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Transforming teaching and learning: embedding ICT into everyday classroom practices R. Sutherland, V. Armstrong, S. Barnes, R. Brawn, N. Breeze, M. Gall, S. Matthewman, F. Olivero, A. Taylor, P. Triggs, J. Wishart & P. Johnw Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
wFaculty of Education, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
Abstract
Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper describes how teams of teachers and researchers have developed ways of embedding information and communications technology (ICT) into everyday classroom practices to enhance learning. The focus is on teaching and learning across a range of subjects: English, history, geography, mathematics, modern foreign languages, music and science. The influence of young people’s out-of-school uses of ICT on inschool learning is discussed. The creative tension between idiosyncratic and institutional knowledge construction is emphasised and we argue that this is exacerbated by the use of ICT in the classroom.
Keywords:
culture, ICT, learning, subject knowledge, teaching
Introduction
This paper focuses on teaching and learning with information and communications technology (ICT) across a range of subjects, drawing on the research of the InterActive Education Project.1 Teachers and researchers have worked together within the project to develop and evaluate learning initiatives that focus on particular areas of the curriculum that students might normally find difficult and where a particular use of ICT could enhance learning. The idea is to use ICT that is readily available in schools and yet under-utilised. The project was predicated on the view that ICT alone does not enhance learning. How ICT is incorporated into learning activities is what is important. In our original research proposal we stated that: Despite three decades of government initiatives and academic research, the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in teaching and learning remains only partially understood by educationalists Accepted: 10 August 2004 1
http://www.interactiveeducation.ac.uk Correspondence: R. Sutherland, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK. E-mail:
[email protected]
and inconsistently practised in schools (Goldstein 1997). Alongside the government’s current d1billion commitment to increasing educational use of ICT (DfEE 1997) has come stringent criticism that there is not enough rigorous research evidence to support the current massive investment in new technologies in schools (Lynch 1999) and, that practitioners are not drawing on research evidence when it does exist. It is these two fundamental concerns of educational ICT that the InterActive Education Project has aimed to address. (Sutherland et al. 1999).
We also argued that although there is an extensive research base on teaching and learning ‘without ICT’ which could inform teaching and learning ‘with ICT’, (for example Greeno et al. 1996; Bransford et al. 1999), such research has not systematically been drawn upon by policy makers when developing curricula and guidelines for teachers on how to use ICT in the classroom. There is a tendency to think that ICT is so ‘new’ that its use will be accompanied by ‘new’ pedagogies that will somehow transform teaching and learning. This utopian vision often leads policy makers and practitioners to ignore general theoretical perspectives about teaching and learning, which in our view are central to all learning, with or without ICT.
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The project has five strands that as we weave them together are making a complex picture of ICT in education. Each strand looks at ICT in relation to a specific aspect: teaching and learning, policy and management, subject cultures, professional development and learners’ out-of-school uses of ICT. This paper reports on the teaching and learning strand of the project with other papers in this volume reporting on policy and management (Dale et al. 2004), professional development and learners’ (Triggs & John 2004) out-of-school uses of ICT (Kent & Facer 2004). We conjectured from the outset that subject knowledge was likely to be an inextricable part of the situated and mediated aspect of learning, and for this reason organised the project around the following subject areas: English, modern foreign languages, music, science, mathematics, history and geography. This has enabled us to compare the embedding of ICT across a range of school subjects. For each subject, teams of researchers and teachers worked together to design learning initiatives,2 with the English, music and mathematics teams working across the primary and secondary sectors, and the other teams working within the secondary sector only. The subject design teams (referred to as SDTs) worked together as whole groups at the University and in smaller teacher–researcher pairings (usually within a teacher’s school). Teachers were funded for 15 days over a period of 2 years to work within the project. Additionally, six of the 54 teachers were successful in obtaining teacher–researcher scholarships that enabled them to devote more than the allocated 15 days to working within the project. Each teacher, working within their subject design team, developed a subject design initiative (referred to as SDIs) that focused on embedding ICT into a small area of the curriculum. Design was informed by the2 The following table presents an overview of the number of teachers and researchers working within each subject design team:
English Mathematics Modern Foreign Languages History Music Science
No. of researchers
No. of teachers
3 3 1 2 2 3
6 3 9 5 2 8
(primary) 8 (secondary) (primary) 9 (secondary) (secondary) (secondary) (primary) 4 (secondary) (secondary)
ory, research-based evidence, teacher’s craft knowledge and feedback from members of the subject design team. A key aspect of this work involved an iterative process of design and re-design. Feedback on student learning was provided by digital video recordings of classroom interactions, together with students’ work and interviews with students. This data allowed us to tease out the ways in which the particular ICT environments used by the teacher and students enhanced or detracted from the intended learning.3 Teachers were involved in the process of viewing the video data and in some cases teachers also became involved in the analysis and writing up of the research. This process of working together has been documented more fully in Triggs and John (2004). We begin with a brief discussion of the socio-cultural theory that framed the work of the teaching and learning strand of the project. We then expand this framework by focusing in more detail on classroom cultures and out-of-school informal learning with ICT. We highlight how effective teaching and learning with ICT involves finding ways of building bridges between ‘individual and idiosyncratic’ and ‘institutional’ knowledge, following this with examples drawn from the project data. Finally, we conclude by discussing the relative roles of digital and non-digital tools in teaching and learning. Theoretical framework
The work of the InterActive Education Project is situated within a theoretical perspective on teaching and learning that draws mainly from socio-cultural theories of learning (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1991; Wertsch et al. 2003). An important aspect of sociocultural theory is the claim that all human action is mediated by tools. We interpret the idea of tool to incorporate a wide range of artefacts (for example pen, paper, book, computer), semiotic systems (for example language, graphs, diagrams), social interaction (for example group work) and institutional structures 3 Authors of this paper have been responsible for detailed analysis of video and interview data from specific design initiatives that were carried out with partner teachers. This has involved viewing and analysing video data from multiple perspectives that relate to the overall aims and theoretical orientation of the project. The paper was written as a collaborative online process with electronic drafts of the paper being circulated to all authors and critical feedback being incorporated into the paper in an ongoing process.
