The Politics of Technological Literacy - Springer Link

International Journal of Technology and Design Education 10, 181–206, 2000.  2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The Politics of Technological Literacy STEPHEN PETRINA Department of Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: Technological literacy has been given official sanction; it is the end of technology education in the United States. For most technology educators, the construct is neutral, and something nobody could be ‘against’. This article situates technological literacy in its ideological context of competitive supremacy and conservative politics. In opposition to a ‘neutral’ notion of this construct, a turn toward critical technological literacy is negotiated. Critical technological literacy represents an overtly political turn toward overcoming forms of power that sustain inequities in the built world. To engage in these politics, it is argued that technology educators will necessarily have to resituate their practice within cultural studies. Keywords: critical literacy, technological literacy

‘Technological literacy’ rolls off the tongue quite smoothly, much like computer literacy, cultural literacy, ecological literacy, scientific literacy or workplace literacy (Greenwood-Gowan, 1992, 1994; McLaughlin, 1995; Noble, 1984a, 1984b; Orr, 1992; Shamos, 1995; Westbury & Purves, 1988). Although these constructs are nebulous by design, they are not impotent or meaningless. These constructs serve as links between action and ideology – they serve to govern some economic, political or social course of action. They are socially distributed and shared ideologically across groups with contradictory articulations and meanings. They help to diffuse a range of motives with popular appeal. This is to say that these constructs are ‘always already’ political. In technology education, technological literacy has been given official sanction; it is the intended outcome or end of technology education in the United States (US) (International Technology Education Association, 1996, pp. 6–13). For the Technology for All Americans project currently in progress, technological literacy simply means ‘the ability to use, manage and understand technology’ (p. 6). Indeed, for most technology educators, the construct is neutral, and something nobody could be ‘against’ (e.g., Colelli, 1994; Dugger, 1995; Hansen & Froelich, 1994; Pucel, 1995; Waetjen, 1987, 1988, 1993). The counterpart of this concept is ‘technological capability’, which has been defined similarly and as neutral in its European and North American contexts (Black & Harrison, 1993; Department For Education, 1987, p. 20; Lewis, 1996; Liddament, 1993). Politically exorcised from literacy, technological capability is simply the potential for efficient, practical, quality work in design. Both constructs have been used hand-in-hand to buttress cases for the economic supremacy of the US or the economic recovery of England in a global, neo-liberal,

182

STEPHEN PETRINA

capitalist market. Both constructs have been tightly linked to the economic interests of private corporations and the state in these countries. In practice, each has been used as a referent to whatever gets taught. Those who prefer a critical component, as opposed to one that is conservative and neoliberal, to the end of education are faced with a dilemma: Enact a project to renovate these constructs or introduce a different language which embodies a critical discourse. This article takes a path through both options of this dilemma. Moving from the work of those who have begun to bracket the discourse on technological literacy and capability, I revisit the project of renovating technological literacy (Barnett, 1995; Braundy, 1987, pp. 190–216; Dyrenfurth, 1991; Gagel, 1997; Gilberti, 1989; Jenkins, 1997a, 1997b; Lewis & Gagel, 1992; Liddament, 1994; Prime, 1998; Todd, 1991; Waetjen, 1992). But unlike these scholars, I resituate technological literacy in a critical tradition (Bryson & deCastell, 1998; Freire, 1982; Gee, 1990; Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996; Greene, 1991; Hooks, 1996; Hull, 1997; Lankshear, 1997; Lankshear & Lawler, 1987; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; McLaren, Hammer, Sholle & Reilly, 1997; Macedo, 1994; Mitchell & Weiler, 1991; Morgan, 1997; Willinsky, 1990). This critical turn resurfaces the political terrain of technological literacy and capability, and is a reconstitution of the end of technology education. It is a renegotiation of power from the state and economic control of technology education toward a power for ecology, justice, labour, and the public. This turn to critical technological literacy means working to overcome forms of power sustaining inequities in the built world. Understanding social epistemology, critical technological literacy will not be left to its own course. To be sure, it is questionable whether technological literacy can be entirely renovated in the political terrain it occupies. The construct of literacy, but not its critical manifestation, is temporarily jettisoned to make room for a new language and new concepts: technological sensibility and political sagacity. Technological sensibility represents capacities of individuals and collectives to act critically toward decisions technological in leisure, work, and the political arena. Political sagacity represents quickness or acuteness of discernment and soundness of judgement needed in actions political. These entail a deep, political orientation toward culture and an aesthetic and ecological regard for nature. With their critical, activism-oriented component, these concepts are eventually figured into ‘critical, technological literacy’ to create a robust, political notion. In effect, technology education is resituated as a cultural study. Here, the world is read in terms of cultural practice and as a cultural text – a world that we co-create through engaging in a circuit of culture marked by the production, consumption, and the regulation of artefacts, identities, representations, and symbols. Technology education as a cultural study begins to recapture some of the critical meaning and politics offered by industrial educators in the US during the 1910s and 1920s. Whereas industrial

THE POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL LITERACY

183

education had been shaped as a social study by Frederick Bonser, W.E.B. DuBois, John Dewey and Lois Mossman, their intent had been disregarded in the conservative politics of the 1940s and 1950s (Foster, 1995; Petrina & Volk, 1995a, 1995b). Situated in cultural studies, the terrain of technology education is necessarily reshifted to lean left and back toward the radical politics of its roots. Competitive supremacy, school reform and literacy H.R. 3102, The Technology Education Act of 1986, recognizes that our future prosperity depends on our students’ ability to compete in an increasingly technological world. To meet these challenges, the bill would help develop a ‘technologically literate’ population through instructional programs in technology education at the secondary level. . . . We are running the risk of jeopardizing this country’s economic security by raising a technologically illiterate generation. . . . American businesses and industries lose when they are unable to obtain employees with skills demanded by a highly complex technical environment . . . our national defense suffers when citizens lack the technical know-how to operate sophisticated military equipment and understand complex defense systems. . . . While Korea, Japan, and other countries have placed a national priority on acquainting their students with the latest technological breakthroughs, our young people are being taught yesterday’s technology. (U.S. House of Representatives, 1986, pp. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

By the mid-1980s in the US, technology education and technological literacy had been defined through the capitalist interests of private corporations and the state. The process of aligning the end of technology education with notions of economic supremacy during the 1980s was encouraged by the educators who would be served by such an alignment. In fact, the American Industrial Arts Association, postured as the International Technology Education Association (ITEA), had become an active mouthpiece and advocate of the capitalistic manoeuvring of the US. Walter Waetjen (1988), chairing the Technology Education Advisory Council’s (TEAC) project titled Technology: A National Imperative, defined technology education in terms of economic stakes. ‘The issue here’, Waetjen argued, ‘is whether the United States will maintain its world-wide competitive lead in technology. Obviously, our country wants to maintain its superiority as leader in technology’ (p. i). ‘Technological literacy’, he argued the previous year, ‘would improve our productivity as a nation’ (i.e., US) (Waetjen, 1987, p. 14). Like the politicians who moved H.R. 3102 through the US Congress, the ITEA and TEAC defined technological literacy in terms of economic supremacy. TEAC (1988) was clear on defining the end of technology education through human capital theory: ‘As a nation, we must address the problem of providing adequately trained personnel to guide our technological growth in all industries. . . . The key for economic competitiveness in the global marketplace today and in the future is ‘productivity’. This can only be accomplished if we have excellence in Technology Education’ (p. 3). Within Technology: A National Imperative was a well-defined dis-

