ICT AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE IN THE ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOL: USING BELL'S CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS TO CHALLENGE TECHNO-ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATIONS OF ICT USE Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Saima Rana
London Knowledge Lab Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy Institute of Education University of London London WC1H 0AL, UK January 2011 Saima Rana 2011
DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is a presentation of my original research work and has not previously been submitted for a degree from any university. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis does not contain any material previously published or written by another person except where duly acknowledged in the text. Word count (excluding appendices and bibliography): 84,970 words Saima Rana
ABSTRACT The prominence of ICT in the English Secondary schools has increased enormously in the last fifteen years under the New Labour administration. These schools have historically sought justification either in terms of vocational or non-vocational objectives, captured in Oakeshott’s contesting metaphors of schools as markets or as monasteries. ICT became a high profile and very expensive part of a general educational reform policy engaged with these contested objectives for schools. The thesis surveys and critiques government ICT policy between 1995-2010, through situated case studies of policy processes, asking what ideas are driving the reforms and whether the ideas are justified. The central contribution of this thesis is to reveal how ICT educational policy in this sector has been constructed and positioned by applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) to it. An original feature of this CDA is the use of Daniel Bell’s theory of tripartite Axial Realms to identify neglected discourses. The main findings are that there is a dominant techno-economic discourse and that axial principles from the cultural and political spheres are largely invisible. Overall then, this research places the construction of educational ICT policy reform discourse at the centre of important contemporary questions about the purpose of Secondary schools in particular the debate about market and monastic visions of schooling. I use Bell to reconceptualise the educational purpose of ICT, showing that it is best reconstructed in terms of Bell’s three realms, the techno-economic, the political and the cultural, rather than assuming the techno-economic has priority and the others can be suppressed. The implications of this are that vocational justifications alone should not and need not drive ICT educational reform or educational reform generally, and that an approach seeking to reintroduce the political and the cultural axial principles alongside the techno-economic ones into ICT policy would be beneficial.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
| 227 227 228 228 230 233 236 236 236 236 237 237 239 239 241 242 242 243 244 245 246 |
| REFERENCES | 249 |
| APPENDICIES Appendix I: Nominated Documents – 1st Case Study Appendix II: Nominated Documents – 2nd Case Study | 269 271 |
LIST OF FIGURES
| FIGURE | PAGE NO. |
| Figure 6.1 Bell’s Axial Principles | 104 |
LIST OF TABLES
| TABLE | PAGE NO. |
| Table 7.1 Reference Criteria for the selection of key actors Table 7.2 References Criteria for the selection of documents Table 7.3 CDA steps developed by Banister 1994 Table 7.4 Additional steps Table 8.1 Membership of actors Table 8.2 Short listed educational ICT documents included in this research – 1st Case Study Table 9.1 Short listed educational ICT documents included in this research – 2nd Case Study | 141 142 143 145 150 151 185 |
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank and acknowledge the following people who have assisted and supported me with my research. First of all, I would like to thank and offer my sincerest gratitude to my supervisors Dr Martin Oliver and Dr Niall Winters who have supported me throughout my research. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without their continuous patience, knowledge, time, guidance, support, good teaching, academic experience and warm encouragement. Thank you for ploughing through several preliminary versions of my text, making critical suggestions, posing challenging questions, giving me the confidence to explore my research interests and the guidance to avoid getting lost in my exploration. I wish to thank my dear friend Richard Marshall, for helping me get through the difficult times, and for all the emotional support, comraderie, entertainment, and caring he provided. Throughout my research he has provided enthusiasm, inspiration, advice and very good company. Thank you. I am grateful also to all the participants who took part in the case studies. Unfortunately they must remain anonymous but I thank them all for their invaluable contributions. I would like to thank my family for encouraging me and endlessly listening to me. They have been a constant source of emotional and moral support during my doctoral studies and this thesis would certainly not have existed without them. Thank you to my wonderful siblings, my sister Naheed for always being there, my brother Khuram for caring and a very special thanks to my brother Faisal for his endless encouragement, support and his absolute confidence in me. And last but by no means least I thank my parents for their endless patience and love and always supporting me throughout all my studies. To them I dedicate this thesis.