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(for example national educational policy). Within this context, the ‘master tool’ is natural language that is central to all human activity (Cole & Engestrom 1993). Within this framework, the idea of personacting-with-mediational-means (Wertsch 1991) both expands the view of what a person can do and also suggests that a person might be constrained by their situated and mediated action. Socio-cultural theory (as the name suggests) foregrounds the cultural aspects of human action. There are several aspects of culture that are important to take into account. Firstly, the teacher and students work within a local classroom culture that is influenced by both national and global factors (Dale et al. 2004). Within this context, students bring to the classroom a history of learning experiences that relate to their previous cultures of learning both inside and outside schools. This is particularly important when ICT is being used in the classroom because there is increasing evidence that the ways in which young people (and teachers) use ICT at school are influenced by out-ofschool cultures of use (Facer et al. 2003; Kent & Facer 2004). Secondly, any technological tool has been developed within a particular socio-cultural setting and carries with it the provenance of this culture. PowerPoint, for instance, was developed primarily for use within a business context and the preset templates can push writers towards business genres of presentation. However, ICT tools are not static and continue to be re-designed as their use within different communities evolves. Socio-cultural theory also emphasises the fact that students actively construct knowledge drawing on what they already know and believe (Vygotsky 1978). From this point of view students (and teachers) bring implicit theories and perspectives to any new learning situation and these influence what they pay attention to and thus the knowledge they construct. Within this context, the teacher has an important role in that ‘appropriately arranged contrasts can help people notice new features that previously escaped their attention and learn which features are relevant or irrelevant to a new concept’ (Bransford et al. 1999, p. 48).
and bottom-up influences. Top-down influences tend to be formalised and normative and include the school culture, subject culture, the National Curriculum and the national assessment structure that in turn are being influenced by more global factors such as the OECD4 (Dale et al. 2004). Bottom-up influences are more informal and include young people outside school cultures (Facer et al. 2003; Kent & Facer 2004), their personal histories of learning and the teacher’s own personal history of learning (Triggs & John 2004). For example, from our ongoing analysis of data it is clear that the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies in England and Wales5 had a significant influence on the thinking and practice of the mathematics and English teachers. Observation and analysis of data indicate that these teachers worked within the strategy framework that consisted broadly of opening plenary, individual/group work and final plenary (see for example Mills 2004). This structured episodic approach was adopted in the face of the dominant espoused ethos of individualised and small group work patterns that were prevalent in English and mathematics classrooms prior to the introduction of the National Strategies. The move to more template-style lessons also brought with it an emphasis on the teaching of basic mathematical skills, while in English lessons there was a similar shift in emphasis away from the development of individual writing processes to a stronger emphasis on teaching the rules of grammar and the understanding of genres. Our theoretical perspective has given us the capacity to re-conceptualise these National Strategies as mediating tools that can constrain or enhance (or both) a teacher’s way of working. For example, some teachers worked very creatively with the National Strategy (person-acting-with-mediational-means) to develop SDIs that incorporated the use of ICT in ways that enhanced students’ learning. These teachers tended to adapt the particular strategy so as to follow a rhythm of whole-class and individual work which fitted their own tacit understandings of student learning; this process enabled them to integrate ICT into
Classroom cultures
4
Within the project, we recognised from the outset that learning events in school are situated within a set of overlapping cultures, which relate to both top-down
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (http:// www.oecd.org). 5
For information on the National Numeracy Strategy see http:// www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/numeracy/, for information on the National Literacy Strategy see http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/
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their pedagogical practice so that it supported learning. Other teachers, however, were more constrained by the strategies and were more compliant. As a result, whole-class and individual work became more formulaic and many teachers were not able to respond contingently to student learning opportunities. Whereas within any particular school similar local, national and international cultures may be influencing what happens in the classroom, we have increasingly become aware that different subject cultures impact differently on how ICT is used in the classroom (Goodson & Mangen 1995; John & La Velle in press). For instance, many of the science teachers in the project appeared to be working in a particular cultural context that militated against the integration of ICT into the teaching and learning of science. It is important to understand these phenomena within the overall context of school science in England (no attempt to generalise to school science in other countries is made). Science lessons in England have for many years been structured around core activities that are often practical in nature. This relates both to the idea that an experimental approach promotes ‘discovery learning’ and that developing an experimental