John Olson is a professor emeritus of education at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. He is interested in the role of the teacher in change. His most recent book is Understanding Teaching: Beyond Expertise (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1992).

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The computer as Trojan horse

In a recent newspaper cartoon a speaker spoofs the contemporary enthusiasm to acquire computer skills. The speaker says he has come to teach the computer language, COBOL. The expectant clients respond that they have no computers. The speaker, nonplussed, replies that he doesn’t know COBOL.

This comedy is not far-fetched. Schools are installing computers in large numbers and teachers are encouraged to use them in all aspects of instruction and administration. In this rush there is a danger that schools will get more than they bargained for. Teachers should look critically at this Trojan horse in their midst: what they find there may challenge their educational philosophy and practice in unexpected ways &emdash; some good and some not so.

Note the following examples of the ways computer-assisted learning (CAL) may challenge teachers:

• In some CD-ROM books students are asked to propose alternative endings for stories. They are asked to be more than passive readers. They are suddenly part of the story &emdash; the teacher has to take students into account in the reading process, control of which, ironically, has shifted away from the teacher (Miller and Olson 1998).

• Computer-based simulations require students to work in groups to solve problems. Access to the limited number of computers has to be managed. Everyone is doing something different. The classroom is more complicated, albeit more stimulating, as students decide when to move about the room. Teachers, ironically, dream of a computer for every student at his or her seat (Olson 1988).

• Students are expected to become active in the midst of a multimedia package &emdash; as in the environmental package ‘The voyage of the Mimi’ (Black and Atkin 1996: 220). The videotape is over and data-gathering begins. The teacher has to switch from a fellow passive-watcher of the video to a user of complex technology &emdash; probes and a computer &emdash; to gather environmental data. Teachers prefer the security of the videotape; students resent the virtual and passive world it represents (Black and Atkin 1996: 152-154).

In each of these cases, CAL has brought challenges to the way a classroom is run. There are Trojans in the horse! Built into these innovations, and many others, are images of classroom practice. Notions about the role of the teacher in the classroom are challenged as expectations for increased student activity are embedded in CAL (Linn 1991). Behind these designs lie ideas about the process of education itself. So when schools use CAL they are making certain commitments to educational practices and values. Given the rush to adopt CAL, educators might pause to ask what these practices and values are? Where do they fit with what is traditionally done and valued in schools? Who are these Trojans in this Trojan horse?

Educators need to put CAL and the technology that supports it into perspective. Computers and CAL are but one technology applied to education (Linn 1991: 226). In classrooms computers encounter a pre-existing technology: the techniques and tools of classroom instruction and management that use familiar and predictable resources and routines lying readily to hand and embodying certain values about the work being done. Teachers use these techniques to create classroom flow and production. Desks, boards, books, chalk, maps, etc., are where they ought to be and do what they should. Teachers, who tacitly control these tools (Polanyi 1959, Bowers 1990: 74), can monitor students at work so that many things can go on at once with a minimum of intervention. Teachers know the signs of difficulty and have devised complex systems for dealing with them.

Researchers are looking at a complex technology when they look at classrooms. Although teachers may not be able to give a full account of the nature of their technology, they are well aware of the risks of abandoning it (Olson 1992, Miller and Olson 1994). How then can we understand what is at stake when schools adopt computers and CAL? To illustrate the analysis that is needed, take the use of computer laboratories as an example.

What is likely to happen if teachers regularly take their students out of the classroom to a computer laboratory? Why take students to such a place? How does doing this flow from what is going on in the classroom? Why do so, given the dislocation such a move represents? Why would a teacher want to abandon the complex and sustaining resources of the classroom for a computer laboratory?

One way of looking at computer laboratories is to see them as a brute necessity caused by the difficulty of readily assimilating computers in sufficient numbers needed for CAL in each classroom (Watson 1990: 34). Another way to look at them is to see how they are associated with the move to stress generic mental skills instead of traditional subject-based curriculum objectives. If training students to develop generic skills is the object of schooling, then perhaps one does not need the ebb and flow of the classroom and its complex technology &emdash; one needs students riveted to their seats. Is the computer laboratory a physical manifestation of the skills curriculum just as open classrooms were manifestations of the child-centred curriculum of the 1960s and 1970s? Is the computer laboratory like the language laboratory &emdash; a place to do highly prescribed activities in a rather routine fashion? Thus computers are massed in rooms of their own because CAL design demands, and curriculum policy supports, such a plan. But why such a plan in the first place? Who delivered to the schools this Trojan horse?

A clue can be found in a recent analysis of the UK geography curriculum. Watson (1997) noted an increasing vocational emphasis in such school subjects as geography which are vehicles for general skills-training rather than forms of knowledge educationally valuable in their own right. CAL is playing a role in this transformation. Thus general skills are to be taught through the use of computer programs that emphasize those skills (Hodson 1990: 71). Computer laboratories become sites for such training. Furthermore, this emphasis in CAL is not surprising, given how heavily influenced it is by information-processing and artificial-intelligence theories.

Who would want to promote generic vocational skills? One candidate is those who represent the business interest in public schooling and promote the view that schools should produce the work habits and employability skills they desire. What are to be made of lists of employability skills that are used in curriculum? Canadian examples I have seen are so simplistic that they appear unreal. Perhaps the idea of listing, defining and objectifying &emdash; of reducing complexity to simplicity &emdash; gives assurance of control over school production and productivity. Their latent intent is to assure, not to guide.

Have teachers wholeheartedly embraced this world of atomized skills? Teachers I have talked to have expressed concerns even as they try to come to terms with the new regime of computer-based teaching (Olson 1982, 1992). This concern is not surprising: how teachers construe the subject matter they teach is central to their work-lives, and because important values may be lost, they resist anything that renders existing technology obsolete. This resistance reminds me of the early 19th-century Luddite reaction to the loss of craft-values and a way of life based on independence. As others (Hobsbawm 1968, Lyon 1991: 100, Postman 1992: 43, Noble 1995) have pointed out, this Luddite response to technological change was neither trivial nor reactionary. Unfortunately, the term ‘Luddite’ is now used to berate those who resist technological change (Perelman 1992); indeed, teachers who have not embraced CAL are called Luddites.

Teachers’ reluctance to adopt computer-based innovations needs to be seen in the context of existing technology and its commitments. They interpret reform packages in the framework of their existing technology. Take an example from Japan (Black and Atkin 1996, Olson et al. 1999). Teachers there were encouraged by university teacher educators and the Ministry of Education to follow an international trend and use calculators in their classrooms. But current Japanese textbooks did not support this change, and calculators were forbidden in examinations. Needless to say, the teachers were reluctant to use calculators: there was no domestic warrant for them in spite of pressures to innovate and join international trends to focus on problem solving. Teachers did have a warrant to use existing instructional technology and paper-and-pencil exercises.

Because the use of CAL in the classroom may undermine a teacher’s sense of efficacy, expressive elements &emdash; like teacher credibility &emdash; need to be considered along with instrumental matters &emdash; like efficacy and efficiency &emdash; in understanding how CAL is used in classrooms (Miller and Olson 1998). Such understanding has been absent in the literature of change. On the contrary, as I have already indicated, teachers have been criticized for not embracing CAL. Allied with this criticism is an absurd overestimation of the importance of CAL for education (Miller and Olson 1995, 1998).

It should not be surprising that teachers have adapted CAL to their classrooms according to their expressive and instrumental values. CAL is not the first innovation that teachers have domesticated. In a study of the UK Schools Council Integrated Science Project (SCISP), the teachers I observed in comprehensive schools domesticated the project with a vengeance (Olson 1982). They simply ignored the generic cognitive skills basis of the curriculum, i.e. problem-solving and pattern-finding based on the cognitive psychology of Gagné (1974). They re-packaged integrated science into separate sciences but experienced some difficulties with the project’s social issues (although it was a topic in which they were interested). They used teaching methods (e.g. teacher-controlled question-and-answer) that were not useful for discussing social issues. As a result, the domestic version of SCISP in schools was a far cry from the original vision of its makers.

The struggle teachers had with the SCISP project has parallels in CAL’s acceptance. CAL involves, implicitly more often than explicitly, non-traditional images of the subject couched in languages and dependent on classroom technologies teachers may not use. The innovations, in the best cases, involve more attention to student ideas and student control, movement around the school, focus on meta-learning, data-handling and interpretation, and less focus on the intervention of the teacher. But the shift to CAL brings ‘bugs’ in smooth classroom running and involves didactic and pedagogic ideas foreign and unacceptable to many teachers (Linn 1991: 226). If teachers view these new approaches as ‘wild’, it is not surprising that they ‘domesticate’ them.

But exactly what features do teachers perceive as ‘wild’? And why? And how do they domesticate them? Here I think educators need to examine the forces that affect teachers as they enact curriculum &emdash; especially the craft and survival norms that play an important role in the process of domestication (Olson et al. 1999). The balance among these norms should be recognized in any appreciation of the process of adaptation of innovation in classrooms.