CHAPTER 1:INTRODUCTION
This thesis is a reaction to the huge and unprecedented investment in English Secondary Schools ICT resources since the 1980’s. The story of ICT’s introduction into English Secondary schools has involved huge amounts of money and resources coupled with studies that question the effectiveness of this policy investment. Introduced for the first time as part of the National Curriculum in 1988 as part of Design and Technology, IT developed later into ICT. It is now a statutory non-core foundation subject taught in all the Key stages as a discrete subject. An incoming New Labour Government in 1997 set challenging targets for the use of ICT in a consultation paper. In this was proposed a National Grid For Learning which would create, ‘A mosaic of inter-connecting networks and education services based on the Internet which will support teaching, learning, training and administration in schools, colleges, universities, libraries, the workplace and homes’ (DfEE, 1997a). Since then there has been huge capital investment in schools. Since 1997, £1.367 billion has been invested in Primary and Secondary schools from grants from Standards Funds alone by 2002 (DfES/Becta 2002, p2). Matched funding from LEAs has meant that levels of investment in this introduction of ICT into schools is estimated to have been about £1.8 billion over a seven year period up to 2002. Since 1999 the £250 million New Opportunities Fund (NOF) initiative has been awarded for training teachers and librarians in schools to use ICT. ICT is now established in these schools. The computer to pupil ratio is now 1:5.4. Average numbers of computers per school has increased from 100.9 in 1998 to 192.7 in 2003. 82% of teachers are now reported as feeling confident using ICT (compared to 61% in 1998) (DfES/Becta, 2003). The majority of secondary schools have well- equipped ICT suites providing 20–25 networked workstations, intranets, connections and ‘clusters’ or stand-alone machines around the school. However, despite increased access to technology both at school and home, the majority of teachers use ICT resources in less than half of lessons and generally prefer to rely on paper-based sources for lesson planning, rather than making use of the Internet. Where ICT is used in lessons the most common use of ICT across all subjects is using the Internet for research (DfES/Becta 2003, DfES 2003c). 43.3% of secondary teachers have access to an electronic whiteboard; 27.3% use it regularly. 64.5% of secondary school teachers have access to personal email at school. There is a close correlation between availability and regular use. Only 23.1% of secondary teachers make regular use of IT curriculum-related software. Yet despite this, the claims of the techno-reform policy agenda continually focus on what will be achieved in the future. The policy agenda claimed that the investment in ICT in Secondary Schools in England would bring about a significant impact. For example, the DfES wrote that investing in ICT in Secondary Schools would ensure that: ‘ICT makes a significant contribution to teaching and learning across all subjects and ages, inside and outside the curriculum; ICT is used to improve access to learning for pupils with a diverse range of individual needs, including those with SEN and disabilities; ICT is used as a tool for whole-school improvement; ICT is used as a means of enabling learning to take place more easily beyond the bounds of the formal school organisation and outside the school day; and ICT capabilities are developed as key skills essential for participation in today’s society and economy’ (DfES/Becta 2003). This perceived gap between the aims and ideals of the techno-reformist agenda and its continually deferred ICT potential raise questions as to whether there were problems with the articulation of those perceived aims and ideals. If the investment and the training was successfully happening then there had to be something that was preventing the predicted success from happening. This led me to think about techno-reformist policy in terms of a discourse that might possibly be defective. It was this that led me to start reading the literature critiquing this policy discourse. Out of this came questions as to the origins of the discourse, and questions about whether the discourse contained ‘contradictions’ which meant that its promises were not just deferred for the moment but were permanently deferred. Larry Cuban (2003) had written extensively about the way promises made on behalf of technology for improving schools had failed. I had read Diane Coyle’s (1997) book about the impact of ICT on the ‘weightless economy,’ which summarized a vision that seemed to connect closely with the vision driving the ‘techno-reform’ agenda in Secondary schools, one where information, services and positional goods become the new sources of capital made possible by the new ICTs. From this it was a small move to thinking about the claims being made for this new wired, weightless economy. I began to read the originators of the idea that Coyle had summarized. Bell’s rebuttal of Lasch in the ‘New York Review of Books’ (1974) made a surprising claim for his theory: that he was restricting his claim about the ‘Information Society’ to a distinct realm rather than claiming it would revolutionise the whole of society. This is what Bell wrote then that struck me as being terribly important and overlooked subsequently: ‘It said it is useful, analytically, to divide society into three realms: the social structure (which comprises the economic-technical-industrial order, the stratification and occupation system of the