184

STEPHEN PETRINA

course of competitive supremacy (see also Colelli, 1994). According to TEAC, the ‘very competitive worldwide marketplace . . . brings with it major threats and opportunities to the businesses and economic base of the United States – all of which is predicated on the technological literacy of our citizens’ (p. 2). The report and its accompanying video, Corporate Image Technology Education: A National Imperative, ended with the appeal for technology education to ‘make a difference in the competitive edge held by the United States’ (p. 22). For those who ventured to look critically at the 1980s, the contrived economic crisis and capitalist response of the US government and the ITEA smacked of conservative politics. The response of ‘technological literacy’ in the early 1980s may have appeared ‘faddish’ to Rustum Roy, Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, but he saw it as nonetheless a response to a serious problem (1982, p. 289). The problem in the US was one of coming to grips with extensive cultural changes interrelated with the post-World War II academic-industrial-military complex, social turmoil that was at once gendered, racist, and class based, and the irrelevance of public education in the face of business as usual politics. While the 1960s had given rise to grass roots action and organised resistance to the US’s economic and foreign relations policies, few in that decade and the 1970s were moved to argue for a ‘literacy’ response. As Roy saw it, it wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s that ‘technological literacy’ or its counterpart, ‘illiteracy’, could be constructed with political meaning. The ‘technological illiteracy’ that was referred to in ‘the Technology Education Act of 1986’ was constructed in the early 1980s as industrialists, the media and politicians in the US lamented the loss of competitive advantages in labour-intensive industries. The invariable decline of American economic supremacy was the message of this discourse. The onus for productivity declines had been placed on the backs of workers, whose skills and labour contributions were substandard in the view of management. In this discourse, there was an increasing mismatch between the skills necessary to operate and build the new technologies being used to innovate in manufacturing industries and the skills possessed by ill-prepared workers in the labour pool. Explained in terms of human capital theory, there was a strong relation between low skills and low productivity or profit (Lewis, 1997). Workers, and especially young male workers, were not receiving the type of training in school to provide them with skills that would translate into productive innovation. During the early years of President Reagan’s administration, in response to the spectre of economic decline, policy was shaped to soften industrial regulations, liberate corporations from constraints on multinational market capitalism, and strengthen business-governmentmilitary-school partnerships. This conservative discourse and neo-liberal policy would ultimately place the blame for low productivity and economic decline on the desks of students and teachers in the school system instead of on the tables of corporate executives in boardrooms (Macedo, 1994, pp. 137–183; Shea, Kahane & Sola, 1989; Shor, 1992, pp. 104–160). This


185

was a significant strategy in what Shor (1992, cover) called the ‘conservative restoration’ of culture in the United States. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a barrage of attacks on public education were launched by educators, private organisations, and governmental branches. Media reports at this time were crafted to side with the points that the reports were making: The public schools were woefully inadequate in addressing the needs of business and industry’s problems of declining competitive supremacy. ‘The Year of the Report on Education’ was 1983, when at least ten ‘major’ reports appeared and an eleventh was necessary to synthesise the ten (Education Commission of the States, 1983, p. 1). While one report in 1983, A Nation At Risk, indicted the public schools for inadequacy in a wide range of problems, including competitiveness, another report launched by the Reagan administration focused on America’s competitive supremacy in global markets. America’s Competitive Challenge, authored by a task force of conservative corporate and university executives, provided policy details for tightening the links between schools and the capitalist economy (Business-Higher Education Forum, 1983). In this discourse, business and industry defined the purposes of public schooling, reiterating what had been reported through the other major reports. This discourse and neo-liberal response continued through Reagan’s second term and President George Bush’s term ending in 1992. With few exceptions, the discourse on education for work during 1980s was centred on the production of ‘high’ skills for competitiveness as opposed to policy for disadvantaged, disillusioned, and unemployed youth (Lewis, 1997; Martin, 1989). The pressures placed on the schools generated a number of different educational reforms. Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, spearheaded a ‘back to basics’ campaign which resulted in re-energising a politics of school knowledge. Only selected, exclusive subjects were basic according to Bennett and his proponents. Subjects such as art, home economics, and industrial arts were low status compared with subjects such as mathematics and the sciences. These latter disciplines were postured as the basics for high skills and global competition. Responding to declining Scholastic Aptitude Test scores in mathematics and the sciences, the government invested an inordinate amount of money in remediation and testing programs. By the late 1980s, a campaign for ‘world class’ standards had been launched, and was underwritten by a vast network of governmental and private organisations (National Education Goals Panel, 1991, p. iii). World class standards were, like the other reforms, rationalised in terms of American competitive supremacy. And literacy in the new basics took on an economic meaning and popular appeal. General, mathematical, and scientific literacy were re-energised with an economic life that was first given to these constructs in the late 1950s and 1960s. Computer literacy was constructed to represent a new range of functional skills, and cultural literacy was constructed to represent a quality of successful individual action in the conservative culture neces-

186

STEPHEN PETRINA

sary for other literacies to flourish. Qualifying literacy with a specific referent had become an effective political tool. As Noble (1984a, 1984b) pointed out, computer literacy, like other literacies, was linked tightly to the economic needs of the computer vendors and the state. One proponent of computer literacy noted that the construct was a key ‘to reverse the trend of decline of the US relative to its main competition in productivity, prestige, and leadership’ (Licklider quoted in Noble, 1984a, p. 610). It was in this context of economic decline, school reform, and the politics of literacy that ‘technological literacy’ was constructed to make sense and pay-off in political and popular appeal. The use of technological literacy in economic discourses gained utility as a meaningful link between an ideology of competitive supremacy and an action of school reform. Indeed, the construct was more than the ‘slogan . . . [with] emotional appeal’ that Waks (1986, p. 331; Todd, 1991) had described. In addition to its utility as a slogan, technological literacy began to play a role in governing a political course of action. While the construct was socially distributed and shared ideologically across groups with contradictory articulations and meanings, its use in a context of American decline signified an individualised disposition toward economic competition. While this construct had differing denotations, including those which were non-economic (e.g., Fleming, 1989; Goldman & Cutcliffe, 1982; Hoepfl, 1993), the connotation or representation with widest shared meaning was economic. Its use in discourse and practice diffused a range of definitions and motives and was ‘always already’ political (Figure 1). One can see in some of the earliest constructions of technological literacy, such as Michael Dyrenfurth’s in 1983, this conflation of literacy with economic supremacy. After having defined the construct economically and culturally, Dyrenfurth concluded that ‘technological literacy’ was crucial to the cultural well-being and ‘industrial, military and economic strength’ of the US (p. 44). Fifteen years after the early constructions of technological literacy, we continue to witness the educational alignment of this construct with anxieties in the US over competitive supremacy. We are now witnessing the US’s construction of world class standards for technology education, which embody in content and form the conflation of education with global economics. William Dugger, Director of the ‘Technology For All Americans’ project, made this clear as he launched the effort in 1995: The US ‘National Standards for Technology Education’ would be constructed as ‘the vital link to enhance America’s global competitiveness in the future’ (p. 4). As suggested in Figure 1, competitive supremacy and technological literacy were made to work in tandem to shape the actions of technology educators. Rationalised by the dictates of business and industry, technological literacy was constructed as a product of the marketplace. ‘Corporate leaders are often ideal spokespersons for education’, noted TEAC (1988), echoing their constituents’ willingness to commodify their educational practice (p. 22). It was significant to the proponents of technological literacy that corporate spokesmen such as Forest D. Brummett and Forrest Johnson


187

Figure 1. This figure depicts the interrelationships between business, industry and technology education. The strings of competitive supremacy and technological literacy controlling the limbs of the puppet, ‘Tech Ed’, are tied to business and industry. Of course, for most proponents of technological literacy, it is merely the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace that animates the entire puppet theatre. (I’m grateful for the help of UBC student, Douglas Borden, in this conceptualization).

were given privileges to define a competitive vision for technology education; these representatives delivered a message directly from the market (Petrina, 1998b). To be sure however, there are counter resistances, and those who live by the market die by the market.

