young people. The ensuing discussion and conclusion explore some of issues raised by these studies.
Literature Review
There is a growing body of mainly qualitative research (for example, Ball et al, 2000; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 1999) that theorises the complexities of transitions from compulsory into post-compulsory education or from school into college or work. Valuable insights have been offered from such work around such notions as ‘careership’ and ‘horizons for action’ (Hodkinson and Sparkes, 1997) and of ‘learning career’ (Bloomer, 1997; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000). Such work challenges some of the simplistic ideas about the way young people exercise choice within their lives that tend to dominate policies and systems in post-compulsory education. The idea of simple, rational decision-making in career progression is rejected and instead the importance of each young person’s cultural situatedness is stressed, including the complex network of family, friend and work relationships that influence the evolving identity and sense of possible identities evident in the lives of many young people in their late teenage years (see also Davies and Tedder, 2003).
Ball et al (2000) undertook a study of the choices and the consequences of such choices made by young people at the age of sixteen. There are similarities between several of the young people presented in Ball’s work and the young men from the ICT site. Luke and Jordan, for example, were presented as ‘ordinary’ young men, motivated towards work and achievement, who both chose to progress to further study after compulsory schooling. Ball drew attention to the social context in which decisions were made and how they were influenced significantly by the advice given at school and from ‘critical adult advice givers’. Their choices when selecting which courses to take and which subjects were described as ‘pragmatic’ (p 98). However, Ball concluded that:
For Luke and Jordan the post-compulsory transition was unplanned and ‘almost happened to them’ rather than their taking active control or asserting themselves. Perhaps they simply wanted to avoid making choices altogether. (Ball, 2000, p 99)
Some of the other young people featured in Ball’s study achieved little at school in terms of academic awards and appeared to show few aspirations. The writer commented:
Reading through the interviews it is difficult not to pick up a sense of lethargy and fearfulness, of things put-off, of passivity and reactivity. There are plans, ideas, possibilities but they mostly remain as ‘not yet’. The young people talk about ‘just’ doing something, for the time being. A kind of social minimalism. (Ball, 2000, p 109)
Our ICT learning site revealed that a persuasive option for many young people like these with low qualifications from school was to study computing; however, we found a variety of reasons for their modest previous qualifications and the intensity of their engagement with their courses was also highly varied.
The literature about the impact of computers in formal education reveals some who claim a seismic shift has occurred in the knowledge and understanding of young people. Prensky (2001), for example, claimed that today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach because they have grown up with new technology - computers, videogames, digital music players, video cameras, cell phones - and he estimated they have spent less than half the time reading than they have spent playing video games, not to mention the hours watching television. He made a linguistic analogy in claiming that:
the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by … the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants. (Prensky, 2001, p 1)
An enthusiast for the potential of ICT in formal education is Somekh who has worked for many years with school teachers in action research projects and has made substantial claims for the power of computers to transform learning. Some of her excitement for ICT in the classroom was captured in reports on a study undertaken between 1999 and 2002 by Somekh and Mavers (2003) which claimed that ‘technology can be used to transform children’s learning experiences’ (p 410). They identified a transformed relationship between teacher and students, and students able to work better with each other and yet also more capable of working autonomously as a consequence of the effective integration of ICT with students ‘learning tasks’. They expressed concern, however, that schools gave insufficient attention to students’ learning outwith the school and that the tests used for assessing students’ knowledge and concepts did not match the wider range of knowledge that students achieve through ICT in the home.
Within colleges and work-based learning providers, Natrins (2004) reported on some 350 ‘action learning projects’ undertaken since 1999 that had the specific purpose of improving retention and achievement figures within the Raising Quality and Achievement Programme (RQA) and the Support for Success (S4S) Quality Improvement Programme. Commenting on the role that new technology can play in various ways within these projects, Natrins noted that:
The projects demonstrate that the technology is merely a means to an end; it is one of a series of tools that can be used to bring about improvements in retention and achievement. (Natrins, 2004, 37)
She also concluded that: ‘many of the case studies discuss how the focus of the project has proved to be a catalyst for a change in strategic direction’ (p 37).
By contrast, Selwyn (1999a, 1999b, 1999c) has consistently adopted a more critical view of computers in schools and colleges and is among the few to have undertaken empirical research among the 16 to 19 year age group. He found that attitudes to information technology depended on subject cultures. He drew attention to the way ICT was seen as superfluous by some students studying for GCE A level and that some teaching staff reinforced the view that ICT was relevant to ‘vocational’ courses but was not a priority in A level (1999b). He noted the development of taken-for granted meanings, values and symbols associated with the implicit and explicit content of ICT and related such processes with a sense of identity: