Dear fellow xmca-ers -
i'm responding in particular to Bill's posting, and in general to Luiz, Eugene, Peter and others interested.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@attbi.com]
Sent: Thu 11/13/2003 9:12 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Cc:
Subject: Carol Lee's article
First, I think Carol makes an important contribution to the various fields of
educational design and further presents all educators with challenges.
and Bill continued -
I think in part, the implication of Carol's work for me is that this melee of
triangles penetrating into the classroom needs to somehow be accounted for
in the design (and application) of technologies, and lets not forget, in the
way people are taught and learn to use the technologies, including "teacher
development". That doing so is *cumbersome* is a critque challenged by
Carol, but perhaps not fully enough. Placing culture at the center is
definitely a hopeful strategy I've heard echoed here on xmca.
I'd like to expand on Bill's points by first re-emphasizing that Lee's article presents all educators with challenges.
There are some other points I’d like to make as well about the Carol Lee article. With all of the major points I was never in disagreement. Yes, technology, as with any other cultural artifact in a public school, should be child friendly supportive nurturing culturally flexible. At the same time, public schools are not just for children. Public schools are also for the parents as well as the other adults and institutions, religious and commercial and political. There is no stable consensus about what constitutes an appropriate education for children and as a result schools as institutions and teachers personally are caught up in multiple figured worlds (Holland, et. al., 1998). As noted in Peter’s article “Rethinking Rhizomes …”coauthoring research with teachers “has increased our sympathy for their situations and forced us into taking as much of an emic, or insider’s, perspective on their work as we can muster given that we are inherently outsiders to their teaching.”
Lee’s work is an unacknowledged outsider’s view of teaching. As such, it is really then a performance piece for fellow researchers in education. By performance, I mean that it is a method of defining, redefining, and maintaining her figured world identity as a researcher in education (McAloon, Singer, Butler are only three of many who work with the notion of performance as a way of constructing cultural identity and social selves). Her research work is clearly not for teachers, even though it is teachers who in the final result would be the implementers of such a project. I also wonder if Lee’s piece is even for teachers in teacher education. For if this project that Lee’s proposing is so valuable, where is the call and recognition for such a project to be implemented in our community colleges, four year colleges and universities? Those of you who are teachers in higher education, when you consider Lee’s suggestions for implementing more culturally friendly technology and programs, what do you see in your classroom? Short of sending the students to the computer lab.
I think that if researchers in education really want to see changes in the classroom that then need to be working in the classroom, collaboratively researching with the classroom teachers, coauthoring their work with those teachers, and figuring out as well how to implement the implications of the research in their own professional site of education.
My four bits worth.
What do you think?
Phillip
Phillip White
University of Colorado at Denver
School of Education
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