I took an Educational Foundations course as a sophomore in college where in one of the last weeks, we watched a truly bizarre video in class. In a rural area of India, a local researcher had placed a computer literally inside of a wall with a few programs, internet access, and no further instructions. Months later, he found that young children from nearby areas had taught themselves how to use the device and were watching videos, downloading games, and teaching others. Sugata Mitra, the researcher, coined this process as “minimally invasive education” and posited, upon conclusion, that schools were obsolete.
I understood the appeal of the sentiment. Like India, Tanzania also faces a crisis of a growing population of young people eager to learn and an educational infrastructure struggling to meet that need. The irrefutable benefit of non-invasive approaches like the “Hole in the Wall Project” is how they can recruit technological tools to circumvent the challenges standing in the way of a quality education for millions of children around the world. Perhaps, my classmates and I mused, self-directed learning would be the norm in education for all children as the role of technology in our lives and its capabilities grew exponentially.
Exactly four years later, a once-in-a-generation global pandemic hit, closing schools indefinitely and putting to test the feasibility of virtual education as students were sent online in droves. Left with computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all the information known to man, students struggled academically more than they ever had before. Teachers, we were being told, were indispensable. Classrooms, they insisted, was where students needed to be. Schools, it seemed, were not as obsolete as we had thought.
An education is a human experience. Or at least it should be, in my opinion. Time spent laughing in the cafeteria with friends, or running around a pitch with teammates, or reading quietly in the library next to classmates. Being able to take the marker from your teacher’s hand to complete the problem, or poking the person next to you to ask them to explain what’s going on, or sitting together in a group pretending to study and accidentally getting work done in the end. Education, when done best, is an accumulation of experiences to be learned from.
However, we can huff and puff as much as we like, but our human experiences cannot be divorced from all the technology dominant in our lives. In order for me to wax lyrically about the potency about human connection, I had to open my MacBook Air, wait for my wifi connection to come through, direct my browser to the Substack online platform, and then spend twenty minutes combing through Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia to find the video referenced in the opening paragraph (all the while playing the same MUNA song on repeat on Apple Music and window-scrolling through the SSENSE clothing sale on my iPhone). It would be disingenuous and completely impractical to pretend to live in a world untethered from the technological advances that define this moment. And, for better or for worse, schools live in this moment too.
Students today experience the impact of technology, first and foremost through the hardware present at their fingertips. Twenty years ago, in certain parts of the world, schools would have computer labs where hundreds of kids would share thirty bulky desktops. Today, in those same schools and more, thirty Chromebooks or iPads are wheeled around a single classroom and are opened up by students throughout their day. The software that students engage with also reveals the saliency of technology in their academic lives, as they learn subject matter from programs like ST Math and complete assignments on tools like Google Docs. And for older students today and younger students tomorrow, generative artificial intelligence is creeping into the classroom before inevitably bursting in and transforming what learning looks like. On the one end, generative AI is used to make learning easier (i.e. translating ). On the other end, generative AI is used to avoid learning altogether (i.e. writing assignments). These broad, interconnected swaths of educational technology — machines and devices, programs and applications, and artificial intelligence — are already changing what school is for our students. How do we reevaluate what an education is in our digital world? How we do reassert the values, principles, and lessons we believe are central to an education? And how do we reimagine what we want an education to be, not dictated to us by Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurs, but on our own terms, and with our students at the centre?
The nightmare challenge of teaching a combination class was trying to figure out what one group could do independently whilst the other group was with me, as we all shared the same room at the same time. My years in early childhood had made me staunchly anti-tech, arguing adamantly against placing children in front of screens, especially mere months after emerging (“emerging”) from a pandemic. But, I had nine four-year-olds who I needed to teach how to play with playdoh and fifteen five-year-olds who needed to learn addition and subtraction. So I caved and taught my kindergarteners how to log on to i-Ready for an hour every day so that I could have some time with my transitional kindergarten babies.
For those unfamiliar, i-Ready is an online, academic program for kids that has lessons in reading and in math where students are taught material, given activities based on said materials, and then are given summative assessments once completed. It is personalised, measuring where students are and what they are ready for, and also includes diagnostic tests for students to take at least twice a year. In many school districts, including my own, those results are used as official data to gauge student academic performance. Despite my gripes, within a few weeks, I found myself warming towards i-Ready. In addition to its practical benefits, I appreciated how for some students, I could assign lessons that I knew they were having a hard time grasping, and for other students, I could assign lessons to push them beyond or grade-level. And I could keep track of their progress from my teacher portal, letting the computer do more assessments in a day than I could ever even attempt.
