Ania Lian and Amy Norman

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Ania Lian and Amy Norman

A Dialogic, Evidence-based
Framework for Integrating Technology into School Curricula

Ania Lian and Amy Norman
Charles Darwin University, Australia

Abstract

The General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014c) echo the 21st-century learning skills and attributes which embody some of the key challenges of modern pedagogies. Briefly, next to the Cross-curriculum Priorities (ACARA, 2014b), the General Capabilities statements are the key building blocks of the curriculum and refer to student wellbeing, emotional growth, critical and creative thinking, and social, ethical and intercultural development. This chapter reviews contrasting perspectives on the links which the literature constructs between digital technology and learning, and investigates their implications for the teaching of the General Capabilities. This examination results in the formulation of a “dialogic framework” for integrating technology into educational contexts, with a focus on early childhood and primary education. The framework builds its evidence base by drawing on a range of disciplines, thus ensuring relevant cross-checking. Some of the disciplines include corrective phonetics, semiotics and genre studies, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of inquiry. The result is a comprehensive mapping of the concept of learning in relation to each of the Capabilities. Implications for the use of ICT and the design of learning activities which link with the Cross-curriculum Priorities are illustrated.

Introduction

Despite the advances which have taken place over the last five decades in the philosophy of inquiry and which see knowledge construction as inherently dialogic (i.e. problem-based), strategic (i.e. forming a response to the problem) and historically embedded (i.e. engaging the stakes of the challenge) (Calhoun, 1995, p. 175), the field of education, by and large, continues to see learning as somehow special and the dialogic framework as insufficient in providing satisfactory constraints to inform educational practices and research. In line with this belief, educators have established numerous initiatives, including the “push for experimental research” (Biesta, 2007, p. 3), in order to obtain evidence about “what works”.

Despite these efforts, the proponents of the “what works” approach to teaching and learning are not immune to criticism, as the measurement of effectiveness is not a simple process (Biesta, 2007, p. 4). It is not simple because the parameters which make evidence look convincing do matter, and establishing such parameters, inter alia, requires specification of the frameworks on which the evidence builds and of their limitations when cross-checked in relation to neighbouring disciplines. One limitation worth considering are the sources of interests in relation to which students’ success is being framed and the ways in which students’ own meaning-making systems are taken into account. In other words, the role that students play in their own learning is not trivial and needs to be theorised.

This chapter links the task of developing evidence-based learning environments with the requirements of the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014a), while also responding to the growing investment in digital technology as a tool for supporting learning. With technology being embraced as a means for creating a new “knowledge society”, excited about its capacity to produce new forms of knowledge and new ways of being and seeing (Cope & Kalantzis, 2012, p. 83), it is clear that the conventional teaching paradigms are being challenged. The DIY (do-it-yourself) culture of the World Wide Web makes it increasingly possible for learning engagements to draw on the knowledge of the broader community and to do so in a personally-relevant manner. This paper sets out to investigate the relationship between technology and learning with a view to developing a comprehensive, evidence-based framework for integrating technology into school curricula with the aim of enhancing students’ learning. It does so by examining a range of key proposals put forward by educators in this regard in order to offer direction for teaching and research.

Methodology

The General Capabilities are the key building blocks of the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014a) and capture skills and dispositions linked to student wellbeing, emotional growth, critical and creative thinking, and the development of social, ethical and intercultural orientation (ACARA, 2014c). Together with the Cross-curriculum Priorities, the Capabilities support learning experiences which expand students’ immediate community connections in order to account for the cultural heritage of Australia, ethnic diversity and our closest neighbours.

Each of the pedagogic models examined in this paper is selected with the aim to provide perspectives that are relevant to the development of the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions captured in the Capabilities. Specifically, the following Capabilities are engaged: the Social and Personal Capabilities, the Capabilities of Critical and Creative Thinking, and the Capabilities of Intercultural Knowledge and Ethics. These Capabilities are chosen as they concern themselves, in particular, with the ethical aspects of learning and knowledge production. The pedagogic models are reviewed and discussed in relation to the following aspects of the learning process: (a) assumptions they make about the learner and learning, (b) the principles in which these assumptions are framed, and (c) implications for the integration of ICT into learning.

