Chapter 5.7
How May Teacher Learning Be Promoted For Educational Renewal With IT?
Niki Davis
IowaStateUniversityCenter for Technology in Learning and Teaching
Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching
IowaState University
Ames, USA
Abstract:This chapter takes an instrumental perspective with the goal of empowering teachers and other leaders with an understanding of the ecology of educational renewal with IT. The diversity of factors that impact a teacher’s adoption of IT are envisioned in layers that frame perspectives of the classroom as nested within the school, local area, region, and the global biosphere of education. Theoretical models are used to explain the multi-staged processes and illustrated with research. For example, models of the adoption of IT in a classroom emphasize each teacher’s ownership of the innovation process. In addition, simultaneous renewal of teacher education and K-12 schools involves overlapping ecologies in multiple organizations, leading to additional challenges for teacher learning with IT in preservice teacher education. The chapter concludes with a recommendation to incorporate ecological perspectives in the design and reporting of research in this area.
Keywords:Adaptation; Ecological perspective; Educational renewal; Organizational maturation; IT professional development; Systemic change;
1. Introduction
The process of teachers learning to use IT effectively to support learning and teaching is linked to the adaptation of education to the context of the 21st century. Although the application of information technology in education can take very different forms, it is the use of IT to support educational transformation that constitute the core concern in policies and strategies to support teacher learning to incorporate IT in pedagogical practices. That is to say, the process of diffusing information and communication technologies into educational organizations to promote personal and system-wide improvements in learning and teaching is more challenging than promoting its use to support traditional forms of education or adding IT as a curricular discipline in its own right (Law, 2008). Therefore, the major aim of this chapter is to inform educational change and renewal with IT for twenty-first century societies in which technology is prevalent. An instrumentalist approach is taken to empower teachers and other leaders, although it should be noted that much of the literature takes a deterministic perspective with many authors adopting a market-oriented approach (Surry & Farquhar, 1997).
This chapter emphasizes the importance of teachers as leaders of renewal of educational systems with IT interpreted through multiple ecological layers starting with an overview of the global biosphere of education. The chapter then zooms through layers of educational ecosystems framed by the region, school and classroom before considering characteristics of IT innovations that may be marketed to teachers. Revolutionary change in education is identified in virtual educational organizations that apply IT to extend access to education. Having taken a relatively simple view centered on a classroom nested within a school and its region, the chapter discusses interacting educational systems including simultaneous renewal of teacher education and K-12 schools that has been catalyzed by IT.
The beginning of the twenty-first century is a time of unpredictable change for education and for most other sectors of society due to rapid socio-economic changes.Dutton’s (2004) briefing for the World Summit on the Information Societyof the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) explainedthe role of technology in social transformation and identifiedIT as “a double-edged sword.” He emphasized that every individual and society has a choice in reconfiguring access, including access to education, and noted that technology is “changing the dynamics of the classroom” and “redrawing of the borders of educational institutions.” Education is changing and everyone has a role to play because “the crucial factor is not information per se, but the ability to control access to information, people, services and technologies” (p 47). This includes the problem of significant inequitable access to resources in education, which is doubly important because education is a key factor in the ability of individuals and communities to access and use information suited to their needs.
2. A Global Perspective
One way of visualizing educational renewal is to adopt an ecosystems perspective developed by ecologists to analyze the living world. An ecological perspective of education recognizes that a variety of ecosystems interact in the global biosphere and that a micro ecosystem, such as a classroom, is nested within another ecosystem, the school, which is part of the nation’s macro educational ecosystem. Figure 1 depicts this layered ecological perspective of the global educational biosphere. It was inspired by Zhao & Frank’s (2003) study which saw that “a classroom is nested within a multilevel ecological hierarchy including government agencies, societal institutions, local community organizations and the school bureaucracy” (p. 815). In addition, I applied systemic perspectives developed over my career and influenced by researchers such as Fullan (2001), Hargreaves (2003), and Somekh (2008). The picture may be somewhat different across countries, but the multilevel ecological hierarchy still applies.
Figure 1
Influences of IT in the global biosphere of education, including nested ecologies
Let us consider the outermost global level of Figure 1, which provides a perspective on mechanisms that spread IT in education in the 21st century. At this level, ecozones or regions of education may follow continental borders or, given the importance of culture and national identity, national boundaries may be preferred. From this perspective, although the educational ecozones of the U.K. and North America are similar to one another and very different from those of Asia and Sub Saharan Africa, changes with IT in education in one zone would have a tendency to stimulate change in another.
The organizations in Figure 1 are arranged in the same order around each level using four categories that stimulate and/or retard change with IT across the levels. The lines that link each corner with the central frame of the classroom denote flow across the educational ecozones and between the levels. Starting at the top left corner, the categories I have identified are: commercial, political, bureaucratic, and professional. These are illustrated in the outmost frame of Figure 1.
