Chapter 5.3

FACTORS Affecting Teachers’ Pedagogical Adoption of ICT

Bridget Somekh

Education and Social Research Institute

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester, UK

Abstract: this chapter uses insights from socio-cultural theory to develop a new analysis of the process of teachers’ pedagogical adoption of ICT. It refutes the common assumption that failure to embed ICT in pedagogy is the result of teachers’ resistance to change, and argues the need for a wider analytic frame that takes into account complex cultural factors and the regulatory frameworks and policies of national education systems. Humans learn to use new tools by, first, attempting to find a ‘fit’ with existing social practices and over time, through experimentation, developing new social practices that take advantage of their affordances. This process is always enabled or constrained by organisational structures, social contexts and established mechanisms of control, such as national curricula and assessment regimes. The chapter provides examples of transformative pedagogies with ICT and draws attention to the common factors which have enabled their success.

Key Words: Innovation, Change, Research partnerships, Socio-cultural theory, Transformative pedagogy, Teacher professional development, Affordance

Insights From Socio-Cultural Theory

Much of the research on teachers’ use of ICT in their teaching describes low levels of usage and minimal pedagogical change. Around the world, when visionary policy initiatives have frequently resulted in minimal change in classroom practice, evaluators have tended to blame teachers and urge more ‘training’; a consensus has developed for a deficit model that assumes failure to be caused at the levels of the school and the classroom, and teachers’ ‘resistance’ to be the core obstacle to be overcome. In this chapter I want to explore an alternative analysis. However, it is useful to begin by focusing briefly on some key findings derived from studies adopting these assumptions. An excellent review of the factors affecting teachers’ use of ICT over the previous twenty years is provided by Mumtaz (2000). She provides summary lists of “inhibitors” to teachers’ adoption, including “lacks” of experience with ICT, on-site support, ICT specialist teachers, time, access and financial support; and causes of “teachers’ resistance” (outside intervention, time management, lack of administrative support / organisational change, and teachers’ perceptions linked with “personal and psychological factors”). She provides a good overview of factors that encourage teachers to use technology drawing on surveys of teachers’ perceptions and attitudes conducted in the USA (e.g. Hadley & Sheingold, 1993); and qualitative studies of teachers learning to integrate use of ICT in their teaching. Webb & Cox (2004) provide an extensive review of research into the relationship between pedagogy and ICT, drawing on the European tradition of pedagogy as “the science of teaching”. They present a “framework of pedagogical practices relating to ICT use” which enables a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between: teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, pedagogical reasoning and behaviours; the affordances of technology; and students’ knowledge, beliefs and behaviours – and how these impact on the learning activities which lead to the development of students’ knowledge, understanding and skills.

The analysis presented in this chapter adopts a rather different framework, based on socio-cultural theory, which assumes that processes of change in schools and classrooms cannot be understood in isolation because they are necessarily co-constructed with students / local communities, and constrained / enabled by the regulatory frameworks and policies of national education systems and national cultures. Thus teachers’ beliefs and attitudes, and their confidence and competence with ICT, remain centrally important in the pedagogical adoption of ICT, but teachers are not ‘free agents’ (there is indeed no such thing) and their use of ICT for teaching and learning depends on the inter-locking cultural, social and organisational contexts in which they live and work. Although neither Mumtaz nor Webb and Cox adopt this approach their reviews lend support to such a socio-cultural analysis of the process of ICT innovation. For example, Webb and Cox include students’ values, beliefs and knowledge in their pedagogical framework and comment that “most of the studies considered in this article did not consider this issue specifically and there is a need for further research to address this” (ibid. p.276).

Rather than teachers being somehow to blame for the lack of pedagogical transformation when ICT is introduced, this chapter will argue that the failure lies with both policy-makers and evaluators who have little understanding of the process of technological innovation. Drawing on socio-cultural theory, in particular the insights it offers to the co-constructed, cultural-historical nature of social practices and the mediating role tools play in their development, the proposition will be made that radical structural changes to education systems and schools are needed if schooling is to be transformed by ICT. This approach draws on the insights of a number of other researchers (Cole, 1996; Crook, 2001; Saljo, 1999; Sutherland, 2004). What is argued is that the legislative frameworks and organisational structures of schooling often make it impossible for ICT tools to be explored and appropriated pedagogically. They severely constrain teachers’ and students’ agency, because they are in effect cultural tools that mediate pedagogies of blackboard and chalk. They reinforce teachers’ traditional roles and beliefs. Education systems can be understood as outdated infrastructures resisting inevitable change. As McLuhan (1964, p.379) argues: “Continued in their present pattern of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live.”