188

STEPHEN PETRINA

(Re)presenting Technological Literacy Literacies are not neutral. They are ideological forms with profound significance for how human life is lived and whose interests are most served by the way life is lived (Lankshear & Lawler, 1987, p. 59). To award oneself a literacy is to say – this domain, our domain, is important; important like reading and writing are important. . . . [T]here is little merit in the current usage of technological literacy, resting as it does on a crude and under-theorised view of literacy. (Barnett, 1995, pp. 120, 123)

Through the 1980s, technological literacy came to represent a necessary quality of the new competitive, economic maximising, self-interested, yet democratic, individual. This remains a quality of individuals desired for possession in capitalising and globalising countries. For reasons environmental and economic, technological illiteracy came to represent a characteristic of a new ‘caste’ of ‘barbarians’ (Dyrenfurth, 1983, p. 42). This new caste was ‘jeopardizing’ the US’s ‘economic security’ (US House of Representatives, p. 2). Technological illiterates, according to Paul DeVore (1992), created a ‘drain’ on resources and figured heavily into ‘a loss of competitive economic potential by businesses and industries’ (p. 61). These uses of literacy and illiteracy also represent a currency that is held by the user. Indeed, the user appears to be ‘hip’ and literate, and tuned into beliefs that the new literacies are responding to technological changes which are autonomously accelerating, progressive, and rapid. Only the ‘technopeasants, serfs of technology’, would see literacy and technology otherwise (Pucel, 1995, p. 35). As indicated, these representations were the result of a ‘signifying practice’ that began in a context of competitive supremacy, school reform and the reconstruction of literacy (Hall, 1997, p. 24). The initial ‘fixing’ or codification of these constructs has been a powerful determinant of their connotations or representations over time. Perhaps no construct over the past two decades in technology education has received the attention that technological literacy has received. The number of definitions had multiplied to an inordinate number, inspiring attempts at synthesis (e.g., Dyrenfurth, 1991; Prime, 1998) and clarification through interpretive inquiry (e.g., Gagel, 1997; Gilberti, 1989). A 1996 survey of 55 researchers in technology education indicated dissatisfactions over an inability to define technological literacy and its nature with precision (Foster, 1996, p. 32). The researchers sampled suggested that this necessity be recognised as a high priority on any research agenda in technology education. ‘Technological Literacy For All’ is part of the mission statement of the World Council of Associations of Technology Education (WOCATE), and one of the founding resolutions is to support systematic research into denotations of this construct (Barnett, 1995). Technological literacy has been acknowledged as the end of technology education as constructed in the Technology for All Americans rationale. It follows that once precisely denoted, effort could be ‘directed toward the measurement of technological literacy’ and standards of attainment (DeVore, 1986,


189

p. 202). This autonomous, technical construction of literacy positions the construct as a detached, progressively reasoned, and value-free characteristic of individuals. Ignoring the discursive problems with this model, attention to technological literacy has been largely preoccupied with the struggle over denotations – agreed-upon meanings – instead of with connotation or representation. Neither those who have aimed at synthesis nor those who aimed at interpretation problematized technological literacy as a political representation. For example, Dyrenfurth (1991) took the construct on its own terms and effected a synthesised definition and model. From a range of definitions he distilled a number of common themes, one of which was the inseparable relation between literacy and ‘technological capability’ (p. 179). Hence, technological literacy represented a quality of the capable, competitive, constructive, functional individual consumer/producer. Similarly, Gilberti (1989) distilled common elements from a variety of definitions of technological literacy, which was for him, an autonomous, neutral construct without a political location. Stretching back to the Greek notion of paideia, he constructed a background for technological literacy, but overlooked the charged political microhistory of the construct in the 1980s. Lewis and Gagel (1992) recognised the confusion in denoting this construct, and argued that an important issue was the contentiousness of denotations for both ‘literacy’ and ‘technology’. Coupling them could only cause confusion, but they argued that there was a reasoned, interpretive way out of the confusion. Gagel (1997) took the charge of hermeneutically interpreting the way out, and like Gilberti, reasoned that clarification would be made in the psychological realm – in the realm of the mind. Like Dyrenfurth and Gilberti, and similar to his earlier work with Lewis, Gagel worked to extract definitions of literacy, technology, and technological literacy from their political contexts, stripping away their representations in the process. His interpretive representation for technological literacy, an ‘identity kit’ for the accommodating, creative, efficient, judicious individual is an ephemeral but hopeful connotation (p. 25). In the end, Gagel, like DeVore, makes the discursive mistake of reasoning that means can merely be neutrally derived from a clarified end of technological literacy. Jenkins (1997a, 1997b), like Gagel and Lewis and Gagel (1992), noted that the variety of public understandings of technology was at the base of competing definitions of technological literacy across the world. But unlike interpretations prior to his, Jenkins acknowledged the political realm through which this construct was rationalised. Competing with the economic representations of technological literacy were those of feminists and postcolonial educators. But Jenkins superficially acknowledged competing visions, and missed an opportunity to address normative issues concerning the politics of education, literacy, technology and technological literacy. As in other interpretive efforts noted, he took technological literacy on its own terms without placing the construct into its political context. He overlooked and left representations of technological literacy unquestioned. A

190

STEPHEN PETRINA

troubling aspect of all of these efforts is that they are marked by the assumption that denotation can be worked out in the individual, psychological realm, as opposed to resituating denotation in the sociological or political context of practice. These efforts failed to problematize technological literacy as a western, social construction. It is alarming that countries enfranchised by capitalism define their educational system in the same competitive terms as those countries that have been and continue to be disenfranchised by global capital (Figure 2). Technological literacy is represented as a universal construct with power to maintain the competitive supremacy of enfranchised countries and somehow uplift the competitiveness of the disenfranchised. There is no egalitarian value embedded in this construct, as those who are enfranchised are fighting and working extremely hard to maintain the status quo, but now with higher levels of production. It is clear that if there is to be any egalitarian value to education, enfranchised countries will have to take a much different approach to literacy than technology educators in disenfranchised countries. Different relationships to technology within these ranges of countries is a necessary but not sufficient condition for egalitarianism. For the most part, those who tried to ‘make sense’ of the competing denotations of technological literacy ignored the larger ideological discourse and

Figure 2. For countries enfranchised through global capital, there has been a gradual shift of emphases in technology education toward economic development and competitive supremacy. The United States continues to outpace the rest of the world in consumption and pollution, yet technology educators in this country continue to define the end of their endeavour in terms of economic development and competitive supremacy.


191

context in which denotations were constructed. Those who submitted to hermeneutic analyses erased the political differences in contested versions of this construct. They ignored the author; they ignored the issues of who was speaking to, and for, whom through constructions of class, gender, race, and power. Nor did those interpreting technological literacy pay attention to material practices in school shops and laboratories, where what was taught and what technologies were selected to be taught were themselves constructions of history, ideology, and politics. The recent profit-driven, capitalistic vendors’ transformation of shops was not linked up to the particular, competitive literacies developed in these new environments (Petrina, 1993). It is here, in the political context of practice, that the new competitive, economic maximising, self-interested, yet democratic, individual is constructed. Without consciously problematising the links between denotation and representation, the politics of technological literacy are easily dismissed. Without this problematisation, one would say that the construct is neutrally defined but subject to misuse and misinterpretation. But this is to miss the point that the construct was ‘always already’ political, and that it would be interpreted within particular cultural and political settings. Representation occurs within particular political settings. While Barnett’s (1995) suggestion to jettison technological literacy is tempting precisely because of its conservative and neo-liberal representations, that step will not be taken just yet. It is important to recognise possibilities of the critical reconstruction of literacy that have been taking place over the past two decades, precisely because these possibilities were not recognised by interpreters of technological literacy. To be sure, the project of transforming or ‘rewriting’ literacy has not solely been the province of conservative educators constructing a discourse of competitive supremacy and the conservative restoration (Mitchell & Weiler, 1991, p. xvii).