The chapter concludes with a framework for integrating technology into school curricula. To this end, it builds on the discussions it generates and renders a comprehensive mapping of the concept of learning in relation to each of the Capabilities, together with implications for the use of ICT and the design of learning activities.

The Use of ICT to Support Social and Personal Capabilities

The Social and Personal Capabilities concern themselves largely with engagements which support students in developing self-knowledge and the knowledge of others (ACARA, 2014c). This section examines how the integration of ICT can assist the students in these goals.

Assumptions about the learner and learning

In the field of gaming in education, James Gee is known for his research on the use of games as a teaching and learning tool. In the paper “Being a lion and being a soldier”, Gee and Tashia Morgridge (2007) offer a critique of the principles of designing educational games and propose a direction for future developments. The paper begins with an evaluation of the Savannah game (Facer et al., 2004) where, through role playing, children are assisted to build an awareness of what it is like to be a lion. It was expected that this would assist them to develop “conceptual understanding of animal behavior and interaction with the environment” (Gee & Morgridge, 2007, p. 1031).

In their paper, Gee and Morgridge (2007, p. 1035) see role playing as the key feature of well-designed educational games as it “demands that the player thinks, values, and acts like one to win the game”. In their view, through role playing, virtual games can offer spaces which enable students to generate deep understandings of the perspectives of other people and, through this, to engage in a learning where activities and goals emerge from the game, “rather than as a long list of facts outside any context of goals and action” (pp. 1034-1035). Meaningful learning will follow when the rules of the game focus on the content, i.e. the knowledge, goals, and values that come with playing a specific role (p. 1036).

But what would the learning of these goals, knowledge and values actually involve? In other words, how is a game to shift beyond being an end in itself to support the students in developing stronger links between those goals and values, and their own perceptions of themselves and others? How is a game, therefore, to be engaging, empowering and lead to the construction of personally-relevant knowledge? These are important questions if, as Gee and Morgridge (2007, p. 1037) suggest, integration of games is to offer an alternative to the “content fetish” in theories of learning “in many of our schools today”.

Gee and Morgridge (2007) offer no clear framework in this regard beyond asserting the value of role playing. Scaffolded mastery of the roles is proposed as a principle for designing learning experiences in games, with students progressing from simple to more complex challenges, a process which is designed to enable them to discover how the rules of the game permit them to enact those roles (Gee Morgridge, 2007, p. 1029). Gee and Morgridge acknowledge that the idea of teaching children to take on different identities may be met with objections. However, they believe that “there is no real learning without some ideology” (p. 1036), and taking on different identities should assist children in experiencing different domains of knowledge through a certain set of values and a particular worldview which are intimately connected to those characters.

The idea of perspective-taking as a process by which children learn finds its support in neuroscience. In their paper “We feel therefore we learn”, Damasio and Immordino-Yang (2007) link emotion with learning and explain that emotions cannot be reduced to just a feeling. They point to newly discovered connections between emotional, cognitive, and social functioning which evolved as an integrated system to cope with the management of life (pp. 3, 7). These connections support a form of learning which Immordino-Yang (2009, p. 5) describes as both social and subjective, i.e. involving children in “internalizing [their] subjective interpretations of other people’s beliefs, goals, feelings and actions, and vicariously experiencing these as if they were [their] own”.

In other words, children do not observe reality directly. They impute goals to other persons’ actions based on their own experience within that or similar contexts (Immordino-Yang, 2009, p. 12). This makes learning resemble an internal dialogue that children generate about the world around them based on their earlier experiences. It also shows that in order to support the students in developing self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, it is not the playing of a specific role that is the end goal. Rather of concern are the interpretations in relation to which students construct these roles and therefore themselves in the context of the game and beyond. This suggests that the quality of students’ learning, and the perceptions they will form of themselves and of others as a result, will depend on the extent to which their interpretations are engaged by the learning environment (Immordino-Yang, 2009, pp. 12-13).