In this chapter pedagogy is defined as the interactive process by which a student’s learning is mediated by teachers using a range of tools (Vygotsky, 1978 p.27). These tools, including language, conceptual frameworks and artefacts such as books and computers, are continually developing and changing. As we become skilled in their use we develop social practices to incorporate them as extensions of ourselves (McLuhan, 1964.p7) and depending on how we use their affordances they shape and change the nature of those practices, empowering us to do things previously beyond our capability (Wertsch, 1998). Following Alexander (2000) pedagogy is conceptualised here as a set of culturally contextualised social practices which requires holistic analysis: “Culture both drives and is everywhere manifested in what goes on in classrooms, from what you see on the walls to what you cannot see going on inside children’s heads” (p.266).

The specific focus of this chapter is how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being appropriated and used by teachers in many countries as pedagogical tools. The premise is that learning is a situated process (Lave & Wenger, 1991) mediated by the context of the classroom, school and larger society, and that teachers’ pedagogical adoption of ICTs is driven by the values and assumptions embedded in routines of practice (Pearson & Somekh, 2006). Among these embedded values are teachers’ beliefs about their own role in the pedagogical process. Bruner (1996, pp.63-65) provides a useful analysis of four ways in which teachers orientate themselves towards learners: as fosterers of the child’s learning process; skilled transmitters of specialist knowledge; expert manipulators of the child’s psychological processes; or – in what he calls “modern pedagogy” – facilitators of both children’s learning and the development of their metacognitive capability. It seems certain that teachers’ pedagogical orientation is one of the crucial factors in their ability to appropriate ICTs. In a survey carried out in the USA (Becker, 2000, Riel & Becker, 2008), teachers who subscribe to Bruner’s ‘modern pedagogy’, believing teaching to be a process of co-constructing knowledge with learners, were predominant in the small group who used ICT for teaching academic subjects. I want to argue that this may be because digital technologies are tools which offer a new kind of control to learners, particularly because young people often acquire skills in their use more quickly than teachers in effect, digital technologies in the classroom mediate the relationships between teachers and learners and are disruptive to styles of teaching where the teacher is either an authority figure or feels the need to be the centre or attention. To adopt Bruner’s ‘modern pedagogy’ teachers have to make a conscious effort to re-orientate their relationship with learners and to do this effectively they need to work within a community that actively supports both this new conception of childhood and the changes in pedagogical practices that concretise it. A second, very powerful factor which culturally shapes teachers’ pedagogical adoption of ICT is the strong separation between the worlds of technology and the liberal arts in western societies (Latour, 1996 pp.vii-x). Embedded in the culture of the classroom, which is itself embedded in a society dominated by the liberal arts, are the assumptions of adults (teachers and parents) about how technology may impact on their own identity and their assumptions about its (in)appropriateness for the study of many academic subjects. This separation between the worlds of technology and the liberal arts is powerfully explicated in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig, 1974). It is embedded in national curricula and assessment systems, and can be observed when the popular media express worries about the negative impact of ICT on children’s literacy skills (Carrington, 2005).