THE POLITICS OF LITERACY Critical theories of literacy derive from critical social theory and its interest in matters of class, gender and ethnicity. Both share the view that society is in a constant state of conflict, for the possession of knowledge (hence power), status and material resources is always open to contest. Struggles to define the world are carried out by unequally matched contestants, for certain social groups have historically controlled the ideologies, institutions and practices of their society, thereby maintaining their dominant position. But since these are socially and historically constructed, they can be reconstructed. One of the chief means for such re/construction is language. (Morgan, 1997, p. 1)

For Paulo Freire (1970), literacy was an empowering, consciousness raising process, enabling people to analyse, resist, and transform social conditions which underlay inequality, oppression, and power. Literacy had little meaning for Freire outside of everyday practices, where particular

192

STEPHEN PETRINA

technologies and texts form particular literacies. In Freire’s work with underprivileged and disenfranchised adults, literacy was constructed through reading and writing. That which was read and written was selected for its emancipatory, political content. Texts were selected to inspire critical investigations of oppression and possibilities for liberation through collective action. Reading and writing engaged one in critical, conscious action to transform the world – to liberate oneself from oppression and power through praxis or reflective action. As a teacher, Freire recognised the ‘always already’ political nature of education, and consciously selected tools and texts to expose oppression and oppressors. Critical literacies were counterpoints to domination in practice. The processes of becoming literate – of forming a critical consciousness – and of teaching were, for Freire, overtly ideological and political. Critical theorists of literacy have generally worked from Freire’s ideas to reposition the politics of literacy. No more can literacy be seen as autonomous, neutral and without context. This ‘autonomous’ view of literacy, which has been the norm in technology education, fails to capture the political nature of reading and writing in practice. Street (1984, p. 95) argues that a much more robust notion can be found in an ‘ideological’ view of literacy. In this view, there is no essence of literacy – no essential meaning that can be derived through synthetic or interpretive work. Rather, the nature of literacy, or particular literacies, is situated in social practices taking place in specific cultural settings. Literacy is an issue of how reading and writing are constructed and practised through the politics of these settings. These politics involve power which structures inequality or social relations between competing individuals and groups and across class, gender, race, and sexuality (Lankshear & Lawler, 1987, pp. 43–52). What literacy is or means depends on the practices whereby one learns, the purposes for which particular literacies are used, and the settings in which this takes place. Being critical generally means that first, ‘there is the element of evaluation or judgment’. And second, ‘there is the element of knowing closely and ‘for what it is’ that which is being evaluated: the object of evaluation or judgment’ (Peters & Lankshear, 1996, p. 54). Being critically literate then involves: a) having a critical perspective on literacy or literacies per se; b) having a critical perspective on particular texts; c) having a critical perspective on – that is, being able to make ‘critical readings’ of – wider social practices, arrangements, relations, allocations, procedures, and so on, which are mediated, made possible, and partially sustained through reading, writing, viewing, or transmitting texts. (Peters & Lankshear, 1998, p. 55) Surely, critical literacy involves the consumption, production and regulation of text. For Tuman (1987), this means critically engaging with, and interrogating, texts that may or may not be compelling, producing texts, and reflexively acting on these productions to compel others to act collectively toward critical ends. These notions link up with Marxist theory and critical


193

theory in general, and have supported theorising over the past two decades in critical pedagogy and literacy. Critical pedagogy and critical literacy can be seen as practices that work to question and transform conditions, ideologies, and institutions which are structured to maintain inequality (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; McLaren, 1995; Morgan, 1997). For Lankshear and McLaren (1993, p. 413), these practices involve ‘the interpretation of the social present for the purposes of transforming the cultural life of certain groups, for questioning tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions of current cultural and social formations and the subjectivities and capacities for agenthood that they foster’. These are radical practices which prepare students in the development of a critical awareness of oppressive formations and critical strategies for acting to overturn these structures. To be critical is to take an opposing stand against overt and covert positions and structures of domination. This requires one to make a judgement on the merits or qualities of these positions and structures and know to a degree the politics of who or what is being evaluated. Of course, critical pedagogy and critical literacy have their criticisms, and one of the most serious of these questions the notion that emancipated individuals can add up to a critical mass for social transformation or revolution. Where the subject is the critical, free, empowered, transformative individual, critical pedagogy and critical literacy appear overly liberal. But where the subject is the critical collective moved by solidarity, these practices pose real threats to status quo capitalism, power, and oppression. Efforts in critical pedagogy have begun to transform discourse and practice in vocational and work education (e.g., Gregson, 1993; Lakes, 1994; Shor, 1988; Simon, Dippo & Schenke, 1991), and this critical turn has supported a discourse in opposition to the conservative manifestations of technology education shaped between the 1960s and today (Petrina, 1998a; Zuga, 1989). This critical discourse on education for work and technology education owes its debt to radical notions of industrial education formed during the first third of this century in the US (Petrina, 1995; Petrina & Volk, 1995a & 1995b). John Dewey’s (1915, 1917) and W.E.B. DuBois’ (1932) radical notions of industrial education in the US are legendary. Both fought against the injustices reproduced in the schooling of the working classes, and responded to the industrial regime with critical notions of pedagogy. Both understood well that literacies and texts were not neutral and there were real differences in partisanship toward these – differences in politics. In their arguments for industrial education, technologies or texts are critically selected for their ‘disclosive power’ (Blacker, 1994, p. 309). Technologies are selected to disclose insights into contexts, which are dialectically linked to understanding oppression and how working class students are entangled in its web. In this case, technologies selected for pedagogy have tremendous disclosive power to provide insight into the conditions of farm or factory work, and class formation, racism and sexism in society.

194

STEPHEN PETRINA

Industrial education from this perspective entails the critical selection of disclosive technologies, organised for the end of bringing working class children to a consciousness of class and race conditions. Through this educational practice students would develop what Dewey called ‘industrial intelligence’ (1917, p. 333; Gilberti, 1990, pp. 54–62; Wirth, 1989). ‘Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ’, Dewey and his daughter reasoned, ‘they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances which they are dealing’ (Dewey & Dewey, 1915/1962, p. 178). Industrial intelligence was basically critical insight, or ‘discriminating inquiry’ into material things and the world of work (Dewey, 1922, p. 141). Yet, industrial educators were fostering an ‘undiscriminating gulping mental habit’, through a ‘systematic, almost deliberate, avoidance of the spirit of criticism in dealing with history, politics and economics’ (p. 141). This technical and political ‘discriminating’ understanding of ‘conditions and processes’ (Dewey, 1917, p. 333) was what one of Dewey’s strongest supporters and industrial arts theorist, Frederick Bonser, called ‘selective judgment’. A pedagogy for selective judgment was a practice of ‘affording experiences and materials through which learners may develop ability to choose among alternative courses of thought and action with that intelligence which includes a sense of social responsibility for the consequences of their choices’ (Bonser, 1928, p. 204). Industrial education teachers and students would work together toward a ‘reconstructed social order’ which would entail addressing ‘conditions of want, exploitation, and maladjustment in the immediate present’ (1932, pp. 225, 226). For Bonser, teachers ought to ‘teach the new generation to wrestle with the issues upon which depend its very survival. The challenge is for a new moral idealism which will energize the young to enter sanely and vigorously into an era of enlightened reconstruction’ (p. 236). Selective judgment in reconstructing the social order meant a critical orientation toward ‘the understanding of the methods of organization, production, and distribution of commodities, to the interdependence of peoples all over the world from whom we receive supplies, and to the control of conditions for the sake of fair play. It is only right that production, distribution, and the sale of commodities be promoted for the common good without injustice or exploitation of any worker or group of workers’ (1932, p. 101). Here, industrial education was positioned as a ‘social study’ and within efforts in the social reconstruction of capitalist society during the late 1920s and 1930s (p. 101). Dubois’s notions of industrial education for African Americans were similarly critical, social, and positioned to oppose a capitalist order (Johnson, 1996). As his biographer wrote, ‘DuBois saw education (to be truly education) as partisan and – given the realities of the social order – fundamentally subversive’ (Aptheker, 1989, p. 338). During the first three decades of the 20th century DuBois (1932) argued, industrial education ‘set its face toward the employer and the capitalist and the men of wealth’


