Forget your digital detoxes and back-to-nature retreats. Tech is everywhere, and in everything. It's interwoven into the very fabric of our culture. And we'll only truly get control of it when we accept that and stop seeing tech as something other (Tinworth, 2018).
The year 2020 will go down as a marker in the history of common schools. Likely we will consider it a transition. While the moment is so near, it is audacious and dangerous to speak of such shifts. The feeling that the seeds of change having been planted, though, for us is inescapable. There will inevitably be a rush back to “normal” and a desire for stability, yet we will be left with the harshly inescapable lessons learned during the pandemic. Many of these lessons, from the structures of the school day to questions of equity in digital access, probably should have been absorbed long ago, with problem-solving already in progress. Others, including the role of digital technologies in making learning environments safer in a health crisis, are new. How we respond to these now readily apparent flaws will define whether the great equalizing and democratic hopes of common schools persist to future generations.
As the contagious nature of the COVID-19 virus became apparent in the early months of 2020, society began to utilize mechanisms to minimize spread which included the indefinite closing of school buildings across much of the world. It was a drastic but necessary measure, and even early in the confusion and fear of the initial days of the pandemic, many seasoned educational leaders knew this would be the most severe test of our system of schools in their generation. As spring broke and turned to summer, the vaccines and viable pathway out of the pandemic were, at best, a year away. No administrators of their generation had ever faced the prospect of a year without school buildings. There was no binder with an emergency plan on the shelf. No mentor to which to turn. Further, there was precious little guidance available from governmental authorities overwhelmed with the task of containing a seemingly uncontainable virus.
Without those buildings, and the behaviors within, schools struggled to adapt. As the pandemic worsened over the course of weeks and then months and into the following year, it was clear that for school to exist at all it would need to do so without the buildings. For many, school was, at its core, a gathering location, and the common elements such as classrooms, gymnasiums, cafeterias, libraries and the principal's office were the shared common components that we could all picture in our heads when imagining school.
Yet, it was clear school would have to be reimagined without place and without classrooms. This reimagining needed to happen over a weekend or, at most, during a two-week pause.
Everyone turned simultaneously to technology.
The technologies of the day provided a glimmer of hope that school might persist even without the place. A rush ensued to transition to digital schooling.
Prior to the pandemic, these digital learning technologies were largely underestimated by the elementary and secondary school systems. Now, overnight, they were immediately overestimated. There was no technologically based viable replacement for the place-based experience of kindergarten, yet we plowed forward into Google Classrooms and online reading software anyway. For many, technology could be a savior. Within weeks of a transition to fully online schooling, though, it was clear that it was not.
Our misplaced instincts with both digital technologies and even broader technologies of school stems from a common misconception of how these tools impact the learning environment. Long before the pandemic emerged, the impacts of our misconceptions of technology in school were visibly limiting our imaginations as school leaders.
Misconceptions of technology
Technology is defined in many ways. Martin Heidegger saw the critical component as “manipulation,” in that technology allows humans to alter their interaction with the world for their benefit (Dreyfuss, 1991, p. 64). Open Education Sociology Dictionary (2021) suggests a similar concept, “the application of knowledge, techniques, and tools to adapt and control physical environments and material resources to satisfy wants and needs.” Elbert (2016) in her book, Creating Makers, puts these ideas together, “...technology does not just mean computers. It is not limited to robots, microprocessors, or electronics. Technology means using knowledge to advance our society. Pencils are technology. Books are technology. Smart phones are technology. An educator once told me that technology is “the art of manipulating the world” (p. 6).
Thus, whether a student calmly looks out of a classroom window to see the natural world, stands on a chair to reach a high shelf, uses his phone to convert difficult to decode text into speech or connects to his classroom from home to stay safe in a pandemic, human engineering is allowing that manipulation and changing what is possible.