Innovative packages arrive at teachers’ desks as part of some strategy of dissemination. Governing that strategy is some kind of model. One model assumes that effective practitioners will encourage others to experiment with new ideas. But, as Watson (1993) has pointed out in a case study of residual effects in schools where there were CAL enthusiasts, a search for the shadows of effective users is likely to be very disappointing. The enthusiasts move on &emdash; without leaving a trace. The school-based model simply does not work.

A similar conclusion may be drawn from experience with a parallel model that requires effective students to support their peers in developing CAL capability. In my own research (Miller and Olson 1994), I found peer-experts did not tutor &emdash; they debugged and moved on. CAL capability was not shared, and again users were not diffusers. Why?

What is missing in these models may be an adequate understanding of what counts in teacher and student culture, and of how perceptions of non-users compare to those of users. In both cases, issues related to conventional classroom roles are potent. An understanding is needed of how users achieve the needed capability. Educators do not know enough about the assimilation of innovation, partly because existing change models are rather mechanical and focus on management issues of interest to administrators (Olson 1992). They underplay the strong steering forces of established classroom practices and existing techniques. In short, they do not attend to the culture of practice. Freire (1973), for example, underscores the importance of culture and tradition in understanding change. The problem of assimilating new technology is a cultural problem &emdash; and one that may require an anthropological approach. Geertz (1973), among others, suggests that understanding change involves conversation between insiders and outsiders, proponents of the new and guardians of the old.

How does the process of school reform depend on understanding and engaging in conversation with teachers? Take, for example, the dissemination of UK Schools Council Science 5-13 project. Teachers deployed a Piaget-based scheme that required students to develop cognitive skills through science, and teachers to monitor that development and make appropriate interventions. Thus the very basis of teaching the subject was being changed: the new pedagogy required a more clinical approach to students.

The teachers, according to Elliott (1985), thought that their intuitive understanding of students was being slighted in this scheme and its presentation to them. Furthermore, they said that the scheme was a mechanical, less sophisticated approach. They felt threatened by the scheme because it seemed to imply that they did not know their students. Their view was that student assessment could not be reduced to sets of checklists &emdash; that there was more to assessing students than an application of Piaget directly to practice. Too much was at stake in giving up what they thought was an adequate technology.

This report suggests that innovators should engage in conversations with teachers about their work culture, the technologies that sustain it, and the implications of new approaches for those technologies. This process involves a high degree of negative feedback (Olson et al. 1999). Rather than assume that the new is to supplant the old, a conversation that cognizant of school culture should be established &emdash; based on parity between teachers on the one hand and researchers, innovators or policy makers on the other.

Within such a conversation, questions about change may be explored:

• How can the theoretical ideas be tested in practice?

• What does practice say back to these theoretical ideas?

• How can useful negative feedback be obtained?

• What might be important substantive talking points about the new processes? What is critical from a classroom perspective?

• What does talking about the new say about the nature of existing technology. Is it adequate?

• What scaffold can be built for the next stage?

These questions can become the basis for in-service teacher education, and the process of change can provide an opportunity for professional development. The problem is that there are many barriers to conversation built into the institutions of schooling and into the way researchers habitually relate to practitioners. There are issues of power and will, status and stature &emdash; and conflicting ideas about subject didactics and pedagogies.

Given an adequate context for discussion these issues may be tabled and examined. But the difficulty is that at the moment educational change is highly politicized. Governments are paying court to certain stakeholders and using a frame foreign to the educational process &emdash; that of commercial ‘best practice’ and other mechanical ideas whose nature begs questions of value. The language of discussion is intended to satisfy influential stakeholders (my spelling checker did not like this word and recommended ‘stockholders’!) outside the educational system.

There is a political task here &emdash; rescuing discussion from this reduced framework and returning it to issues of value that concern teachers. Unfortunately, the temptation to join in using dominant rhetoric is strong. That rhetoric is seductive in many ways, and it shifts the conversation from issues at the heart of education. It is certainly possible that CAL innovations could improve practice, but it would be tragic if the discourse surrounding CAL use greased this slippery slope &emdash; this shift away from educational values. CAL’s potential to enhance many worthwhile innovations is great, but research and critical commentary are needed to ensure that the significant issues become part of the conversation.

Acknowledgement

I thank Larry Miller for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Information Technology Seminar Series at King’s College, London, October 1998.

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