Many multinational IT vendors have developed global educational initiatives to enhance education and build capacity for their services. While most of the influence of these commercial organizations is mediated in levels closer to the teacher, a few global organizations have directly impacted classroom practices. For example, Cisco Network Academies provide IT hardware, software, accreditation and teacher training directly into secondary schools and colleges with more than 11,000 academies in 160 countries ( Such educational innovation with IT can serve the company and country’s need for skilled IT workers to maintain the regional IT infrastructure while also changing education with IT (Selinger, 2006). UNESCO is a global political organization that promotes equity in change with IT. For example, in 2002 UNESCO published its first planning guide “ICT and Teacher Training” to inform policy makers and institutional leaders. UNESCO republished this handbook in five languages over time and improved dissemination with three workshops on different continents in economically less developed regions of the world (UNESCO, 2002; copies in all languages are available in full in this handbook’s online appendices). The international group of authors of this planning guide (including the author of this chapter) brought together knowledge from their respective educational systems and helped improve the flow of information across the globe. Although collaboration of bureaucratic institutions is weak across political borders, regional communities have developed significant IT innovations to improve cohesion within regions. For example European School Net ( shares information on IT in education and promotes collaborative work across Europe and recently, the New Educational Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has emerged with a similar goal for Africa. The development of mutual support also applies to professional non profit organizations. For example, the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN provides services and teacher training to support teachers to connect their classrooms world wide as well as to come together for conferences. For teacher educators, the Society of IT and Teacher Education (SITE - publishes journals and attracts participants from over 50 countries for its conference annually.
Selwyn’s (2002) research of system-wide changes in IT in education encompassed national and international organizations to provide evidence of the socio-economic forces that have pushed technology diffusion in the U.K. Selwyn’s discursive construction of educational computing in the U.K. analyzes documentary evidence from many sources, including marketing literature of the government sponsored ‘BBC computer’ and policies of the government of France, Japan and the U.S. that influenced the British government. His interviews of government officials, advisors and multinational corporations that sell hardware, software and telecommunications to schools, traces the origin of the U.K. ‘National Grid For Learning’ as a strategic vision for the nation. Although, according to the executive of a multinational IT corporation, “the actual adage in the entire IT industry is that education is ‘a high maintenance/low margin’ business” (p. 65), Selwyn provides evidence that these companies see multiple benefits from the educational sector: profit, educational branding for sales to the much larger home market, employable people for their IT sector to support sales in other sectors, and building a future consumer base. This also applies to other countries, for example, CCC Kei Wa Primary School (2007) in Hong Kong noted that an initiative which used the web to improve pupil’s learning of English had resulted in an increase in the home ownership of computers with Internet access from 30% to 100%. While these economic motivations may be obscure to educators, they clearly fit with an ecological perspective of socio-economic change with IT in education.
3. Schools’ Local Area as an Ecology
The three central layers of Figure 1 show each teacher’s classroom nested within their school and its district, including collaborating districts. Zhao, Pugh, Sheldon, and Byers, (2002) provided evidence for their ecological framework which conceptualized teachers as the ‘keystone species’ with the ‘IT-using teacher’ as an ‘invasive exotic species’ who interacts with and displaces traditional teachers as the keystone species. Zhao & Frank (2003) used ecological modeling analysis to study uses of IT over time in a ‘contained educational system’ of 19 schools in 4 districts in the U.S. and found evidence of co-evolution of both IT and teachers’ pedagogies. Change was more likely when there was an ‘empty niche’, (for instance, telecommunications was exploited to communicate with parents where there had been little communication before), but IT was rarely exploited for curriculum purposes where it competed with existing curriculum activities.
Zhao and Frank (2003) identified four basic mechanisms that support teachers’ adoption of IT in the school system: recruitment/selection of new teachers with IT as a selection criterion; training/socialization supportive of IT use; provision of opportunities to explore and learn with IT; and leveraging change through the social context including opinion leaders. Additional recommendations included learning about IT in the curriculum, management of the influence of peers, and stress caused by competing innovations. At the program level, Zhao and Frank explained why professional development for individual teachers outside the school context often provided little support for innovation, whereas group or whole school initiatives coherent with the school’s strategic plan and supported by its leadership were more effective in promoting renewal with IT in education.
My criticism of Zhao and Frank’s ecological framework is their misleading use of the term ‘extinct’. A teacher who adapts his or her practice to incorporate IT does not become extinct, after all the teacher remains.What has occurred is that teachers (as well as their collaborating administrators and support staff) have adapted pedagogical and organizational practices with IT in education. The term adaptation is more accurate because IT is rarely adopted without adaptation into its new context, and what may appear at first sight to be one IT application is in fact a cluster of innovations informed by development of the teacher’s pedagogic and content knowledge (AACTE, in press). Alternatively, one may suggest that what becomes extinct is prevailing practice rather than the people themselves.If one were to view practices as ‘genes’ of an ‘organism’, then it may be expected that evolving organisms would develop different gene compositions in response to environment changes. This adaptation of educational practice with use of IT will now be discussed in more detail by considering the ecology of a school.The importance of such ‘eco-friendly’ professional development has been confirmed by in a study of the U.K. national initiative to train all teachers to use IT (Davis, Preston & Sahin, 2007). This adaptation of educational practice with use of IT will now be discussed in more detail by considering the ecology of a school.