195

(p. 5). This alignment with business and industry was done at the expense of a critical understanding of class, economics, labour, and politics. Literacy for DuBois (1936/1985), was a practice for realising an ‘intensified class and race consciousness’, which would serve as an ‘irresistible force rather than mere sentimental and moral appeal to bear on the motives and actions of men for justice and equity’ (p. 148). Literacy worked toward economic ends, but within an economic theory that opposed capitalism and blind consumption (DuBois, 1933/1986, pp. 1235–1238). The goal was a reconstruction of the social order – including economics – predicated on the collective action of a ‘literate’ or conscious people. While DuBois questioned trade unions for their racist practices, he saw their collective action toward working class ends as invaluable. He saw workers’ education as a development of class and race conscious literacy, and recognised that some of the most significant changes of the 20th century had come through union education, and not through public schooling. Workers’ education then, far from being a neutral means of literacy, was to be as social theorist Theodore Brameld (1941, p. 283) defined it: ‘a potent means of critical intelligence, social vision’ and ‘consciously directed change’. Here was the critical calling of industrial educators. It’s obviously necessary to oppose technology education and its structures along with technological literacy and its representation of competitive supremacy (O’Riley, 1996; Petrina, 1998a). As technological literacy has been resituated in the capitalist terrain where it was constructed, it can be jettisoned while its critical manifestation is formed. Critically working with, through and against capitalists’ tools assumes a modicum of critical cultural capital for students and teachers. Technological sensibility and political sagacity A new language has been constructed for this practice and theorising: technological sensibility and political sagacity. Technological sensibility denotes capacities of individuals and collectives to act critically toward decisions in technoscientific practice, whether they be in leisure, work, or politics. Political sagacity denotes quickness or acuteness of discernment and soundness of judgement needed in actions critical and political. In mutually supporting roles, these are configurations of a critical, political orientation toward culture and an aesthetic and ecological regard for nature, however little or much culture and nature can be separated. With their critical orientations, these configurations will eventually be configured into ‘critical, technological literacy’ to create a robust, political representation. What does it mean to be sensible and politically sagacious in our participation in technological practice? This is a question of the ethics and politics of practice. It is a different question from ‘what does it mean to be literate about, and capable in, technological practice?’ While values may be inherent in both, especially given an ideological model of literacy,

196

STEPHEN PETRINA

the first question politicises one’s participation in technological practice in such a way that a question of literacy does not. If ‘technological literacy’ is merely ‘the ability to use, manage and understand technology’, as it is denoted in the Technology for All Americans summary (ITEA, 1996, p. 6), its political denotation is conservative yet masked under a posture of neutrality (O’Riley, 1996). So for the time being, we will leave technological literacy and its postured neutrality arrested in its conservative and neo-liberal context. Technological sensibility and political sagacity are one with a critical discourse on technological practice (Petrina, 1998a). Technological sensibility and political sagacity involve acknowledging the voice of those marginalized by western, capitalist histories and styles of technological practice, such as aboriginal peoples, animals, colonised and post-colonial peoples, the financially disenfranchised, people of colour, and women. This requires an engagement with the ways that issues of class, gender, labour, race, and sexuality are configured and reconfigured in technological discourse. Being sensible about capitalist styles of technological practice means asking fundamental questions about what a particular technology offers or represents (perception and description), what it means or produces with its embedded values (analysis and interpretation), and the technology’s worth (judgement). This means questioning technocratic assumptions, and capitalist notions of autonomy, determinism, and progress. Being sensible means acting politically, or intervening on the issues of inequity, injustice and exclusion that are invariably exposed through questioning. Of course, this active intervening entails the production of political artefacts or texts – the deconstruction, reproduction, and regulation of a politicised, built world. If sensibility is a critical intention to engage ethically and perceptively, or politically with technological practice, then political sagacity is the critical agency which animates and mobilises transformations of this practice. Technological practice, like cultural practice in general, is the inextricably unavoidable engagement with technologies, or the particularly styled scripts written through everyday life. While practice may be seen to extend from the ‘design’ to ‘use’ of technologies, and from the ‘practical’ to the ‘political’ endeavour with technology, it is important to see that these are indistinct. To be sensible about and politically active in a struggle against capitalist forms of consumption or waste is to be sensible and act against capitalist forms of production or deregulation. Inasmuch as technological sensibility and political sagacity are configurations within a critical discourse on technological practice, we begin to reconfigure a discourse on critical literacy. Texts, critical selection, materialism and cultural studies Critical literacy begins and ends with a critical rewriting of the world. The texts of critical literacy are not limited to conventional notions (i.e.,


197

spoken or written word). Text can represent the spoken or written word and narrative, image, media, sign, or artefact – text is the artificial representation of and in the world. We are part and parcel of a (text)ured world through which we create and are created (Nadin, 1997; Willinsky, 1991). These texts are given meaning through discourse and genre, or style. Discourse refers to the recurrent statements, themes and wordings giving meaning across texts, representing particularly styled and systematic orientations to the world. Genres are our conventional categories of discourses and texts (e.g., diciplinary, popular, etc.). As discourses and genres are constructed in the practices of making meaning, they can been understood as intricately tied to ‘semantic networks’ (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus, 1997, p. 16). For example, a discourse on the Sony Walkman is made meaningful only in that this discourse weaves together artifact, corporation, music, and user into a network. Of course, critically engaging in semantic networks or understanding cultural forms that are at the same time material and symbolic is not a norm. This takes a modicum of critical cultural capital. It is more common to find an acceptance and toleration of these forms as they write us as actors into an ‘always already’ political script, or a stylised discourse. In cultural practice, we construct and are constructed by these scripts and their actors; we are inscripted. This is not to say that meaning is prescripted or provided for us, but merely that making meaning through cultural practice is constrained by scripts of text and their actors. We may be meaning makers but, says Marx, we do not make meaning as we please. And as Latour (1991) and Haraway (1985, 1995) have suggested, it is important to accept that actors in meaning-making are both human and non-human. This prompts us to pay attention to what artefacts represent and to the intentions which they embody in cultural practice. The self and the world are conversed and traversed through cultural practice and as a cultural text. In Marxist terms, as we work in and transform the world, we also transform ourselves. We co-create our selves and our world through engaging with the production, consumption, and regulation of artefacts, identities, representations, and symbols. As theorists such as Haraway note, our engagement with media or electronic texts – hypertext – is an engagement with everyday artifacts, codes, and symbols. There is no McLuhanesque ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ or ‘high’ and ‘low’ textual hierarchy, but this is not to say that all texts are alike. Digital texts, according to de Castell (1998, p. 8), are ‘unprecedented’ hybrids: ‘for the first time in the history of human practices of inscription, all forms of representation, reflection, invention and expression can be captured and preserved in a single, enormously powerful, code’. Media, multimedia and the hypertext of cyberspace provide powerful opportunities for both surveillant control and appropriation for interrupting or ‘jamming’ this code. Cracking the binary, master ‘code’ of digital text, or hacking, is not the only tool for destabilising the status quo. In opening up communication channels to an endless variety of expressions and cultural voices, the very nature