society), the polity, and the cultural’ (Bell 1974a). It was this suggestion that I wanted to exploit in my thesis. Although I was aware that much of Bell’s theory has been subjected to heavy criticism I still felt that taking on this approach was to move forward with a thesis that theorized: ‘…counter to the dominant sociological theories of Marxism and functionalism. Both Marxism and functionalism, antagonistic as they may be in other respects, share a common premise: that any society is a structurally interrelated whole’ (Bell 1974a). Reflecting on this, I subsequently began to think that there were similarities between Bell’s criticism of an interrelated whole and a polarisation of views within the world of English Secondary school education. As a teacher working in the sector it was clear that there were different and competing visions of educational purpose, but in particular there was a polarisation of two conceptions of education, the Liberal and the Vocational, that seemed to have deep historical roots and an enduring and often destructive presence in this area of education and schooling. The conceptions polarised around ideals that seemed to connect with Bell’s distinction of realms, in particular his techno-economic realm and his cultural realm. It became part of my approach to trying to understand ICT and its place in English Secondary schools at this time (1995 to 2010) to examine the educational landscape by joining the analytic structure of Bell’s theory to these competing conceptions of education’s purpose. Bell’s ideas struck me as being particularly pertinent in making sense of the educational situation I was trying to understand.
As a teacher and advisor of ICT in London Secondary Schools for the last ten years the issue of the place of ICT in schools is a live and urgent one. Attitudes towards the rapid and expanding use of ICT in education were often a mixture of unrealistic utopianism, suspicion and negativity. The attitudes seemed to be partly rooted in attitudes to change generally but in some cases were specifically about ICT. This interested me. It also interested me that the policy documents and the briefing meetings set up by the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) and other educational bodies steering the introduction of the new technology into schools, were all uniformly positive about ICT, and seemed incapable and unwilling to hear any views that were discordant. In particular both teachers and student voices seemed left out of the process. Certain ideals connected to what might be labelled Liberal educational values seemed absent and I wanted to investigate further whether this experience was widespread. This led me to think about the context of this change. I work with colleagues who could remember seeing their first computer in a school context and I can remember being at school where there were no computers. My first experience of a computer was at College in 1998. My older colleagues recall the introduction of Apple Macs with tiny black and white screens, which were treated with a kind of awe and fascination. These were objects of almost supernatural mystery. Specially designated LEA advisory teachers, often co-opted onto the government initiative of TVEI (Technical and vocational educational initiative), tried to induct fellow teachers into the mysteries involved like techno priests, a role and image they encouraged. From the very beginning, then, according to this recalled experience, computers were endowed with both power and an idiom of specialised knowledge that was formidable and lent itself to mystification and self-aggrandisement. It was my first experience of the digital divide where inequalities of access to the technology threatened to exacerbate inequalities of power. This is where I began to feel that I needed to find a theoretical position to explain what I was beginning to see as a tension within the educational world’s attitudes toward technology. It was a tension that suggested that there were reasons that went beyond just educational attitudes towards the new technology. I began to feel that perhaps there were larger cultural issues at stake. My MSc research investigated thinking about ICT in classrooms. It showed several surprising results, for example that teachers were not using ICT as they thought they were, were not changing their teaching styles to accommodate ICT but if anything were accommodating ICT to their teaching styles, were not using a very wide range of software packages, were on the whole positive about ICT but were not as ICT literate as they thought they were, and were not invited to discuss how they wanted ICT to work for them but rather were at the end of the delivery of an ICT process which did not involve their voices. Similarly the research found pupils were also excluded from the decision making process when it came to how ICT could help their learning. There was a divide between home use and school use, and the more sophisticated use of ICT took place outside of the school. The research also threw up questions of the digital divide where some pupils did not have access to ICT outside of school. This was also apparent with teachers. There was also a mismatch between technical support and need in schools which reflected the basic power structure within these organisations. Bureaucracy and management agendas, which also dominated the purchasing of ICT in schools, were more dominant than teaching and learning agendas. Having raised the issue of how some educational values seemed to be hidden from the techno-reform agenda I wanted to explore this further; therefore I embarked on this PhD.