Educational administrators too rarely look into transformation of the structures which define a student's days in school. Buildings are, or at least seem to be, fixed objects. The day's time frame is created by school boards and is often defined in union contracts. Schedules are developed for efficiency and in response to state seat time mandates. Furniture is the province of building service departments, and digital tools are routinely chosen by technology departments that prioritize costs, ease of management and the preference of some educators for locked down devices.
All of these oft ignored items, however, form the educational environment in which we ask children to live and learn, and all are likely to have profound impacts on student achievement and student well-being.
In education, we may have, in part, sabotaged ourselves through our language. For at least 25 years, American educators have referred to “IT,” “Information Technology,” while in the rest of the world, this field has always been referred to as, “ICT,” “Information and Communications Technology.” “In contrast [to IT],” wrote Ketchum (2018), “ICT's tech is more expansive, with a greater focus on outreach, community building and a desire to explore the ways in which telecommunications can enrich society.” One must wonder whether education's language choices focused more on consumption with technology rather than communication with technology left us unprepared when the pandemic forced student devices to become primarily for interactive communication.
The language misalignment, though, is deeper than that. When some human constructions are described as “technology” (computers, mobile phones, digital projectors, interactive boards and Wi-Fi) and others are not (books, blackboards and whiteboards, library shelves, paper and pencils, furniture and lighting), we divide environmental structures into classifications which make our decision-making more difficult. Few school districts would allow their chief information officer to decide whether a school library or a teacher should order paperback or hardcover or even audiobooks; those decisions are left in the hands of educators. Further, it is not likely that any educational institution would let that CIO rip out textbook pages he or she deems “risky” or “dangerous.” Yet, in choosing which websites to filter the CIO is essentially making the same decision, just on a different communication technology (Anderson, 2016).
Every day in almost every school, detached administrators removed from student learning make decisions about materials formatting and sources of information. Central offices make assumptions about how children read and write, how they process mathematics and how they communicate with both peers and teachers. Other noninstructional administrators choose what children can see from a classroom or corridor, how students feel when they sit to do work and where they can eat and drink. We separate schooling from learning through thousands of such detached decisions, frequently under the guise of invented technological boundaries.
Thus, it is essential for us to not perceive any of these “technologies” as natural forms that do not create winners and losers. “The book,” Postman and Weingartner wrote (1969), “by isolating the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from the powerful oral influences of his family, teacher, and priest. Print thus created a new conception of self as well as of self-interest. At the same time, the printing press provided the wide circulation necessary to mate national literatures and intense pride in one's native language. Print thus promoted individualism on the one hand and nationalism on the other” (p. X). They go on to describe changes in the forms of writing, poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, created by the invention of the printed book, as well as changes in how human beliefs were formed and how political opinion developed.
Finally, in our focus on present technologies, we may fail to realize that technological change transforming learning is not just a recent development, and thus miss the chance to learn from the past. As education became, in the 17th century, largely about the printed word, our public schools were initially created in an era when “everything” changed in information delivery. The telegraph, railroad and steamship altered the transmission time for both news and communication in almost incomprehensible ways. Machine made paper formed from wood pulp combined with steam-driven rotary presses to make affordable newspapers and inexpensive books possible. The telegraph alone allowed that “communication was, for the first time in history, no longer limited to the speed at which a physical message could pass between locations. So long as they were linked by telegraphic wires, humans were liberated from the tyranny of distance” (Trainor, 2016). “Time and space has been completely annihilated,” wrote the Baltimore Sun on May 31, 1844 (Rosen, 2012).
“[The technological print] monopoly began to dissolve toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when a more or less continuous stream of media inventions began to make accessible unprecedented quantities of information and created new modes of perception and qualities of aesthetic experience,” Postman and Weingartner (1969, p. 165) wrote, noting that in just less than one hundred years the photograph, the telegraph, the phonograph, motion pictures, wireless telegraphy, radio, films with sound and television were all invented.