198

STEPHEN PETRINA

of digital technologies is destabilisation of text. The destabilisation of boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres poses opportunities for a critical appropriation, or what the Media Foundation in Vancouver calls ‘culture jamming’ (Bryson & de Castell, 1998; Burbles & Callister, 1996; Kellner, 1998; Mackay, 1992; Peters & Lankshear, 1996). Culture jamming is a mode of production and regulation wherby critical resistance to commercial media is mobilised through texts which spoof or jam mainstream, popular productions. The goal of culture jamming, says the Media Foundation (1998), ‘is to galvanize resistance against those who would destroy the environment, pollute our minds and diminish our lives. We want to turn consumers back into citizens, take the ‘consumer’ out of consumer culture, and shift the human experiment on Planet Earth back onto a sustainable path’. This is accomplished through the production of texts that appropriate the work of corporations such as Calvin Klein or industries such as tobacco. Cultural images are selected for their consumer potency and then remade to jam or disturb that consumerism. Becoming literate, or forming a critical consciousness, is not a simple matter of learning language – of reading, speaking, writing and interpreting in the traditional sense of the words. Language is particularly important in that it is a primary way of representing cultural forms, but language is not confined to reading, speaking, and writing. As Morgan (1997, p. 29) noted, critical literacy refuses to ‘confine its examination to words-on-the-page’. Culture, as text and discourse broadly defined, takes the form of a ‘language’, and orientations to conversing with culture as language, such as cultural studies, semiotics, and sociology, figure heavily in critical literacy. In other words, to critically converse with a world of texts and discourses, we construct particular orientations or genres. Becoming critically literate involves a process of using the tools that help us write and rewrite ourselves and our cultural practices. There has recently been quite a bit of theorising of our engagement with texts in the world, with a number of productive reorientations to science and technology. For example, Donna Haraway (1985, 1995, p. xvi) (re)configured the ‘cyborg’ as a ‘blasphemous anti-racist feminist figure’ for working critically from within to implode technoscientific processes. A cyborg orientation to technology is power-sensitive and blurs differences between object and subject and between inside – outside boundaries of culture and nature. The cyborg orientation is literally a reconfiguration of the built world. The ‘circuit of culture’ is also fruitful in helping us become critically conversant in the built world. For example, du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus (1997) used the Sony Walkman and a series of related texts to disclose five cultural processes – representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. They demonstrated that these processes are inscribed into social uses of the Walkman, but at the same time, how this artefact consumes, produces, and regulates identities. They investigated the production, consumption and regulation of the artefact, and the Walkman’s relations with identities and representations. There is


199

a dialectic at work where meaning is ascribed to the artefact by users and producers, which in turn, inscribes selves with meaning. Although this theoretical model of disclosing cultural practice is extremely powerful, it nevertheless falls short of making explicit the ‘waste’ of production, consumption, identity, regulation, and representation. The ‘discarded’ process of waste, when added to this, ‘completes’ the circuit with a sixth cultural process (Feng & Petrina, 1998; Petrina, Hill & Lewis, under review). In this circuit, representation, identity, production, consumption, regulation, and waste are framed as cultural processes working in tandem under material conditions. The Walkman and interrelated texts were selected for their power to disclose the social workings of technology, or in this case, the semantic network of the Walkman. In the case of the Walkman, we begin to recognise how a critical selection of artefacts or texts can disclose our relations with everyday technologies which are intricately tied to larger social relations. As technology education is a practice where artefacts, discourses and signs are both locally and remotely produced, consumed, regulated and wasted, it will pay to explore the workings of our ‘information’, ‘materials’, ‘tools’, ‘processes’, and ‘products’. These productions, consumptions, regulations, and wastes of commodities, identities, and representations are mediated by an ecology and myriad of ‘always already’ political discourses, symbols, and things in and outside the classroom. Where cultural text is the artificial representation of the world, and critical literacy an orientation toward transforming cultural practice, there are possibilities for a critical technological literacy figuring heavily in pedagogical practice. Technology education, where engagement with any number and range of commodities is the norm in practice, provides an opportune setting for (re)presenting, (re)producing, and (re)interpreting culture and nature. Critical literacy, the transformation of the built world, and underlying inequities of technological practice require more than just ‘seat work’ and ‘digital work’. And if critical technological literacy is to play a valued role in the formation of critical subjects and collectives, then we will have to attend to the critical selection of our technologies or texts (Petrina, 1998a). A pedagogy for a critical engagement with, or literacy of, the built world necessarily involves a critical selection and engagement with a variety of digital, mediated, paper, and three-dimensional texts. It’s crucial to acknowledge that these texts, and interrelated literacies, are ‘always already’ political. Literacies are inextricably linked to particular technologies or texts, and pedagogically, to critical selection. As mentioned, Dewey’s primary criterion for selection in schools was the ‘disclosive power’ of technologies used (Blacker, 1994). This criterion for critical selection opposes conventional logic and practices where technologies are selected for their role in ‘high-tech’ capitalist economies, or for preparing individuals to compete in these economies. And this criterion for critically selecting from a world of texts takes a trajectory from disclosing ‘how things work’ to disclosures of ‘who’s in charge’. Indeed, critical technological literacy is formed

200

STEPHEN PETRINA

through a materialist engagement with, and appropriation of, texts in the world (Petrina, 1999). To be certain, we in technology education – administrators, students, teachers, technologists – are necessarily manipulated, complicit, and caught up in a powerful circuit of culture. Who we are – identity – is intimately tied to a cultural and natural politics of who and what we produce, consume, regulate, represent, and waste. While there may be no escaping this circuit, there are ways of appropriating, confronting and acting on one’s complicity – ways of forming a critical literacy of the built world. This ‘circuit of culture’ makes it crucial to pay close attention to the production, consumption and disclosive power of even the most mundane of classroom artefacts. Where technological literacy was constructed through the gospels of consumption, production and representation, critical technological literacy attends to the responsibility of sensitising students to the politics of these processes. Critical technological literacy is a particular (re)reading and (re)writing of the world through these politics. Critical technological literacy Without shop work, critical practices in the schools smack of a cultural elitism. Of course, it’s not just any dirty hands that will engage critical hearts and minds in transforming technological practice. Similarly, it’s not the patriarchal, racial formations of technology education that will engender a revolutionary agency. And it’s certainly not the new competitive, economic maximising, self-interested, yet democratic, individual that has been constructed in technology education who will act to confront capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, globalism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and technocentrism in cultural practice. Given that ‘technological literacy’ has been configured in conservative and neo-liberal discourses on competitive supremacy, I jettisoned the construct from my own discourse on technology education. Yet, with critical theories suggesting that the artificial representation of the world is text, I’m uncomfortable with the abandonment of technological literacy. In which case, positioning critical technological literacy in opposition to conservative representations is a necessary political move. Where, in this argument, I gave meaning to technological sensibility and political sagacity, we can now inscribe critical technological literacy with these meanings. Critical technological literacy represents the critically sensible, politically sagacious individual and collective. Being critically literate of the built world means that we maintain a ‘critical’ orientation or a different relationship to our technologies than has been the norm. Being critically literate of technology means that we have: (a) a critical orientation to representations of technological literacy; (b) the sensibility or critical intention to engage politically with technological practices such as those that sustain high rates of capital, consumption, inequities, and unegalitarian distributions of profit and waste; and (c) the political or critical agency to mobilise and produce actions


201

and ‘texts’ that work against or ‘jam’ the discourses and works of culturally and ecologically destructive technologies. Given that literacies are situated in local practice, critical student literacies are dependent on the critical selection of texts by sensible and politically sagacious teachers (Figure 3). Critical technological literacy involves a critical engagement with, and appropriation of, the built world and its signs of the times, the use of critical discourses, genres, or language to confront that world, and the mobilisation of resources to politically transform what’s built. With an eye toward the circuit of culture, the design and production of artefacts and media – critical selections – are crucial in learning how the built world works for some and might work better for others. Here, critical technological literacy subsumes critical computer literacy (Kellner, 1998; Mackay, 1992) and works in solidarity with critical media literacy (Kellner, 1998; McLaren,

Figure 3. Without the strings attached to business and industry which control the movement and rhetoric of “Tech Ed,” “Crit Tech” is free to collectively organise and agitate to say “no” to competitive supremacy, ecological destruction, exploitive practices of globalization, homophobic aggression, racist structures, and sexist displays of masculinity.