The discourse of technologies, paradoxically, contain strands that are both deeply materialistic and instrumental and at the same time can be understood in terms that are so extravagant that they seem almost religious. There is a faith that is placed in these technologies, a faith that is the natural outcome of the desires and hopes the technologies feed and feed into which are also the root source of accompanying feelings of fear and loathing. In the enormous powers invested in the technologies also resides the root of fear and a will to escape. It is clear from literature about aspects of the ICT policy discourse, such as the literature around the notion of ‘digital divide’, that the introduction of ICT into schools has not been unproblematic (e.g. Selwyn 2004, Selwyn & Facer 2007); ‘…it is not enough that high and low achieving students all have access to ICT in classrooms, if high achievers use ICT as a tool for communication and collaboration, while low achieving students only use it for drill and practice’ (Wasser, 1997, quoted in Guile 1998, p8) This context suggests that whilst discourses of techno-reform might be dominant in education, they remain problematic. Building on this, this thesis examines the idea that current understanding of ICT in schools is misconceived. In order to investigate this it examines English Secondary schools during the period when ICT was being introduced. The thesis joins current critiques analysing the reforms (e.g. Cuban 2001, Selwyn 2004, Grint and Woolgar 1992) and attempts to develop a framework for understanding limits to ICT in schools that might help organise critiques and understand why reform expectations are not being met. The thesis argues that a significant and relevant debate about educational values in the English Secondary sector links with elements of Bell’s notion of the information society and together these help to develop a framework for understanding the limits to the introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools. This is a new framework combining elements that have not been combined in this way before. The education debate has tended to be kept separate from the specifics of the ICT in education debate and both are tended to be discussed away from discussions about Post-industrialism, new technologies and the economy. This new framework proposes a way of combining these elements to present a more nuanced understanding the complexities of the introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools. However, the focus and motivation for the thesis is ICT and education. In applying Bell’s theoretical structure to the approach of introducing ICT into English secondary schools the thesis inevitably touches upon theories that seem more pertinent to a thesis about the sociologies and philosophies of modernity and post-modernity than to such a parochial concern. But the thesis nevertheless is interested in the educational implications of the ICT policies in these schools. Using Bell is controversial because he often writes to larger, more sweeping topics. But it would be to misread the thesis to think that it was interested in such things. It is English Secondary schools and the introduction of ICT that is of prime concern and the thesis has adopted a research programme that aims at readers working in the fields of ICT and education. However in drawing on Bell’s theoretical structure I inevitably use terms such as ‘culture’ and ‘techno-economic’ and ‘political’ all of which have been important and contested in many related fields. I don’t engage with the controversies for two reasons: firstly the word limit of the thesis wouldn’t allow for any sustained and detailed critique, and secondly, the terms have been used as Bell used them, in terms simply defined by what he calls the ‘axial principles’ of each realm. Bell writes that, ‘…each of the realms I posit is obedient to axial principles which embody these contradictions: the social structure follows the norms of functional rationality (i.e. efficiency, role segmentation, increased specialization, bureaucratization, etc.); the polity operates on the principle of formal equality (e.g. one man, one vote) and is based on representation or participation; and the culture emphasizes self-realization and self-fulfillment. Because of these contrary axial principles we have