approach is at the core of what it means to ‘do science’. These approaches were built from the curricular reform movements of the 1970s that blended constructivism and particular scientific epistemologies. From the late 1980s onwards, however, this commitment to practical discovery was increasingly being bound to a new curriculum content as the National Curriculum and its assessment structures began to take shape. Finally the ingrained focus on student safety in science also appeared to inhibit the creative use of ICT, which requires a flexible approach for success. The melding of these issues has led to a series of questions that surround the teaching of science and its relationship to ICT. Most notably, should the science teacher bring experimental equipment into the computer room or move computers into the lab? How might science teachers monitor both the use of ICT and experimental equipment with a typical class of 30 students? Some have argued that such problems may ease with the increased uses of mobile, wireless computers or hand-held computers. However, we believe there is a real tension between integrating ICT into the teaching and learning of science when the only technology available is the desktop computer,
particularly when these are organised in a computer suite that is shared with other subjects. In contrast, the majority of project mathematics teachers were able to incorporate ICT more smoothly into the teaching and learning of mathematics (for example, Godwin & Sutherland 2004; Mills 2004; Sutherland et al. 2004) with many of them choosing to use hand-held or otherwise portable technologies rather than make use of a computer suite. Software for learning mathematics has been developed over a relatively long period in contrast to other subjects and there is a wealth of research and development on the use of ICT for learning mathematics.6 So although it is still the case that the vast majority of mathematics teachers in the UK are not integrating ICT into their teaching (Somekh et al. 2002), the project mathematics teachers were supported by a legacy of use that enabled them to be more confident in their design experiments. In other subjects, these technological legacies varied from the more techno-phobic historians to the more techno-positive musicians. However, across the project there was a diversity of activity. Many of the English teachers (Triggs & Scott-Cook 2002; Matthewman et al. 2004; Sutch 2004), music teachers (Gall & Breeze 2003) and modern foreign language teachers (Taylor & Cole 2002) all developed productive ways of integrating ICT into their subject teaching. While the work in history and geography was more patchy (Morgan & Tidmarsh 2004). The results of the project also highlighted a number of similarities and differences in the culture of teaching and learning between primary and secondary schools. The majority of project primary teachers were able to create communities of inquiry where students and teachers used a range of ICT tools to co-construct knowledge. This might be due in part to the view that primary teachers do not see themselves as experts in a particular subject domain and so are more likely to favour a co-construction of knowledge approach. However, as we discuss later in the paper, the importance of subject-knowledge expertise should not be underestimated, particularly in the ways in which teachers are able to use their knowledge to lead students into increasingly sophisticated knowledge do6
See for example the journal Micromath (http://mcs.open.ac.uk/cme/ Micromath/) that is written for teachers, and The International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning (http://www.kluweronline.com).
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mains, for example, data handling and statistics (Mills 2004), and spelling and language (Sutch 2004). Whereas some secondary teachers (Weeden 2002) also worked in this way, there were other instances where secondary teachers appeared to feel the pressure of being knowledge providers as opposed to being a knowledgeable resource within a broader community of learners. We conjecture that this may be linked to the curricular content and coverage demand being made on secondary teachers combined with traditional subject sub-cultural attitudes. In one history SDI, for instance, the teacher despite being technologically able had problems breaking from a particular conception of the subject. At the outset he asserted that he was ‘good at talking to kids and telling a story’. This appeared to be somewhat at odds with his extensive work with computers, a context that tends to reduce the levels of teacher talk. He reconciled these two views by spending time at the beginning of each of his lessons with computers addressing the whole class, away from the machines. He was, however, concerned about the use of ICT in teaching history, identifying it as the ‘the tail wagging the teaching dog’. He questioned whether or not learning, which he defined as ‘involving the brain’, might be inhibited by ICT which he thought might encourage a ‘by-passing of the brain’. In the lessons observed, the teacher therefore tended to expose the students to instructions and content, but gave little or no help in how to manage the collaborative and history-related aspect of the work. It may have been that an assumption was made that the computer would act as the third voice, the ersatz teacher, and that somehow when working with computers, students would either know what to do, or would be motivated to find out. This SDI revealed that for some subject areas and for some teachers, ICT was a Trojan Horse, secretly bringing in new approaches to learning that conflicted with the deep grammar of the subject. In the vignettes above, we have tried to highlight the complexity of the cultural influences that impact on teaching and learning with ICT in the classroom. We suggest that these dynamic influences have to be understood in order to begin to develop adequate policy for integrating ICT into subject teaching. In the next section we introduce another factor that impacts on learning with ICT in the classroom, namely out-ofschool informal learning with ICT.