4. A School Perspective
The ongoing adaptation of school practice with adoption of IT may be interpreted with maturity modeling, which identifies characteristics that distinguish stages of change in school ecology with increasing penetration of IT. Organizational change with IT starts with (1) localized exploitation, when one or more school teachers adopt one or more IT innovations.As the number of teachers and students using IT increases and activity proliferates, the increasing demand for resources stimulates management to appoint an IT coordinator to manage demand, resulting in (2) internal integration. The range of innovations continue to mature within the organization and when users work together to (3) transform their pedagogy and educational practice the third stage is reached. The next stage involves IT in a redesign of the school’s external networks, such as adding partner schools into the school’s course offerings, leading to further (4) embedding of IT. Although few traditional schools reach the (5) revolutionary stage where the organization redefines its scope of work, virtual organizations start at this stage. The establishment of OpenUniversities and VirtualSchools that depend on IT to increase access to education have revolutionarized the scope of schooling, with catchments and student diversity well beyond that of traditional institutions. For example, the U.K. Open University and the first U.S. Virtual High School (Zucker & Kozma, 2003) both recruit students worldwide. They also deliver courses in collaboration with a network of traditional schools and colleges close to students and the innovative educational processes include an unbundling of the teaching role (Harms, Niederhauser, Davis, Roblyer, & Gilbert, 2006; Natriello, 2005).
An ecological perspective provides a means to appreciate that the increasing maturity of IT use may be followed by a decline, and that differing school ecologies cannot be assumed to follow the same path with IT applications. For example, Tearle (2003) provides a detailed case study of an exemplary U.K. secondary school that remains unlikely to move from the second stage of internal integration of IT due to restraints from regional and national authorities, including ‘high stakes’ standardized tests. In addition there are cases where a school has moved back a level. Hargreaves (2003) provides an illustration of a knowledge-society school, BlueMountain in Canada, which was set up at the third or transformative stage, with an IT coordinator and state of the art technology used effectively in learning, teaching and administration. However, following external shocks of budget cuts and a change in principal, the BlueMountainSchool reverted to a more traditional approach with coordinated integration and localized innovation with IT. In addition, Hargreaves (2003) observed that BlueMountainSchool was not successful in transferring its practice to other schools within the district. Yen, Law and Wong (2003) also recognized that international case studies of ‘innovative schools’ analyzed by the SITES module 2 project were unlikely to provide a blueprint for other schools to follow.
5. The IT Coordinator
Widespread adoption of IT in a school normally results in the creation of a new role, the IT coordinator (Bradley, 1992; Owen, 1992; Lai 2001; Davis, 1991), as noted in the previous section at the second stage of internal integration. Lai (2001) researched the role of IT coordinators in New Zealand secondary schools and found that it was rarely a full-time position, but usually coupled with the responsibilities of a deputy or assistant principal (28%) or a head of department for IT, technology or mathematics (61%).According to Lai, the IT coordinators served the leadership roles of planner, manager, envisioner, trainer, and technician and tended to have responsibility for the purchase, maintenance and support of IT equipment as well as for teaching others how to use it. A significant workload issue was identified, with technical management of a computer network being identified as one of the most frustrating.
Owen’s research into IT coordinator roles and responsibilities in the U.K. in the 1990s identified considerable stress because such coordination included change management that impacted the work of the senior management team. It was rare (at that time) for an IT coordinator to be a member of the school’s executive team that is required to move to the third or transformation stage of organizational maturity.Evidence for the need to share leadership at multiple levels within a school was presented by Tong and Trinidad (2005) in Hong Kong using a model that was developed in Australia. This model is split into strategic, department and teacher levels and identifies influences and feedback loops that drive educational IT change processes. Leadership was shared within and across the school and involved the chief executive, the IT coordinator, curriculum coordinators and individual teachers. IT coordination involved work across the departments of the school as well as within discipline and age specific groupings. Kirkman (2000: 46) also provided confirming evidence of the importance of multi-level IT leadership across a U.K. high school, with the caution that “ a network of subject ICT coordinators who could offer application-specific support … can block curriculum change through inaction, passive resistance or a political response” (p.46).This evidence confirms research related to conditions for successful adoption of IT by Ely (1990).
IT coordination has been less formal in primary/elementary schools, and the literature suggests that an IT coordinator was perceived as a temporary phase until teachers become proficient with IT (Strudler & Gall, 1988). However, in a follow-up study Strudler (1995-6) found that there was a continuing need for an IT coordinator to support provision of resources and professional development within each school and, when IT coordination was not retained, the school’s progress in IT use tended to stagnate.