increasing strain and conflict in the society: equality vs. bureaucratization, the “whole man” versus the role demands, etc…( Bell 1974, p 1) In applying this theoretical structure to English Secondary schools and the introduction of ICT into them, the thesis isn’t justified by theoretical discussions of the terms of the structure but rather by the productivity of such an approach. The thesis is interested in English Secondary schools and their use of ICT and is asking whether applying some version of Bell’s structure might produce a better understanding of them. My thesis is asking what might be further understood if schools and ICT policies were analysed in terms of the tripartite division of realms in Bell’s thesis. It isn’t engaging with general theories of culture, politics, technology or economics but rather asking whether stipulating, as Bell does, the separation of these into three realms (technology and economics are placed in the same realm by Bell) produces new information about the important phenomenon of ICT’s introduction into English Secondary schools. I gloss over key theorists such as Foucault, Lyotard and Bourdieu because their theoretical positions are only incidental to the main concerns of the thesis. In particular, ‘culture’ is used as bell uses it, as something that isn’t reducible to either of the other realms. In terms of schools, I apply it to Oakeshott’s metaphors of schools as monasteries and schools as markets to suggest that something like Bell’s idea of incompatibility of realms was already a prevalent strand of thought in the English secondary schooling system. But to say more here is to anticipate later chapters. What I hope to have done in this brief introduction is to say both what is in the thesis and also what is not in the thesis. Everything is directed towards better understanding a particular set of policies in a particular type of school in a particular country. It is not a thesis about technology, cultural theory, politics, modernity, post modernity nor sociological and philosophical systems of any stripe. My interest is in schools and ICT and it is to those interests that this thesis is directed.
The research questions that guide this research are as follows: Research Question 1 (RQ1): What is the purpose of English Secondary Schooling? Research Question 2 (RQ2): How does the ICT policy introducing ICT into English Secondary schools relate to these schools’ broader purpose? Research Question 3 (RQ3): What happens to education when ICT is introduced into English Secondary schools? Research Question 4 (RQ4): How does policy influence this process? In particular what have the policies been? How were they formed? How are they expected to influence practice? Research Question 5 (RQ5): What concepts can be used to explain the influence of the policies? Are these Educational concepts? If not, does this make a difference?
There is an ongoing debate about the use of ICTs in English secondary Schools. The debate is taking place in a context of huge financial, political and theoretical investment driven by an ICT and education policy discourse. Critics have identified problems arising from this agenda, in particular a failure to delivery the transformation of Secondary schools the ICT policies promised. The thesis engages positively with the debate by offering an alternative paradigm for investigating the discourse. In so doing critical insights into the nature of ICT and learning may be discussed outside of the constraints of the dominant discourse. This will provide more room for those insights to be properly incorporated into a new policy discourse, one that recognises that values other than those of the dominant discourse of 1995-2010 can fruitfully be mobilised. The thesis therefore has both a negative and a positive function: it seeks to deconstruct the dominant ICT education policy discourse of the techno-reformers and it seeks to clear conceptual space that can then develop an alternative discourse in which educational values of self fulfilment, self expression and equality can be recognised. The thesis is significant, then, because it seeks to be more than merely descriptive of a certain discourse and its genealogy. It is normative, suggesting what should be contained within any educational policy discourse, including an ICT educational policy discourse.