These findings also suggest that scaffolding, as an umbrella term, is insufficient to offer a principled basis to account for students’ subjective interpretations and therefore to support their informed and critical engagement. In the context of scaffolded activities which are teacher(expert)-led, the most that teachers can do is to impute goals to students’ actions based on their own personal histories, which are not the same as those of their students.

Principles of Learning

The understandings proposed by Gee and Morgridge (2007) can be summarised in the following principles:

(a)  All learning draws on some ideology connected to practice or a domain of knowledge.

(b)  Learning should concern itself primarily with activities supporting experiences, not content. Roles are activities oriented to “produce and use knowledge” (p. 1037). Experiences, on the other hand, inculcate students into “special ways of seeing, valuing, and being in the world” relative to the roles they play” (p. 1037).

(c)  “Taking perspectives” involves children in learning as a way of “being in the world”, rather than “doing content” (p. 1037).

(d)  The designer of the game is in command of the criteria, or progression scales, in relation to which students’ learning is structured and scaffolded.

Implications for Integration of ICT: Discussion

Gee and Morgridge (2007, pp. 1028-30) identify the advantages of good games as follows: (a) they offer players strong identities; (b) they make players think like the person they personify; (c) they reduce the consequences of failure; (d) they allow players to customize the game to fit their learning and playing styles; (e) they offer players the feeling of a real sense of agency, ownership, and control; (f) they offer players a set of challenging problems and let them practise these problems until they have routinised their mastery; (g) they stay within, but at the outer edge of, the players’ “regime of competence”; (h) they encourage players to think about relationships; (i) they encourage players to explore thoroughly before moving on; and (j) they operate by a principle of performance before competence.

However, in view of the discussion above, these features describe a vision, while the conceptual framework for their integration into the game context in order to generate personally-relevant, empowering and informed learning is missing. Such a conceptual framework is also missing in the original paper reporting on the Savannah project (Facer, Joiner, Stanton, Reid, Hull, & Kirk, 2004), with the authors making reference to the technical tools only. Yet, the principles are critical if, as the Savannah research team and Gee and Morgridge (2007, p. 1039), acknowledge, game-like learning is to be “about a whole learning and social system built around the game”.

In the field of technology-enhanced language learning, Andrew Lian draws on the fields of semiotics and corrective phonetics, which allowed him to question the idea that perception is direct and that technology can merely be used as a tool for simulating real-life events (Lian, 2004, 2011). Briefly, research in these fields shows that people do not perceive the world directly (“The difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word”, Derrida, 1982, p. 5), sounds are not heard but interpreted in relation to the meaning potential they are attributed to by the listener (Guberina, 1972; Lian, 1980; Lotto, 2014) (the same applies to other senses, e.g. vision, Purves, Wojtach & Lotto, 2011), and the process of interpretation (meaning-making) revolves around the ability to reject that which does not matter (“any given local context … is understandable as significant only as a factor of the other possible contextual mediations that it excludes”, Chambers, 1996, p. 147). Following on from these points, ambiguity (conflict) is experienced when students’ expectations or judgments compete for “truth”, i.e., when students experience signals as equally meaningful, which prevents them from differentiating between the important and unimportant elements (Lian & Lian, 1997).

According to Lian (1980, 2004) and Lian and Lian (1997), the reduction of ambiguity can be assisted through load reduction facilities, i.e. the inclusion of tools which allow students to reduce the interference of competing information-processing demands, which generate interfering conflicts in perception, attention, thinking, and memory system (Grachev, Kumar, Ramachandran & Szeverenyi, 2001), thus making less attentional space available for recognising and processing the ambiguity and which orient the students to always choosing the familiar, already-tested and entrenched processing pathways. The interactions which arise with the help of such tools, through the new compare-and-contrast activities which they make possible, enable students to approach the understandings in which they frame the demands of the particular task that they are grappling with in an unaccustomed manner. Now the students are no longer dealing with a single familiar task. The load-reduction tools allow the students to break down the task into a range of tasks or problems and explore the relevance of the new understandings they develop in relation to the initial problem which generated the exploratory process in the first place (Lian, 2004).