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Out-of-school informal learning with ICT
An important aspect of any dynamic classroom culture is the multi-cultural influences that each individual student and teacher brings to the classroom. This has been particularly evident in English classrooms where young people are increasingly influenced by their outof-school production of multi-media texts. For example, when students were producing websites at John Cabot City Technology College (Matthewman et al. 2004), they drew on both the ideas being presented by their teachers and their out-of-school experiences. One group produced a website about their favourite band, working on this out-of-lessons and out-of-school and then presenting their website to the teacher in class time. Another group benefited from a particular student’s prior experience in website design that enabled them to manage and select the images and information they had researched independently. Importantly, all the students were familiar with managing files, downloading images, using e-mail and word processing; however, it was not just the experience of producing multi-media texts that was significant. It became apparent that outside school, students are immersed in a visual culture (Goodwyn 2000; Kress 2000) and interviews with students taking part in this particular design initiative indicate that their extensive experience of browsing the Web was brought to bear on their in-class Web designs. In music also, students frequently come to the classroom with a wealth of knowledge and awareness of styles of music; in many cases exceeding their teachers’ knowledge in particular areas. Some music software packages (for example, Fruity Loops, Acids Xpress and Dance eJayt) enabled students to compose within various contemporary styles of music that are clearly important in young peoples’ social and cultural lives. The results of the music design initiatives indicate that this can lead to increased motivation and engagement in school. Some teachers recognised the benefits of this exploratory style of learning in music and viewed these classroom situations as opportunities for them to learn from the students rather than vice versa. Others, however, were more fearful believing that their own lack of knowledge might become apparent to the students leading to situations where they could not give adequate support. In mathematics there was also evidence that out-ofschool uses of ICT were impacting on learning in the
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classroom. For example, when Simon Mill’s Year 4 (age 8–9) class were investigating the distribution of colours in packets of smarties, using Excel to represent the data in both tabular and graphical form (Mills 2004), it soon became apparent that some of the students in the class knew how to manipulate Excel, although this had never been taught at school. Subsequent interviews with students also revealed out-ofschool experience of using Excel. Int: Do either of you use Excel at home (Alan shakes head)? Ray: Sometimes. My Dad uses it for his paper work. Int: And when you use it what do you use it for? Ray: Umm, he uses it, cos when he’s got paper calculations and some are hard like for him, he puts it in Excel and then he puts, he circles it and then presses the equal button and it tells him what the sums are. Int: What do you use it for? Ray: Maths homework. Alan: Cheat
Results of the teacher questionnaire administered to all teachers in the project schools and interviews with partner teachers indicate that the majority of teachers are not aware of the nature and extent of students’ expertise that relates to their out-of-school uses of ICT. For example in the 2003 questionnaire administered to teachers in the project schools 79% of teachers (n 5 229) underestimated the computer ownership of 91% revealed by the student questionnaire. Teachers also tend to be unaware of the knowledge students have of curriculum areas and by default, the sorts of input they might have in lessons. This is actually not a new phenomenon but is arguably exacerbated by ICT. We suggest that if teachers can find ways of drawing upon the distributed expertise of all the students in a class, then the learning of the whole class can be enhanced. If, on the other hand, the use of ICT in the classroom is accompanied by a focus on individualised learning, as advocated by many policy makers, then this potential to turn a class into a learning community where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts could be lost.
