Being Within the Technology Paradox
Ted Aoki has given many insights to the question of technology in relation to
education. His writings encourage the careful and thoughtful process of trying to
understand how technology can assist and/or interrupt the important project of
education. Although the question of technology in has been debated by many
prominent theorists (Heidegger, 1977; Gadamer, 1982), Aoki brings a particularly
insightful perspective by enticing us to linger on themes that listen to the human
needs that technology should benefit. It is this insight that reveals a paradox
between our technophilia and our humanity. The following themes are not
comprehensive or complete but only attempt to give a sample of the ideas Aoki
suggests.
THEME 1 – Understanding the Essence of “Computer Application”
A recent headline in our local newspaper reads: “Technology ignites a passion for
learning in kids and teachers” (Bramham, 2012). The specifics of the technology
seem irrelevant compared to what this type of statement reveals about the
seductive hold technology has on our imagination. The idea is that technology has
an incredible potential to solve our educational challenges. It ignites our passion
with possibilities. This is what Aoki (p. 153) refers to, in Heideggarian terms, as
“standing reserve,” a stockpile of resources ready for the potential of solving
utilitarian ends. The fact that educational technology has, for the last 50 years,
repeatedly not lived up to its potential does not seem to diminish our infatuations
with the latest developments. Aoki makes the pointed distinction of the true essence
of technology is not in its instrumental (a tool to extend human specified means and
ends) or anthropological (technological use as a human activity) definition but in its
potential as “standing reserve.” Our interaction with the essence of technology as a
stockpile of possible solutions becomes all-encompassing, displacing other ways of
encountering and understanding the world and ourselves. Aoki describes this
situation as “dangerous” because the essence of technology can replace our
understanding of our own essence, loosing our ability to encounter ourselves
authentically. This insight, from 1987, is especially prescient in the context of the
ubiquity of social media and near constant device-based interaction that has become
evident since. There is a tendency to believe in technological solutions to our
problems, based on potential rather than outcomes.
Aoki refines our understanding of technology in educational situations by examining
the computer application. On the surface computer applications are rather
unproblematic. Computers were designed to run applications therefore it seems
natural and logical that the technical act of applying the generalized meaning of
computers to specific educational situations should pertain. The assumption here is
the end result is understood so the application of technology follows this
understanding in a linear and reproductive way (reproducing general
understanding to specific situations). This instrumental process separates
application from understanding. However, Aoki suggests (following Gadamer) that
application and understanding are inseparable and require interpretation as a
hermeneutic problem. This suggestion of interpreting and understanding both the
specific and the general requires a reevaluation of the general for every specific
location of application. The general and the specific come together in a “fusion of
horizons” (p. 155) to create one phenomenon.
This exploration of technology and application illustrates one of Aoki’s recurrent
themes, which is the mindfulness to listen to what is right in a given specific
situation. The instrumental approach that tries to generalize applications of
education (in technology and in teaching methods) cannot be this mindful by its
very design. In response to this Aoki proposes (p. 156) a hermeneutic approach that
specific and general ways of understanding should inform each other in an iterative
cycle.