I begin the thesis with this chapter, which introduces the research to be undertaken; my motivation, the research and context within which I will be working and my research questions and their significance to the thesis. Chapter two addresses RQ 1. In it I outline the contours of two competing educational ideals for educational purpose. The chapter shows that the two polarised views, captured in Michael Oakeshott’s two metaphors of schools being like monasteries or schools being like markets, have been a presence in English Secondary school education from the eighteenth century onwards. The chapter gives the main features of the conflict. In so doing the chapter highlights the specificity of the thesis’ focus: not only does it concentrate on a very particular decade, 1995 to 2010, but it also looks at a very particular area of education, English Secondary schools. In so doing the chapter both shows what educational forces emanated from this particular sector as well as constraining generalised statements about education and ICT to this sector. This is an investigation limited to ICT in English Secondary schools only. In chapter three I examine ICT in English Secondary schools and ask questions as to how it is being understood and how it is being justified in order to address RQ3. I outline a brief history of government funding, of the influential policies that attempted to put ICT into these schools, of the reasons given for this investment and these policies and the impact ICT has had in these schools. In the next two chapters I address RQ4. In chapter four, I examine the link between policy and practice, looking at the dominant reasons given for prioritizing ICT in schools. I examine the place of ICT policy discourse in a wider policy discourse and then show how priorities from the general discourse became priorities structuring the educational reforms. It was as part of general public service policy reform that ICT education policies introduced ICT into schools. The chapter examines the reasons that were given to justify the policies. In chapter five I examine both positive and negative critical literature about the ICT policy discourse. In particular the chapter will show how understanding of the new policy discourse informs both support and criticism of placing ICT in English Secondary schools. The chapter looks into the current debates around ICT in Schools. The chapter will offer overviews of those who oppose the discourse and who resist it in terms of a different understanding of the purpose of education generally. In this they oppose the ideology that the discourse introduces and maintains. These writers offer resistance to the discourse, opposing the ideology that links educational values to those of economics and technology. Resistance to the policy takes different forms in this literature. In the following chapter, chapter six, I will examine the history of the discourse through sociological models of Post-industrialism, in particular aspects of Bell’s Information Society. The thesis poses a question about the scope of technological impact and asks how far a reading of Bell’s three realm sociological theory might be used to understand ICT’s relationship with education and further how the relationship between educational and techno-economic values might best be understood. This framework is the way I approach answering RQ5. Chapter seven describes the research approach that will be used to investigate the ICT policy discourse and case study analysis. It looks at the general principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), briefly outlines different approaches within this tradition, and considers critiques of CDA. The chapter then shows how CDA will be related to Bell’s concept of the distinction of realms and their Axial principles. In chapters eight and nine I analyse documents used by key actors working within English Secondary schools when working to introduce ICT into their English Secondary schools. The documents are subjected to a detailed critical discourse analysis and then the discourses are further analysed using Bell’s tri-partite theory of realms and their Axial principles to establish constraints on introducing ICT into secondary schools. This reveals elements that are often hidden in the dominant discourse. In this RQ 6 is addressed.
In this thesis I want to ask serious questions about the agenda of the techno-reformists. Educational critics like Cuban (2003, 2001, 1995, 1986) make clear there are problems with the techno-reform agenda. ‘As for enhanced efficiency in learning and teaching, there have been no advances (measured by higher academic achievement of urban, suburban, or rural students) over the last decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers. No surprise here, as the debate over whether new technologies have increased overall American economic productivity also has had no clear answers. The link between test score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested’ (Cuban 2003, p178-179). Although an American voice, my own anecdotal experiences in English Secondary schools reflected a similar sense that ICT was not doing in schools what the dominant reform agenda introducing it claimed it would. Many of the positive educational ideas that connect with ICT, such as ‘independent learning’, ‘self-assessment’, collaborative approaches to learning and so on pre-date the ICT policy discourse. However my reading of Cuban and my own experience suggested to me that the policy discourse was constraining these ideas, subtly changing them to fit in to the techno-reform agenda. The research programme the thesis follows aims to deconstruct the dominant policy discourse of the techno-reformers and in so doing intends to offer a different research paradigm for a discourse of ICT policy for education in English Secondary schools to be developed. The thesis proposes a reading of Bell’s tripartite division of society, Bell’s ‘cultural contradiction’ (Bell 1976) thesis based on his sociology of separate realms and their Axial principles, in order to foreground values opposed to those of technology and economics. In approaching the policy discourse introducing ICT into English Secondary schools in this way I am trying to see if it is possible to rethink the discourse of ICT educational policy by relating the polarised visions of educational purpose described in chapter two to Bell’s tripartite realms. In the next chapter, the thesis looks at the way English secondary schools have been understood in order to provide evidence that ideas about the purpose of schooling affect how ICT is understood in this context.