Creative tensions: individual and common knowledge
Accompanying the introduction of computers into schools there has always been an implicit assumption that this investment in hardware will somehow be
accompanied by a reduction in expenditure on teachers. This relates to the idea of individualised learning alluded to above, in which each student will learn almost effortlessly through interaction with a computer. Sutherland (2003) has argued that in the case of mathematics education in the UK, computers were often viewed as an extension of individualised textbook learning schemes, by-passing the teacher who was considered to be the cause rather than the cure of students’ misconceptions in mathematics. This view still prevails in many policy documents where the rhetoric of individualised learning is still dominant. There is strong evidence in the field of mathematics education, at least, that such a vision leads to the learning of individual and idiosyncratic knowledge that cannot be used or communicated in more general social situations. For example, within the InterActive Education Project when 10–11 year-old primary students were learning about the properties of quadrilaterals through interacting with a dynamic geometry environment, all of the students initially wrote ‘informal properties’ on the screen as the following example illustrates: it has four sides, they are like a train track, they are parallel, they are equal, it does not have any right angles, it is the colour turquoise, and it cannot be a diamond. This could have been predicted in advance from our theoretical perspective and relates to students’ previous experiences and lives. We also know that this is likely to be the case in science learning (Leach & Scott 2003) with or without ICT. It is all the more remarkable therefore that developments in simulation software in science do not appear to be taking into account this perspective on learning. As Jewitt (2003) has convincingly shown there are many ways of reading computer-based simulations of science experiments and a lack of understanding of the ‘informal’ readings that students are likely to bring from their out-of-school uses of game software will lead to poorly designed science software that could provoke students to develop alternative frameworks from those intended by a science teacher. As we continue to analyse the video data from the project we are investigating the nature and extent of the gap between students’ initial informal perspectives developed through interaction with an ICT environment and what a teacher considers to be an appropriate perspective from a subject knowledge point of view. Constructivist theories of learning emphasise the importance
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of drawing on this informal knowledge, but suggest that the shift from informal to more formal ways of knowing will happen almost spontaneously. Socio-cultural theories of learning also emphasise the importance of drawing on this informal knowing but point to the role of more-knowledgeable-others in this respect. There is a paradox here, because it is individual engagement with ICT that energises students. But it is also this individual engagement that is likely to lead to idiosyncratic knowledge construction. Interestingly, this seems to be the case whether the software is more open-ended and exploratory or more closed and content-driven and this relates to humans as constructors (and not receivers) of knowledge. For example, in a science classroom when the teachers and students were working with rather content-focused simulation software, created principally as a teaching, rather than a learning tool, students engaged by moving between different simulations and topics, as opposed to focusing on one simulation. We suggest that this exploratory practice is likely to have drawn on young people’s outof-school practices of using ICT and in particular their use of games software. We also suggest that this exploratory practice is an important aspect of learning but one that is at odds with the expectation of this particular simulation software, where students were expected to work in a more linear fashion. Developing a balance of whole-class and individual/group work seems to be a key aspect of productive integration of ICT into school subjects. This was evident across all subjects. For example, at Colstons Primary School, students used a simple sequencing package to produce a composition to fit a given brief. While much of the time was spent working in pairs at separate computers, the students were encouraged to talk to nearby classmates and allowed to move to view others as they worked. This not only enabled students to learn new composition ideas but also to get help with technical issues. Furthermore, many opportunities were provided for sharing work in progress: at various points in the lesson the teacher included plenary sessions in which students regrouped near a specific computer to listen to work and offer ideas for further development. What seems to be emerging is the importance of finding mechanisms for students to present their work for critical feedback from others as a way of shifting emphasis from individual knowledge to collective and
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shared knowledge. Some subjects, music for example, have more of a tradition of such a practice. In music, students are often offered opportunities to share their work, in process and as final performances, to the whole class, at the end of a project. All the music teachers in the project SDIs continued this practice within their work, even when they were using computers for the first time. Many of the English teachers also incorporated an element of critical feedback from students into their SDIs (Matthewman et al. 2004; Sutch 2004). Some of the mathematics teachers within the project also worked in this way.7 For example, when Marnie Weeden worked with 13–14-year-old students on learning about proof and geometry she explicitly built a process of sharing ongoing work into her SDI (Weeden 2002; Sutherland et al. 2004). This impacted on learning as these mathematics students explained when they were interviewed: If I was just doing it, I probably wouldn’t have got anywhere, but knowing that we had to present made me do it. The fact that we were sharing, put in a competition element into the investigation plus we were able to compare what we had found out. It was a group effort so when a group found out about something another group could continue from there. It kinda made you work more because you knew you had to show something at the end of it. If you don’t have to show it, what’s the point of working hard at it?
This collective work brings to the forefront for critical discussion by the whole-class key subject area questions: what constitutes adequate mathematics, adequate science and adequate history? We argue that collective and critical discussion supports students to enter the ‘inner world’ of a school subject. It is clear in the case of mathematical proof, for instance, that students are unlikely to discover spontaneously what constitutes this very particular practice through their own informal investigations. Rather, they have to be inducted into this practice. Within each subject there 7
Some of the project mathematics teachers have been influenced by the work of Hungarian mathematics teachers, For example teachers at John Cabot City Technology College use MEP mathematics (http:// www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/mep). Marnie Weedon was trained on the University of Bristol PGCE course (http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/programmes/ pgce/course/maths) and each year PGCE students exchange visits with Hungarian mathematics teachers.