202

STEPHEN PETRINA

Hammer, Scholle & Reilly, 1995), ecological literacy (Orr, 1992) and critical workplace literacy (Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1996; Gregson, 1993; Hull, 1997; Shor, 1988) in working to overcome forms of power sustaining inequities in the built world. Taking cues from the ‘circuit of culture’ and political ecology we can ask some basic questions of technological practice (Petrina, 1998, pp. 128–130; Petrina, Hill & Lewis, under review). • Whose identity is appropriated and represented in our technological or technoscientific practices (or in this artefact, sign, text, etc.)? • Whose identity and what is regulated through our practices (or in this artefact, sign, text, etc.)? • What are the mechanisms through which representations and regulations are occurring? • How can this identity, representation, production, consumption, regulation, or waste be re/appropriated re/produced for collective justice? In effect of this return to literacy, technology education is resituated as a cultural study. Technology education as a cultural study begins to recapture some of the critical meaning and politics offered by industrial educators during the 1910s and 1920s. In the final analysis, the terrain of technology education is necessarily reshifted to lean left and back toward the radical politics of its discursive formations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for comments made on this paper at the International Working Seminar of Scholars for Technology Education, George Washington University, Washington DC, 24–27 September 1998.

REFERENCES Aptheker, H.: 1989, Literary Legacy of W.E.B. Dubois, Kraus International Publications, White Plains, NY. Barnett, M.: 1995, ‘Literacy, Technology and Technological Literacy’, International Journal of Technology and Design Education 5(2), 119–137. Black, P. & Harrison, G.: 1993, ‘Technological Capability’, in R. McCormick, P. Murphy & M. Harrison (eds.), Teaching and Learning Technology, Addison-Wesley, New York, 51–57. Blacker, D.: 1994, ‘On the Alleged Neutrality of Technology: A Study in Dewey’s Experience and Nature’, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 8(4), 297–317. Bonser, F. G.: 1928a, ‘The Most Outstanding Next Steps for Curriculum Makers in the United States: A Response by Frederick Gordon Bonser’, Teachers College Record 30(3), 200–204. Bonser, F. G.: 1932, ‘The Industrial Arts in an Efficient Education’, in F. G. Bonser (ed.), Life Needs and Education, Teachers College Press, New York, 95–106. Brameld, T.: 1941, ‘Toward a Philosophy of Workers’ Education’, in T. Brameld (ed.), Workers’ Education in the United States, Harper & Brothers, New York, 278–302. Braundy, M.: 1997, Orientation to Trades and Technology: A Curriculum and Resource Book With Special Emphasis on the Needs of Women, Open Learning Agency, Burnaby BC.


203

Bryson, M. & de Castell, S.: 1998, ‘Telling Tales Out of School: Modernist, Critical, and Postmodern ‘True Stoires’ About Educational Computing’, in H. Bromley & M. Apple (eds.), Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing as Social Practice, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 65–84. Burbles, N. & Calister, T.: 1996, ‘Knowledge at the Crossroads: Some Alternative Futures of Hypertext Learning Environments’, Educational Theory 46, 23–34. Colelli, L.: 1994, Tech Prep and Technology Education: A Positive Focus for Competitive Literacy, ITEA, Reston, VA. de Castell, S.: 1998, ‘From Data Information to Learning and Understanding’, http://www.educ.sfu.ca/gentech/libweb.htm. Department For Education: 1987, Design and Technological Activity, Her Majesty’s Printing Office, London. DeVore, P.: 1986, ‘Measuring Technological Literacy: Problems and Issues’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 6(2 & 3), 202–209. DeVore, P.: 1992, ‘Technological Literacy and Social Purpose’, Theory Into Practice 31(1), 59–63. Dewey, J.: 15 May 1915, ‘Education vs. Trade-Training – Dr. Dewey’s Reply’, The New Republic 3(28), 42–43. Dewey, J.: 1917, ‘Learning to Earn’, School and Society 5(4), 331–335. Dewey, J.: 1922, ‘Education as Politics’, New Republic 32, 139–141. Dewey, J. & Dewey, E.: 1915/1962, Schools of Tomorrow, E.P. Dutton, New York. DuBois, W. E. B.: 1932, ‘Education and Work’, Journal of Negro Education 1(1), 60–74. DuBois, W. E. B.: 1933/1986, ‘The Right to Work’, in N. Higgins (ed.), W. E. B. DuBois: Writings, Library of America, New York, 1235–1238. DuBois, W. E. B.: 1936/1985, ‘The Negro and Social Reconstruction’, in H. Aptheker (ed.), Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, University of Massachusets Press, Amherst, MA, 145–160. Dugger, W.: 1995, ‘Technology for all Americans’, The Technology Teacher 54(5), 3–6. Dyrenfurth, M.: 1983, ‘The Route to Technological Literacy’, VocEd 58(1), 42–44. Dyrenfurth, M.: 1991, ‘Technological Literacy Synthesized’, in M. Dyrenfurth and M. Kozak (eds.), Technological Literacy, 40th Yearbook of the Council for Technology Teacher Education, Glencoe, Peoria, IL, 138–183. Education Commission of the States: 1983, A Summary of Major Reports on Education, Author, Denver, CO. Feng, F. & Petrina, S.: 1998, What do We do With the Waste?: Towards Natural Cultural Studies. Unpublished manuscript. Fleming, R.: 1989, ‘Literacy for a Technological Age’, Science Education 73(4), 391–404. Foster, P.: 1995, ‘Industrial Arts/Technology Education as a Social Study: The Original Intent?’, Journal of Technology Education 6(2), 4–18. Foster, W. T.: 1996, ‘A Research Agenda for Technology Education’, The Technology Teacher 56(1), 31–33. Freire, P.: 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by M.B. Ramos, Continuum, New York. Gagel, C.: 1997, ‘Literacy and Technology: Reflections and Insights for Technological Literacy’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education 34(3), 6–34. Gee, J. P.: 1990, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, Falmer, New York. Gee, J. P., Hull, G. & Lankshear, C.: 1996, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism, Westview, Sydney. Gilberti, A.: 1989, Technological Literacy as a Curriculum Movement in Education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park. Goldman, S. & Cutcliffe, S.: 1982, ‘STS, Technology Literacy, and the Arts Curriculum’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 2(3), 291–305. Gowen, S. G.: 1992, The Politics of Workplace Literacy, Teachers College Press, New York. Gowan, S. G.: 1994, ‘The “Literacy Myth” at Work’, in R. Lakes (ed.), Critical Education for Work, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ, 35–49.