THEME 2 – Spaces in-between
Throughout Aoki’s work there is a recurring concept of “indwelling in a zone
between” curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived (e.g. pp. 159, 201, 231, 273-4,
321,423, 449). One of the ideas behind this concept is that curriculum policymaking,
development, implementation, and evaluation come from a linear, industrial model
that is instrumentally reductive of the multiplicity of lived curricula that teachers
and students experience. The education systems that legislate, control and evaluate
the activities of teachers cannot (and should not) address the complexity and human
quality of the teacher-student relationship, which is essential to good teaching. Aoki
asks us to surmount the reductionism and instrumentalism of the curriculum-asplan and to be open to the dialectic, non-linear, lived realities that are understood in
the practice of teaching but have not yet been articulated. It is this inarticulate
nature of curriculum-as-lived that creates a tension for teachers between what they
know as good teaching and what they must adhere to in the institutionalized
curriculum-as-plan. This space between, Aoki suggests, is an “extraordinarily unique
an precious place” where students and teachers gather (p.164). This statement
reflects a careful and mindful approach to every unique interaction between teacher
and student, which is the foundation of good teaching
The tension between the single curriculum-as-plan and the multiplicity of
curriculum-as-lived is amplified when considering the implementation of
educational technology. The promise of technological solutions to the challenges of
curriculum is as ahistorical as it is seductive. This promise has been repeated for
more than half a century (pp. 151 & 236) with slide projectors, language labs,
educational TV’s, computers, and various ‘smart’ devices that require enormous
resources but all have ended up in storeroom mausoleums. Yet there is a constant
belief that the ‘new’ technology will this time achieve its goals. Educational
technology is the epitome of instrumental reductionism for curriculum. Most
educators are not qualified to program or develop educational technology so they
are relegated to the role of implementers of the predetermined ends and means
designed into the technology. Furthermore the seductive nature of new technology
(see the Bramham headline cited above) masks the underlying imperative of control
over the process of teaching and its evaluation.
Consider the case that Norm Friesen (2011) makes regarding the development of
simulations, specifically for dissection lessons but can be said for all types of
technologically mediated curricula. Virtual (technological) learning is ultimately
experienced as a relatively repetitive and simplistic interaction with the keyboard
and mouse, which creates a “discontinuous and disposable” (p. 195) relationship
between the subject and its context. This decontextualization of the learning
environment is less significant for teaching abstract concepts such as math
problems but the potential for the development of rich learning environments that
features social interaction and other forms of encounter is reduced. The concept of
“brilliance” (p. 196) is used to describe the virtual experience when all taskirrelevant elements have been removed and only the aspects of explicit relevance
remain. This allows for flow, transparency and specific learnability, which are
important to instructional design. However, it is both the experiences of brilliance
and the inconvenience, encumbrance and confinement of reality together that are
essential to education. Friesen (p. 199) suggests that opacity, disruption and
upheaval need to be studied as learning experiences but are mutually exclusive to
the systematic instrumental process of educational technology design. This
argument is contested by Sørensen (2011) who tries to be more favorable to digital
technology but misses the point that the unique complexity of our self/world
encounters can never be fully replaced with technical simulation. As Friesen (p.
199) says: “Experiences that are emphatically embodied, mediated affectively and
viscerally, are intrinsic to what it is to know, to learn and to educate.” The lived
embodied experience of teaching and learning can never be completely replaced by
virtual simulations.
THEME 3 – Technology as Instrument
Ted Aoki was working as chair of the Department of Secondary Education at the
University of Alberta when he learnt that the jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew was
coming to campus as a visiting scholar at the music department. Aoki took this
opportunity to ask Shew to come to a curriculum seminar and respond to two
questions: 1) When does an instrument cease to be an instrument? 2) What is it to
improvise? What is improvisation? By asking these questions of a musician (whom
he respects) Aoki is demonstrating how uninspiring and dead music would be if
held under the same constraints that educators can be when they adhere to the
instrumental, predictive curriculum-as-plan. This subtle and clever analogy between
learning and music has a powerful resonance. It shows how a disembodied,
technological system of teaching that rewards faithful implementation of the
curriculum is ultimately dehumanizing. Musicianship is more than techniques,
instruments and scores; it exists when these elements are combined with the body
to “become as one in a living wholeness.” (Shew as quoted in Aoki, 2005, p. 368).
Teaching can be as inspiriting as good music when teachers become improvisers
rather than implementers and thoughtful to the life and experiences of their
students and themselves.