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will also be different and possibly competing views about what constitutes ‘the subject’. All teachers bring to the classroom a view about this – views that are often tacit, historical and experiential. These implicit theories of their subject may be influenced, in part, by what is specified in the National Curriculum but are more likely to be affected by each teacher’s ‘personal curriculum’ (Gudmunsdotir 2000). The interactive whiteboard has a potential role to play in conjoining the teacher’s ‘personal curriculum’ to the knowledge of students in classroom settings. This piece of technology was exploited successfully by several teachers in the InterActive Project. Nondigital whiteboards likewise have considerable potential in this area (Godwin & Sutherland 2004). Another way of constructing a ‘common knowledge community’ is highlighted by the work of Simon Mills at Teyfant School. He is experimenting with digital photography and ways of incorporating such resources into PowerPoint so that collective and whole-class work can be better exhibited (Mills 2004). Despite this reservoir of ‘common knowledge’ made up as it is of teacher and student ideas and expertise, students still perceive the teacher as the knowledge provider because of the inherited traditions of schooling. However, within this pool of knowledge there are likely to be some students who are actually more knowledgeable about using software than the teacher. The example of music sequencing software is a case in point. In such instances, the creative teacher will always find ways of drawing upon this pool of expertise. How then can we conceptualise the role of the teacher when integrating ICT into their subject teaching? Much has been written about the use of ICT in changing the role of the teacher from ‘teller’ to ‘facilitator’. We are particularly concerned about this rather over-simplified polarisation of the teacher’s role. We view the teacher’s role as involving a complex shifting of perspectives from the ‘more-knowledgeable-other’, to the co-constructor of knowledge, to the vicarious participant. In this sense a teacher is analogous to the first violin8 in an orchestra – some8 The metaphor of playing a violin could be extended to think about what it means to be a person-acting-with-mediational-means ‘Take a string instrument. You could analyse it by saying, my pinkie, when on the bow, has this kind of pressure, and at the same time my thumb is doing this and then each finger is kind of moving in an independent choreography, etc. At some point when you’re learning the violin, you do isolate each
times leading, sometimes playing-with and sometimes being silent. As discussed already, a socio-cultural perspective recognises the fact that each student brings their own personal history of learning to any new learning situation. This diversity of student experience might appear to be an almost impossible challenge for the teacher, but as our research shows, ‘creative’ teachers are experienced at bringing together these differences to orchestrate a whole – one that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Integrating ICT into subject cultures
How then can teachers integrate ICT tools into their everyday teaching to transform learning? We would argue that it is important to understand and unpack the inter-related cultural influences that both enhance and constrain what is possible. We have started to explore these issues in the previous sections of this paper and can begin to see how important it is to consider both the subject culture, the culture of the school sector and to understand this within national educational cultures. We also suggest that it is important to understand the ways in which ICT can be productively integrated into subject learning and will begin to tease out the characteristics of constructive uses of ICT within the following section of the paper. When ICT was effectively embedded within a subject, project teachers embraced learning for themselves and used ICT tools to transform their own knowledge of their subject areas and develop, expand and adjust their teaching repertoire. This is illustrated by the way in which Paul Taylor (from Cotham Secondary School) used Cubase VST 5.1 to enable a mixed ability Year 9 class to explore the relationship between film and music. He designed a template for students to use, which contained prepared musical cliche´s, that had to be synchronised with a film that was placed on each computer so that it could be finger and the arm, but the reason the violin is so wonderful is it takes these many, many different motions and weights and activities that can all be integrated, are all coordinated. I mean, you’re moving this arm like this. At the point that you play the violin, the last thing you want to do is think about the arm separately. You learn little by little the way it feels to have all of these actions coordinated, and in some magical way – well it’s not so magical, it’s the way we do everything in the world – you think about everything together. You don’t think about the angle of your wrist and the pressure here and the speed there as being separate. You can’t think of them separately.’ (Ted Machover, http://newmusicbox. org/first-person/oct99/interview6.html).
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Fig. 1 (a–c) Feedback from a mathematics software package concerning negative scaling.
viewed at the same time as the musical template. In pairs students were asked not only to simply arrange the fragments of music but also to cut, copy and paste them appropriately. In addition, they were required to compose their own sections to fit the film. In this initiative, the ICT offered new possibilities for students to compose within a new genre and with a wider range of sounds than are normally available within a music classroom. Another example of teachers engaging with new genres and transforming their own knowledge came from English. Chris Davies and Adrian Blight (John Cabot City Technology College) experimented with hypertext as a way of enhancing students’ literary understanding. Year 10 students constructed a revision website about their examination text Of Mice and Men. They were able to synthesise class teaching, individual research and a variety of textual resources through group collaboration. Students reported enhanced understanding of the text as well as satisfaction with the process of teaching and learning. In a similar way Year 13 students produced a website about First World War literature. This activity was designed to encourage students to make links between contexts and texts and to connect ideas and themes across texts. Analysis of students’ essays after the SDI showed increased instances of linking out to context and linking between texts. Within the successful cases, teachers used the resources of the researcher and teacher-members of their subject design team to generate ideas for embedding ICT into teaching and learning and to scaffold their classroom work. The following quote begins to explain why Ellie Coombs, a mathematics teacher from John Cabot City Technology College, valued this way of working with the University team. I really enjoyed having the meeting with you two [researchers at the University], it gave me so many ideas.
[. . .] What did I enjoy? . . . not having the attention on me, but having the attention on my lesson and my planning was just really nice. And that was really nice to just be able to bounce ideas off somebody else. Because I think you are quite isolated when you are a teacher, you are in the classroom on your own and you do your own things in a way, not that in-depth because people don’t have time in school. And I really enjoyed that aspect of it. And just that you were coming up with lots of new things that I hadn’t thought of. And as well I really felt that you gave me a lot of confidence in trying out different things and you were just like ‘Yeah go ahead and just do it’.