Then came time for the end-of-year diagnostic and I flipped. For the August diagnostic, I left students to their own devices (literally), knowing that this was just a preliminary assessment. In May though, I wanted to see first-hand how students did and watch them work through material we had covered in class. Two tests in, and I was close to pulling my braids out one-by-one. The animated i-Ready monster would be singing the instructions and a kid would start asking me about donuts she saw on the other side of the room. The computer would read a story and before they even heard the question, a student would click the answer in the first bubble. I would re-read a question to them in response to their blank stare and when I asked them to repeat the question back to me, they stare would continue. I realised that even after months of practice, there was no way this test could capture all that my students could do because it just wasn’t appropriate. Even if my students were used to sitting in front of a computer at school and an i-Pad at home, what they were engaging in was less learning, and more watching or memorising or spacing out, all of which I do too when placed in front of a screen. The technology could only do so much without a human being to act like a bridge between the object (the information) and subject (the student).
Maybe technology is the canary, screaming sweetly to us all that is wrong in education today. The machines and devices our students are drawn to are more accessible than teachers in the classroom might be. Easier to see, easier to hear, easier to get a response from, and all of this especially so when we consider our students who are differently-abled and for whom technology can provide some sort of equity. Programs and applications that might be fun and engaging in ways that maybe our lessons aren’t, and might be personalised and adaptive is ways that maybe our instruction isn’t. And generative AI appeals to students who find our assignments too hard, our teaching too ineffective, the time constraints too restrictive, and the pressures of academic performance too high to skip out on having the computer do the work for you.
Sci-fi parables always end on the zero-sum argument that it’s either us or tech. And more often than not, we believe that, either envisioning a world with complete automation or occupying ourselves with fantasies of living off-the-grid. Neither are realistic, particularly when it comes to schools. We need technology to reinforce rather than replace the education we provide to our students. And maybe we need to start by reaffirming a definition of education as being the transference of skills and knowledge to students that is then applied and enacted on in further contexts. An education as an experience where students learn in order to act.
In a digital world, this means making sure that students are taught and given opportunities to practice. That means moving away from pedagogical approaches by computers or humans that emphasise memorisation and minimise critical thinking. Approaches where students are passive participants to the screen or teacher in front of them, when we need them to actively engage in their learning so that they understand the content well-enough to apply it. But we need to make sure that we are all on the same page about our values. That we still care about critical thinking and independent thought, and that we still want students to discover the world for themselves so that they can function on their own by their own terms. But the disputes and conflicts that come up in education around book bans, identity, history, and more reveal the deep schisms hindering our ability to fight collectively for what we believe is central to an education. Because that is what we need, ultimately. A united agenda around the future of educational technology that takes into consideration the goals and objectives of teachers, parents, and students, and how we want the latter to thrive academically and social-emotionally. What we do not need are the goals and objectives of private actors looking to increase profit margins, draw in consumers, and promote their own brands/products/personalities. We need to spend less time arguing about the positives and negatives of technology in the classroom, and more time advocating for what we want technology in the classroom to look like. That is where we are right now.
When I was a kid, I was transfixed one night by Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator when my family landed on it while we were channel surfing. At first, I was drawn in by the film debut of one of my favourite singers at the time (Gwen Stefani), but I stayed in awe of all of the technological achievements pioneered by Howard Hughes in his lifetime. As the movie goes on, the subplot of Hughes’ obsessive compulsive disorder becomes the central conflict of the film, as Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes gradually descents in to panic. The film ends with Hughes successfully flying the plane he had always dreamed, he is then rushed and hidden away as he repeats over and over again, “the way of the future,” eventually alone to himself in the mirror.
Nearly twenty years later, that phrase still sticks to me (and my family). This idea the the future is a refrain, repeated on and on, with little we can do to stop or thwart it. That regardless of my feelings on iPads in the classroom, computer-based assessments, and ChatGPT being used for every and all assignments, technology continues to be the way of the future and as a teacher, it is up to me to figure out how to drag myself along so that I can make sure I am still doing my job, educating responsibly future generations to come.
Teachers are not unique in this journey of discovering what technology means for us. But we cannot let these decisions be made without us demanding a seat at the table and being informed enough to ask for what we need when the floor is ours. This moment is one to learn, plan, and move. The future charges on with or without us. Let’s move with it.
Dear Madam,
Please allow me to write to you again after thoroughly reading your post (i'm a slow-reader ;)
For now, if I may, I thought you might find (trigger-warning: self-promotion ;) the following thoughtful writings of my guru Professor F. William Lawvere (on education and students, which switched me into an activist mode, albeit confined to the comforting familiarity of my four walls ;) of some interest.
https://conceptualmathematics.substack.com/p/history-and-philosophy-of-mathematic-reform
https://conceptualmathematics.wordpress.com/2022/08/30/matematicas-conceptuales/#comment-3492
More soon!
Happy Weekend :)
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
poison