Bobby Shew’s trumpet is a technology that allows him to produce music. Can
educational technology work similarly to teach? Although it might not be as easy to
identify educational instruments as musical ones, a clue to the answer is in Shew’s
response to the first question Aoki posed to him, which was: “When music to be
lived calls for transformation of the instrument and the music into that which is
bodily lived.” (Shew as quoted in Aoki, 2005, p. 369). What this tells us is that if a
technology can help produce a genuine embodied human experience then we may
consider it as an instrument. However, this is often a matter of application rather
than the technology itself. Take for example the headline mentioned above, igniting
passion can be motivational to learning but is this passion due to the enthrallment
of the ‘new’ or does the technology truly have the possibility to express that which is
bodily lived. A new technology has the potential to become an instrument of
learning if it can facilitate open-ended human expressions like telling stories or
making art and music. Examples of this exist where technology is used to help create
projects or environments that reflect the complexity and individuality of our
encounters in lived reality (e.g. Irwin & O’Donoghue, 2012; Grauer, Castro, & Lin,
2012). Technology can be an educational instrument but it takes the careful learning
and practice, such as playing a musical instrument, to go beyond the applications
embedded in the technological design and find the possibilities for true human
expression.
THEME 4 – Ethos
“The technological ethos permeates everyday existence and orders the agenda of
daily life in schools.” (Aoki, p. 236)
The term ethos is understood as describing the underlying beliefs that form an
ideology but it can also be used to refer to the power music has to influence the
listener’s emotions, actions, and even their morals (Gouzouasis, 2010). The way
Aoki uses the term seems include both these meanings. The themes of sound and
music are referred to in much of Aoki’s writings and the intention can be thought of
as a departure from the ocularcentric orientation of modernism (Jay, 1988) to a
deeper understanding that includes the auditory. Hearing is a more contextual way
of perceiving than vision (Truax, 1992; Truax & Barrett, 2011) so that the attention
to listening expands our understanding of curriculum beyond the linear reductionist
approach of control to include the multiplicity of possible individual contexts.
The preceding quote is warning us that we need to be aware of how ethos informs
ideology and becomes the accepted and unquestioned way to proceed. Even in a
time of critical reflection of modernism a technological ethos (with its hidden
instrumental and reductionist influence) can permeate our daily life. The seductive
nature of technology goes deeper than its convenience and appearance, as Pinar
(2012, p.4) states, “it is the salvational potential of technology – its promise of
progress…” that we revere. Indeed it is the link between political liberalism and
technology, the idea that our freedom is linked to the progress of science, that
George Grant identifies as the root cause of our increasingly homogenized society
(Pinar, 2012, p.5). The ironic situation that our quest for individual freedom leads us
to dependence (enslavement) to the continual consumption of technological
products plays out in our pedagogical situation by shifting the discussion from the
development of individuals to the acquisition and implementation of the tools. We
loose in this shift, according to Aoki, our ability to hear “the call of Being, so caught
up are we with the matter of the essence of technology” (p. 396). This truly is a
situation to be wary of; while we perceive and desire progress through our
technological consumption we are actually loosing what it is to be human.
Although there are many forms of technology, the computer is certainly the most
ubiquitous today. Given its foundation of binary comparisons and its militaristic
origins it would be difficult to imagine an invention that is more modernist in its
construction. Indeed we are in an ironic age if the ultimate modernist construction,
the computer, is the main instrument that we use to compose and communicate our
ideas of post-modernism
THEME 5– Attunement and Watchfulness
Aoki uses the concept of attunement to describe a listening with care, but also the
bringing into of a harmonious and responsive relationship. The term implies a
soniferous or musical element as well as the engagement or interaction with the
situation – a relationship. Attunement is more than observation because it involves
not only to be aware of a situation but also to be able to adjust (tune) to what is
required. Aoki uses the concept in combination with touch and tact to describe a
more deeply conscious sensitivity to “our own being as teachers” (p. 164).
Attunement implies dynamic responses and sensitivities at all levels education, not
just in teaching but in the understanding of curriculum as well.
To use this concept of attunement in the context of teaching technology we need to
first be attuned to the needs of the situation. Again we hear the recurring refrain of
the specific informing the general, the practice informing the theory, the curriculumas-lived informing the curriculum-as-plan. Technology can be attuned to specific
pedagogical applications but not in a wholesale manner. If a technology cannot be
altered to fulfill the needs of an individual learning situation then it brings with it
preconceived outcomes and instead the situation itself becomes altered. This is
when a technology ceases to be an instrument.