Despite this, the school remained wholly committed to the fixed text of print. In fact, if we read mid-19th century educational authors, we find less use of books in the 1840s than we would find in the 1940s. Those books also were more tightly controlled. In a classroom before the American Civil War, books were all “source materials” and were selected almost entirely by individual teachers or school leaders, but by the 1940s textbooks, chosen by state committees and school boards, limited information to a controlled script.
Technology is not innovation
Because the architectures of new technologies are novel, we frequently substitute technology for innovation. We link the two ideas and come to see the technology as the innovation rather than just the tool. This substitution is dangerous and can lead to wasteful, if not harmful, behavior. The articles in this special issue provide a nice overarching view of both technological cases of concern as well as instances of success when school leaders focused less on the tool and more on the human experience and system change.
The worrisome impact of technology coupled to innovation was perhaps never more clear than in the COVID-19 pandemic. It may take a decade or more to fully comprehend the impact of the digital approaches to school deployed in haste during the pandemic. Perhaps a lasting impact of the pandemic will be to see the limitations of digital technologies with more clarity. Digital tools could never replace the human relationships and experiences at the root of the science of learning (Darling Hammong et al., 2020). Thus, we must decouple the substitution of the idea of technology from the idea of innovation if we are to more positively impact children's learning.
Postman, in his book The End of Education (1995) explores the relationship between technology and schooling in great detail. He generally finds that the industrial, economic and technological narratives underlying the motivations of the school system to be misplaced. Our modern industrial economies seek ever greater production through ever more advanced tools, and this narrative has also embedded itself in our thinking about the purpose of schools. Schools seek ever more economic value from students by utilizing ever more advanced instructional tools. However, these technological advances come at a cost, particularly for democracy and childhood socialization. Postman argues,
The idea of a school is that individuals must learn in a setting in which individual needs are subordinated to group interests. Unlike other media of mass communication which celebrate individual response and are experienced in private, the classroom is intended to tame the ego, to connect the individual with others, to demonstrate the value and necessity of group cohesion. At present, most scenarios describing the uses of computers have children solving problems alone (p. 45).
Postman would rather society drop altogether this linkage between technology advances and the underlying narrative of school. Instead, in the second half of the book, he proposes five alternative narratives to underlie our hopes and motivations for school, although his distaste for multiculturalism as a pathway to tribalism seemingly has worn poorly with history. Postman's instinct, though, to center the purpose of school outside of the modern industrial, economic and technological landscape would serve us well going forward after the pandemic.
However, as the existing industrial and technology narratives are deeply embedded and whole scale change is unlikely in the near term, perhaps the pandemic provides an opportunity to slightly, but positively, reframe our technological narratives related to school. We must stop seeing technology as a savior or as an innovator and must remain focused on the experience of the learners.
Recoding school
To help us reframe, we may discard the notion of technology as the external innovator and instead see school itself as a technology. The broader notion of technology encapsulates much of what we presently deem as “school,” and this technology of schooling can be designed differently to maximize the relationships and opportunities for durable learning experiences. Postman himself opens his book with,
In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve. One is an engineering problem; the other, a metaphysical one. The engineering problem, as all such problems are, is essentially technical. It is the problem of the means by which the young will become learned. It addresses the issues of where and when things will be done, and, of course, how learning is supposed to occur. The problem is not a simple one, and any self respecting book on schooling must offer some solutions to it. (p. 3).
Despite this opening, postman, thereafter, did not spend much time on the solutions to the engineering problems of implementing the structures of school. As Tyack and Cuban (1997) note much of what we consider to be the current structure of school was engineered under the auspices of scientific management. For instance, in the formerly progressive school hotspot of Gary Indiana in the wake of Dewey's time in Chicago, an engineer who previously worked at Lockheed Martin was employed to engineer the school experience to maximize results. The engineer asserted “there was basically no difference between school and industry. 'I view things analytically … Keep out emotions … and the product comes out. ' A Gary teacher retorted: ‘There’s no way a man with that attitude can succeed in a school. No way.’” (Chapter 5).