The Processes of Pedagogical Adoption of ICT

How then does a teacher adopt ICT pedagogically? Starting inevitably without any skill in its use, humans explore the affordances of any new tool (what latently it makes possible) and develop the necessary skills best through exploratory play. This is how worldwide many children and young people have quickly become skilled users of technology. Indeed most highly skilled users of ICT describe themselves as self-taught through hands-on trial and error. However, those without the time – or often sufficient access to the new tool – to engage in exploratory play, invariably begin by trying to fit the new tool into existing social practices. This has certainly been the case for teachers and ICT. In subjects such as Computer Science, Computer Literacy, and Business Studies (which has its roots in learning office practices such as typing) students were given hands-on access to computers in the classroom; but in other subjects, including science and maths, computers were not a good ‘fit’ with the long-established pedagogic process of imparting conceptual understanding through exposition from the blackboard. A compelling example of the importance of ‘fit with existing practice’ is the extraordinary speed with which interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have been adopted in primary schools in England (Somekh et al., 2007). IWBs include many features ideally suited to supporting the delivery of whole class teaching, which is a requirement of the national numeracy and literacy strategies. The IWB makes it easier for teachers at the front of the class to engage the attention of thirty or so children, and provides an ideal medium for describing, explaining and exemplifying the complexities of reading and number work.

ICTs do not change pedagogic practices themselves. D. Watson (2001) suggests that in seeing ICT as the means of transforming pedagogy politicians have “put the cart before the horse”. It is teachers who change practices, co-constructing them to varying extents with their students (see Bruner’s typology of pedagogies above). In this sense there is, as Fisher (2006) argues, no such thing as technological determinism and the term ‘affordance’ is misused if it creates the suggestion that tools have any power of agency. However, the term ‘affordance’ as a description of latent possibility is highly explanatory for the relationship between humans and ICTs. As we develop experience of using new tools we build mental models of their use – or secondary artefacts using Wartofsky’s term (1979) – and these provide conceptual tools (tertiary artefacts) for imagining radically new ways of using them. By this means, a child who is already skilled in using powerpoint, and when using the internet at home discovers ‘google image’, is easily able to imagine new ways of using powerpoint incorporating images. Going back to powerpoint she may then investigate its menus and find the facility for importing images, and also perhaps digital video which further expands her power to envisage possibilities. Moreover, the affordances of ICT reflect the cultural assumptions of those who created the tools, in the sense that they provide a good ‘fit’ with a social practice of exploratory, individual use, in which access to web-sites (information and potentially knowledge) is not controlled by a third party. This fits well with the independent young user of ICT working at home with a computer and broadband connections. By contrast, there is much research which describes the disruptive effects that ICTs appear to create in classrooms, for example Robertson, Shortis, Todman, John and Dale (2004) found that “ICT consistently destabilizes the established routines of classroom life including norms of time and space” (p. 179). Even when the ‘fit’ is good as with IWBs in contemporary English primary schools, teachers, who have little time to ‘play’ and explore new ways of using their boards, need continuing support and encouragement to make creative use of its affordances as a multi-modal portal and a shared resource with the children (Somekh et al., 2007).

Examples of Transformative Pedagogies With ICT

So how does pedagogical adoption of ICT occur? What are the features of policy and classroom implementation of ICT use which are indicative of success? This section describe three examples of ICT being used pedagogically in ways that transform schooling and draws out some of the features that distinguish them.

The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow Project (ACOT) in the USA (Sandholtz & Ringstaff, 1996)

Over a ten year period from the mid 1980s Apple Computers financed a research and development project in which it worked closely with teachers in elementary and high school technology-rich classrooms. The aims of ACOT were to put technology into the hands of teachers and students and radically change the learning experience. The researchers inspired ACOT teachers with a vision of constructivist teaching and supported them by funding training workshops and week-long “summer institutes” where they were introduced to the latest technologies. The visits of researchers to ACOT schools also “served as an indirect source of support” (ibid p.289). Sandholtz and Ringstaff describe and analyse the process of teacher change that resulted. They record that the introduction of technology brought teachers into conflict with their existing pedagogical beliefs, changing their relationships with their students, reducing their apparent “control” and making their classrooms noisier. At first they responded by imposing restrictions on students’ use of technology, but over time they learnt new ways of working that turned technology to pedagogic advantage. Although the process was slow, it led to noticeable shifts in teachers’ roles and the development of new practices. As radical pedagogic change developed, student motivation increased, and teachers developed new ways of assessing their learning that made creative use of technology. However, in relation to preparing students for standardized tests in traditional paper-based environments teachers continued to have “serious concerns” and to “struggle”. The ACOT project involved teachers actively in research through keeping regular audio-taped journals and writing reports, and this was an important strategy for professional development.