Successful cases capitalised on the potential of ICT to provide rapid feedback that supports the construction of knowledge. This is illustrated by the way in which Ellie used a dynamic software package in mathematics to support students to ‘see’ the effects of a negative scale factor, a property that students would normally find very difficult. Sam and Nabil construct Fig. 1a in Cabri and start changing the scale factor. Nabil: Ehi Sam look at this! Sam, it turns around! (Fig. 1b) Because it’s going minus isn’t it so it goes the other way .. so it . . . if say .. if we . . . wow! Sam: Move that one. Nabil: This one? Nabil changes the scale factor instead. The transformed figure disappears from the screen. Nabil: It’s running away Sam! It’s running away! (Fig. 1c) Ellie: Oh, it’s running away! That was an interesting thing. What happens when you do a negative? Nabil: It goes the opposite way. Ellie: It goes the opposite way. Cool. Yes, when it’s negative. Do a negative again so that we can see it a bit better. It turns upside down, doesn’t it? So you can really comment on that. That’s what I meant by orientation, because it does not stay the same way around. Well done boys!
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Successful cases also supported students to engage for sustained periods of time in activities that related to what the teacher intended to teach. This is illustrated by the way in which Elizabeth Lazarus and Ruth Cole (Sir Bernard Lovell School) used ICT in German lessons to transform students writing and to heighten their awareness of grammar. These teachers used drop-down menus in Word to construct writing frames9 that enabled students to write within a predesigned template that both structured their writing and allowed for creative writing within the free-space textboxes (Taylor & Cole 2002). Another example of the way in which students used word processors came from history, where ICT slowly became incorporated into the accepted subject culture. This was all the more pertinent given the long-standing scepticism towards technology that exists within the humanities. As Barnett (1994) points out too often school curriculum structures and traditions ‘confirm technology as a ghetto for ingenious, specialist tinkerers, and the Humanities as the natural home for anti-technologists.’ Within this SDI Alan Reid was slowly inducted into the use of word processing techniques so that his Year 10 GCSE class might improve the quality of their writing and analysis. Although the approach was what Counsell (2003) terms ‘a low convergence’ activity it did provide us with enough leverage to see whether changes in Alan’s perception about the ‘environmental’ conditions in the computer classroom, combined with perceived improvements in his own levels of confidence and competence with ICT, might shift his practice. The results were encouraging and indicated that the quality of writing produced by his students improved markedly from that of earlier attempts with more conventional forms of expression. The ability to save and re-draft in an iterative way allowed Alan to provide greater input into his students’ substantive thinking about the topic under study – ‘Prohibition in the 1920s in the USA’. Alan was also astounded by the levels of interaction that were taking place when his students were working with the onscreen documents and the integrated websites. For the lower ability students, the writing frames also proved to be helpful, allowing them to construct their answers within a more structured framework. He commented: ‘I 9 A writing frame is a template that structures writing by creating ‘gaps’ in text that students have to fill in for themselves.
couldn’t believe the change in them, in class they take ages to get started but to my surprise they really got into it and brought in so many new sources that I couldn’t get access to. Their writing seems to be better too. I’ve marked their earlier stuff and this was much better mainly I think because they were able to draft and edit and that gave them confidence.’ In terms of his own perception of the use of ICT Alan had also changed his mind. He was suspicious of ICT early on, particularly its ability to enhance learning within set examination and institutional targets. He saw it as ‘something extra we have to do’ rather than being integral to his work. At the end of the SDI, however, he was more supportive and thoughtful about its use and deployment. He opined: ‘You know I wasn’t really into ICT and I had some real doubts about it, with the sort of exams and the pressure we have here, but I’ve really changed. It wasn’t so disruptive and once I got more confident I realised that history is still the same. In fact the kids were excellent and their writing was so much better. In many of the less successful cases of embedding ICT into subject cultures, the teachers did not orchestrate a knowledge community, seemingly believing that somehow knowledge was embedded within the software, that the technology would do the teaching. We should not be surprised by this finding, because many teachers may have been persuaded by the hype that is attached to the use of ICT in school that ICT itself ‘causes’ learning. But as one of the project teachers said ‘It’s just another tool – and it’s what you can do with it that counts and not the tool itself’. Other factors emerging as significant in less successful cases were related to technical difficulties. Sometimes it was literally just too difficult to get the technology to work. For example in the case of music in one school, the music teacher decided to modify a current Year 8 scheme of work on composing Spanish music to incorporate the use of composition software. The four music computers had only been installed in the classroom the week before, and therefore this was the first time that students had used them. A number of issues arose from this teacher’s work. With only four music computers for work with a class of over 25, the teacher had to support instrumental composition at the same time as work on the computers; this is often the case for music teachers, and is not easy because students composing in groups with instruments need different support to those composing at the computer.