204

STEPHEN PETRINA

Greene, M.: 1991, ‘The Literacy Debate and the Public School: Going Beyond the Functional’, Educational Horizons 60(3), 129–168. Gregson, J.: 1993, ‘Critical Pedagogy for Vocational Education’, Journal of Industrial Education 30(2), 3–19. Grossberg, L.: 1994, ‘Introduction: Bringin’ it All Back Home – Pedagogy and Cultural Studies’, in H. Giroux & P. McLaren (eds.), Betrween Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, 1–28. Hall, S. (ed.): 1997, Representation: Cultural Rand Signifying Practices, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Hansen, R. & Froelich, M.: 1994, ‘Technological Literacy’, Canadian Vocational Journal 30(1), 13–19. Haraway, D.: 1985, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review 80, 65–108. Haraway, D.: 1995, ‘Cyborgs and Symbionts’, in C. H. Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, New York, xi–xix. Hoepfl, M.: 1993, ‘Technological Literacy Viewed from Without’, Paper presented at the Convention of the International Technology Education Association, Charlotte, NC. Hooks, B.: 1994, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, New York. Hull, G. (ed.): 1997, Changing Work, Changing Workers: Critical Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Skills, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. International Technology Education Association: 1996, Technology for All Americans, Author, Reston, VA. Jenkins, E.: 1997a, ‘Technological Literacy: Concepts and Constructs’, Journal of Technology Studies 23(1), 2–5. Jenkins, E.: 1997b, ‘Scientific and Technological Literacy: Meanings and Rationales’, in E. Jenkins (ed.), Innovations in Science and Technology Education, vol. VI, UNESCO, Paris, 11–39. Johnson, K.: 1996, ‘Some Thoughts on African Americans’ Struggle to Participate in Technology Education’, Journal of Technology Studies 22(1), 49–54. Kellner, D.: 1998, ‘Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society’, Educational Theory 48, 103–122. Lakes, R. (ed.): 1994, Critical Education for Work: Multidisciplinary Approaches, Ablex, Norwood, NJ. Lankshear, C.: 1997, Changing Literacies, Open University Press, Philadelphia. Lankshear, C. & Lawler, M.: 1987, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution, Falmer, New York. Lankshear, C. & McLaren, P. (eds.): 1993, Critical Literacy, State University of New York Press, New York. Latour, B.: 1991, ‘Technology is Society Made Durable’, in. J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Routledge, New York, 103– 131. Lewis, T.: 1996, ‘Accommodating Border Crossings’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education 33(2), 7–27. Lewis, T.: 1997, ‘America’s Choice: Literacy or Productivity’, Curriculum Inquiry 27(4), 391–422. Lewis, T. & Gagel, C.: 1992, ‘Technological Literacy: A Critical Analysis’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 24(2), 117–138. Liddament, T.: 1993, ‘Technological Capability: A Problematic Concept’, Design Studies 14(3), 330–343. Liddament, T.: 1994, ‘Technological Literacy: The Construction of Meaning’, Design Studies 15(2), 189–213. Macedo, D.: 1994, Literacies of Power: What Americans are Not Allowed to Know, Westview, San Francisco. Mackay, H.: 1992, ‘From Computer literacy to Technology Literacy’, in J. Beynon & H. Mackay (eds.), Technological Literacy and the Curriculum, Falmer, New York, 125–147.


205

Media Foundation: 1999, ‘Information: The Media Foundation’, http://www.adbusters.org/ information/foundatio n.html. McLaren, P.: 1995, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, Routledge, New York. McLaren, P., Hammer, R., Sholle, D. & Reilly, S.: 1997, Rethinking Media Literacy, Peter Lang, New York. McLaughlin, C.: 1995, ‘Developing Environmental Literacy’, The Technology Teacher 54(3), 30–34. Mitchell, C. & Weiler, K.: 1991, Rewriting Literacy: Culture and Discourse of the Other, Bergin & Garvey, New York. Morgan, W.: 1997, Critical Literacy in the Classroom, Routledge, New York. Nadin, M.: 1997, The Civilization of Illiteracy, Dresden University Press, Dresden, Germany. National Commission on Excellence in Education: 1991, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. National Education Goals Panel: 1991, The National Education Goals Report., US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. Noble, D.: 1984a, ‘Computer Literacy and Ideology’, Teachers College Record 85(4), 602–614. Noble, D.: 1984b, ‘The Underside of Computer Literacy’, Raritan 3(4), 37–64. O’Riley, P.: 1996, ‘A Different Storytelling of Technology Education Curriculum Revisions’, Journal of Technology Education 7(2), 28–40. O’Riley, P.: 1999, Opening up Technology Discourses to Difference (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University). Orr, D. W.: 1992, Ecological Literacy, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Peters, M. & Lankshear, C.: 1996, ‘Critical Literacy and Digital Texts’, Educational Theory 46, 51–70. Petrina, S.: 1993, ‘Under the Corporate Thumb: Troubles with Our MATE (Modular Approach to Technology Education’, Journal of Technology Education 5(1), 72–80. Petrina, S.: 1995, ‘The End of Technology Eucation: A Response to Theodore Lewis and Karen Zuga’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education 32(3), 75–82. Petrina, S.: 1998a, ‘Multidisciplinary Technology Education’, International Journal of Technology and Design Education 8(2), 103–138. Petrina, S.: 1998b, ‘Men at Work: Inspecting the Foundations of Technology Education’, Journal of Technology Education 36(1), 99–121. Petrina, S.: 1999, A Theory of Practice in Multidisciplinary Technology Education, Unpublished manuscript. Petrina, S., Hill, A. M. & Lewis, T.: under review, ‘The Political Ecology of Design and Technology Education: Toward Sustainable Practice’, International Journal of Technology and Design Education. Petrina, S. & Volk, K.: 1995b, ‘Industrial Arts Movement’s History, Vision and Ideal: Relevant, Contemporary, Used but Unrecognized (part I)’, Journal of Technology Studies 21(1), 24–32. Petrina, S. & Volk, K.: 1995c, ‘Industrial Arts Movement’s History, Vision and Ideal: Relevant, Contemporary, Used but Unrecognized (part II)’, Journal of Technology Studies 21(2), 28–35. Prime, G.: 1998, ‘Tailoring Assessment of Technological Literacy Learning’, Journal of Technology Studies 24(1), 18–23. Pucel, D.: 1989, ‘Technological Literacy: A Goal and Role for Secondary Industrial Education’, Journal of technology and Society 2(2), 33–46. Pucel, D.: 1995, ‘Developing Technological Literacy’, The Technology Teacher 55(3), 35–43. Roy, R.: 1982, ‘STS: Core of Technological Literacy’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 2(3), 289–290. Shamos, M.: 1995, The Myth of Scientific Literacy, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Shea, C., Kahane, E. & Sola, P. (eds.): 1989, The New Servants of Power: A Critique of the 1980s School Reform Movement., Greenwood, New York.

206

STEPHEN PETRINA

Shor, I.: 1988, ‘Working Hands and Critical Minds: A Paulo Freire Model for Job Training’, Journal of Education 170(2), 102–121. Shor, I.: 1992, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration, 1969–1984, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York. Simon, R., Dippo, D. & Schenke, A.: 1991, Learning Work: A Critical Pedagogy of Work Education, Bergen & Garvey, New York. Street, B.: 1984, Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, New York. Technology Education Advisory Council: 1988, Technology: A National Imperative, International Technology Education Association, Reston, VA. Todd, R.: 1991, ‘The Natures and Challenges of Technological Literacy’, in M. Dyrenfurth and M. Kozak (eds.), Technological Literacy, 40th Yearbook of the Council for Technology Teacher Education, Glencoe, Peoria, IL, 10–27. Tuman, M.: 1987, A Preface to Literacy, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL. U.S. House of Representatives: 1986, ‘Technology Education Act of 1986’, 99th Congress, second session, 1986, H. Doc 343-24. Waetjen, W.: 1987, ‘The Autonomy of Technology: A Challenge to Education’, The Technology Teacher 46(6), 7–14. Waetjen, W.: 1988, ‘Forward’, in Technology Education Advisory Council, Technology: A National Imperative, ITEA, Reston, VA, n.p. Waetjen, W.: 1993, ‘Technological Literacy Reconsidered’, Journal of Technology Education 4(2), 5–11. Waks, L.: 1986, ‘Reflections on Technological Literacy’, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 6(2 & 3), 331–336. Westbury, I. & Purves, A. (eds.): 1988, Cultural Literacy and the Idea of General Education, 87th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, part II, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Willinsky, J.: 1990, The New Literacy, Routledge, New York. Willinsky, J.: 1991, ‘Postmodern Literacy: A Primer’, Interchange 22(4), 50–76. Wirth, A.: 1989, ‘Toward a Post-Industrial Intelligence and Democratic Renewal’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education 27(1), 5–21.