Aoki describes watchfulness in an autobiographical vignette describing a teacher
watching as the Japanese students are ‘relocated’ away from his class. In a moving
and profound way this story tells of a single moment that defines what pedagogical
watchfulness means. The watchfulness of a teacher is an extension of the bond of
parental trust, to allow no harm to come to the student, to hope that the student will
do well. This bond of trust is essential to the constellation of relationships that come
from the student – teacher relationship (i.e. parent – teacher; school – teacher;
society – teacher; etc.). As Aoki says, “good teachers are more than they do; they are
the teaching” (p. 196). Trust is the foundation that teaching is built upon. We trust
the school systems to only accredit trustworthy teachers and we instill upon our
children that teachers are people we can trust. However, an individual student’s
trust is developed through the tacit watchfulness of the teacher, giving them a sense
of protection and freedom that allows them to learn.
It requires a deep understanding of watchfulness for teachers to perceive, interpret,
and attune the often subtle and hidden curriculum embedded in teaching
technology. Virtual environments and communication technology present
challenges to the watchful role of a teacher. It is often difficult to assess let alone
regulate some of the activities students can be involved in using technology, but has
the role of the teacher changed? How can teachers watch over and protect students
if they are unfamiliar with the environments they are engaged in? These questions
go beyond the pedagogical advantages of virtual environments and relate back to
the foundations of trust.
Pedagogical advantages to virtual environments have been promoted (Han, 2010,
2011) but the speed in which these environments are being developed compared to
the understanding of their complex multisensory influence seems mismatched. The
rapidly changing environments that have become commonplace allow little time for
reflection as to their perception or how they are used by individual students to
construct meaning. As Han (2011) points out there are many layers of
interpretation, and possibilities of misinterpretation, that exist in virtual
environments but what she fails to emphasize are the risks that arise when teachers
invite students into these environments. There are the risks to the students of
misinterpretations or exposure to inappropriate or incorrect material but there is
also a risk to the trust that has been built historically, socially and institutionally if
our watchfulness as teachers in virtual environments becomes unclear.
Aoki (p. 357) reflects on his teaching in a grade 1 class with the reading primer “We
Work and Play” and concludes that the hidden curriculum within that seemingly
innocuous text was a work ethic that prioritizes work and separates it from play.
This simple example demonstrates the way hidden curriculum incorporates ethical
and moral perspectives into seemingly unrelated teaching material. The way this
plays out in virtual environments can be much more complex and difficult to
analyze. Hidden curriculum in virtual environments is discussed by Han (2011) as
something that can be revealed and negotiated by promoting visual culture or visual
studies to students so they can understand these environments. Although, visual
literacy is a very important skill, it by its self is incomplete to address the hidden
curriculum in virtual educational environments. There is potential to motivate
learning through the didactic aspects of virtual environments but when so much of
this technology has been developed either for militaristic or commercial purposes
(Edgerton, 2006; Smith, 2010), the question of its hidden curriculum is of great
concern. Educational applications of technology (especially computer based virtual
environments) are more of an afterthought or a reconfiguration of systems that
were designed to entertain or advance military and corporate endeavors.
Attempting to understand how hidden curriculum within these systems reflects
their original design objectives is a complex and uncertain task that educators must
assume if they are to be watchful over their students.
An example of this is the use of online media to teach students about democracy.
Using the historically developed methods of media analysis and media literacy, a
teacher could invite students to select a range of media from a particular source and
critically analyze the sample based on criteria such as representation of gender,
power, ethnicity, etc.
THEME 4.5 – The Metaphorical Bridge
A LINGERING NOTE
I am encouraged by Aoki’s description of discovering Pinar et al and the Bergamo
Conference etc…
Overreification of curriculum
Reconceptualization
Currere
Textured context of phenomenological discourse
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