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It was only after teaching the initiative that the teacher realised the necessity to completely reconsider the structure of the scheme of work in order to incorporate the use of ICT: it could not merely be ‘bolted on’. When redesigning the initiative, after the project, she developed computer musical templates (similar to writing frames) to enable students to focus on specific areas of work and this provided them with the support they needed to become more successful in their outcomes. She also had technological difficulties that the general school technician could not support; students lost so much time when the computers would not work at all that the high attainers working on the computers produced work of a much lower standard than usual and were de-motivated. Getting the technology to work adequately was also a problem for one English teacher. Her design involved students in making digital narratives. She began by attempting to integrate the structure of the national literacy strategy into her teaching within the ICT suite. However, the mixture of whole-class and individual work caused tensions as students worked individually at different rates. Other pressures included the lack of flexibility in booking the ICT suite; the lack of a data projector to support wholeclass work and the teacher’s lack of confidence with the ICT equipment and software. This combination of factors meant that the focus was on management of the class and class output rather than student learning. Sometimes the support of the SDT scaffolded teachers working within less than adequate technical support systems to transcend local constraints. For example, in one primary school the university researchers spent considerable time making sure the software was loaded onto the network before the SDI and arrived in good time before each lesson to double-check that the technical issues had been sorted. As discussed already some secondary subject teachers found it too constraining to take students to a computer room at a fixed time, which did not fit with the flow and rhythm of subject teaching. This was particularly the case with science and history teachers. Mathematics teachers who also expressed concern about such constraints were able to use portable graphics calculators within their own ‘mathematics’ classroom. What all these less successful cases suggest from the perspective of person-acting-with-mediational means is that the starting point for productive in-
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tegration of ICT into subject teaching is that a teacher has to be able to ‘adequately act’ with the particular chosen ICT tool. The vast majority of project teachers had not integrated ICT into their subject teaching before becoming members of the project. This suggests that it is important to understand the nature and extent of the support provided by the SDI as discussed by Pat Triggs and Peter John in this issue. Can this model of professional development be scaled up? We conjecture that it will be possible once we have developed our understanding of the complex factors that enhance and constrain the ways in which a teacher can innovate with ICT in the classroom. Some concluding remarks
The results of the InterActive Education Project have led us to ask questions about the relative roles of digital and non-digital tools in teaching and learning. We suggest that within a particular knowledge domain it may be important for young people to be able to work with both digital and non-digital tools. For example, is it important to be able to compose with a digital composition package and with a musical instrument, using traditional notation? Is it important to write with paper as well as with a word processor? Is it important to do geometry on paper as well as with a dynamic geometry package? Is it important to carry out science experiments in the lab, as well as within a digital simulation? How a teacher answers these questions will relate to their own philosophical perspective on their subject. For example, in music ‘traditionalists’ believe that it is vital to gain instrumental and theoretical skills and harmonic awareness, including notation skills, to compose and that music ICT is an easy and ‘less musical’ option. Others also believe in the superiority of traditional skills but recognise that sequencing software broadens possibilities for composition. Others (and this includes the authors of this paper Nick Beeze and Marina Gall) believe that different skills are used with digital approaches to composition. We suggest that it is important for teachers and policy makers to engage with these types of discussions and not treat ICT tools as unproblematic innovations that will somehow lead to enhanced learning and that necessarily ‘replace’ older technologies. These discussions need to move beyond what is needed for assessment (e.g. students need to write with pen and paper alone and under pressure because that is
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the dominant mode of assessment). In fact modes of assessment should reflect what is important for the world beyond school. We would argue that if policy makers developing national assessment and teachers developing formative assessment could take into account the idea of person-acting-with-mediationalmeans, then we might begin to see different types of assessment being produced. More importantly students should also be engaging in discussions about the relative merits of different tools, so that they can become resourceful learners. Here, as discussed in the beginning of this paper we interpret the idea of tool broadly and so person-actingwith-mediational-means could be person-acting-withanother-person, person-acting-with-ICT, or personacting-with-particular knowledge. In this sense young people could become aware, for example, of the relative affordances of paper and pencil, a word processor, PowerPoint, or discussion with a peer, when communicating ideas. Humans are expert at creating tools to transform practices and knowledge. ICTs are part of this creative production. Knowing how to use these tools to transform learning in schools is not so straightforward. This is because new ICT tools often challenge an existing practice of teaching and threaten a well-established knowledge domain. We have seen through the work of the InterActive Education Project that teachers can begin to develop ways of embedding ICT into their subject teaching and that a good starting point is to creatively exploit readily available software for teaching and learning. Acknowledgements
This paper is based on the work of the project ‘InterActive Education: Teaching and Learning in the Information Age’. This is a 4-year research and development project funded from December 2000 until August 2004 by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ref; L139251060) as part of Phase II of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (see http://www.tlrp.org). The project is directed by Rosamund Sutherland (University of Bristol) and codirected by Susan Robertson (University of Bristol) and Peter John (University of Plymouth). Other members of the team are: Dele Aboudrin, David Badlan, Rebecca Ball, Sally Barnes, Richard Brawn,
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