However, the engineering of school does not need to be based on the principles of industry and scientific management. One can engineer the technology of school for more humane and social justice outcomes. Our instincts to couple technology to innovation can be channeled differently. Rather than technology tightly coupled as a substitute for innovation in schools and an end in itself, it is better if we see innovation tightly coupled to the learner experience of school and technology as the practical engineering choices that permit more authentic and relevant learning (Darling Hammond et al., 2020).
The choice of digital tools is but a small component of the broader choices underlying the systems for learning that embody the school. As we noted earlier, the building is a technology. The books and pencils are technologies. The school schedule is a technology. The curriculum maps are a technology. In-school suspensions are a technology. These are engineered solutions to the practical challenges of managing a school.
In the view of Lawrence Lessig, these elements of school would be architectures within the underlying code of school (Lessig, 2002). To Lessig and whom he deemed The New Chicago School (1998), the idea of “code” extended beyond law to include other regulators of society, namely markets, architectures and norms. These four regulators interplay to govern our societal systems, including schools. All of these regulators are also subject to change, and sustainable systemic change frequently requires modifications to multiple regulators simultaneously.
For us to make progress and provide schools for another generation, we must modify the broader, underlying code of school.
In order for us to rewrite that underlying code, we must use this moment in time to look again at the code which currently operates our ideas of school and to understand our own historically and socially constructed vision (Fendler, 2016, p. 28). Our own experiences reify our own existing sense of the one dominant critical structure. “These beliefs, largely developed during their twelve-year “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 2020) are formed while they are learners in classrooms themselves (Funkhouser and Mouza, 2013). Writing about Jonathan Crary's work on observations, Thomas Popkewitz, “we can understand that the eye does not merely see, but is socially disciplined in the ordering, dividing, and “making” of the possibilities of the world and of the self. By asking how the eye sees, it is possible to ask about how systems of ideas “make” possible what is seen, thought about, felt, and acted on.” (Popkewitz 1997, p. 18).
Technology, largely as architectures, are but a part of the code of school and how technologies interplay with norms, markets and laws help to govern the childhood experience of school. Our definitions of school innovation must include a view of the code of school as encompassing all of these interwoven components, driven by a reflective understanding of our own educational belief assumptions. We must recode our schools to more substantially support the relationships and opportunities for our more well-grounded understanding of the science of learning.
In particular, emerging from the gross inequities highlighted in the pandemic, we must emerge with renewed vigor for change. Fresh with the realization that both our onsite systems and our online systems are deficient of our expectations as a tool of opportunity, we may consider the task of school leadership for transformation more broadly. After the desire to return to normal subsides, the opportunity for innovation is likely to be as broad as any time in a generation. The underlying code of school is susceptible. Leaders who can help communities rally around common attractive alternatives that promote equity of opportunity will leave lasting legacies. No longer can the inequity and racism systemic in our schools remain largely an afterthought.
Opportunities for new operating systems
As Ira said in 2009, “Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs, blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not “good” or “bad,” but at this point, they are simply outdated.” (Socol, 2009).
Postman and others have provided us more productive roadmaps to understanding of technology and its uses. Technology is not an innovative end itself and it is not to be considered in isolation. In the same way that Postman was skeptical of technology that did not advance human communication, we as school leaders must be skeptical of technology that does not advance the science of learning.
This moment, emerging from the pandemic that forced us to reconsider our notions of school, is laced with both danger and opportunity. The danger is in a rush to return to normal sprinkled with a few new technology options held over from the period of online learning. The opportunity, though, is for us to remake education by rethinking our approaches to school. To do this, we will need to be more thoughtful and strategic in recoding the foundational operating systems of our schools. Should we succeed in addressing the now readily apparent flaws in our post-pandemic world of education, the great equalizing and democratic hopes of common schools will persist to future generations.