CHAPTER 2:MONASTERIES Vs MARKETS
There is a long-standing conflict about the purpose of schools in England (Pring 1994). The writings of Victorian thinkers about education such as Newman, Mill and others were keen to establish a Liberal conception of education, which was largely understood in terms of it being anti-vocational (Newman 1902, Mill 1965). However, some of liberal education’s most important features – the development of the mind, intelligence, academic engagement, the intrinsic worth of education, all captured in the notion of “education for education’s sake”, and a subject based, largely academic curriculum – have been traced by educational historians, and John White in particular, to roots that reach back into seventeenth century Protestant Puritan religious communities, mediated by the influence of a particular Parisian logician called Ramus (White 2006a). White’s thesis suggests that from this early period education was modelled on ideas that would be later labelled ‘liberal’. Liberal education can thus be conceived as being a modernized, secular development of what White describes as the ‘Ramus legacy’. The conservative educational philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterized schools that thought of themselves in this way as being like monasteries (Oakeshott 1989). This metaphor captures the thought that the purpose of schools is to create a space for engagement with things of the mind and soul, largely disregarding any specific practical relevance such studies might have. It was charged with the task of making ‘people good’ and self fulfilled (Pring 1994). Oakeshott writes of schools as an ‘…unexpected invitation to disentangle oneself from current happening’ (Oakeshott 1989). In this vision, educational purpose was not about practical relevance and economic well-being but of spiritual, intellectual and moral self-fulfilment, Contrasted with this is an alternative conception of the purpose of education and schools, one focused explicitly on the relevance of studies to economic need. This is the option that conceives of schools as having a broadly vocational purpose. Oakeshott is again helpful in providing the metaphor of schools as markets to capture this ideal. Here schools are conceived rather like assemblages of guilds, providing the training and the skills necessary for a world of work. This view of educational purpose contends that engagement with industry; commerce and earning a living are paramount in legitimising the existence of schools. The idea of intellectual excellence being nurtured by individual genius and hard work couples with the idea of an intellectual elite of guardians who would be the future leaders of a nation. This is the view of the clerisy that Coleridge argued for, a role that liberal educationalists argue is now taken by teachers. TH Green (Gordon and White, 1979) thought that this was the model of a liberal education preparing students ‘…in Oxford for the professions and public service’ (Pring 1994, p63). But the vocational usefulness of this education was not its prime purpose, even though it was thought that being given such an education education that aimed at forming the individual mind intellectually and morally was most suitable for the highest duties of state. Education was conceived of as taking place in a metaphorical ‘place apart’. Oakeshott writes that: ‘In short, ‘School’ is ‘monastic’ in respect of being a place apart where excellences may be heard because the din of worldly laxities and partialities is silenced or abated’ (Oakeshhott 1972, p69). The separation from the world is important. Typically this approach to education is about releasing the student from having to worry about day-to-day pressures and contingencies and to have a space where universal reason and ideals can be contemplated and considered. ‘Liberal learning is a difficult engagement… It is a somewhat unexpected invitation to disentangle oneself from the here and now of current happenings and engagements, to detach oneself from the urgencies of the local and the contemporary, to explore and enjoy a release from having to consider things in terms of their contingent features, beliefs in terms of their applications to contingent situations and persons in terms of their contingent usefulness’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p39). This approach bundles together the idea of a place set apart with ideas about things, beliefs and persons that are also set apart. It encourages the idea of a school as being a zone of order and individual endeavour that encourages students to engage deeply with deeper things than the everyday. In such a zone, the student is able to reflect critically on the deep and eternal questions that allow for the formation of an intellect and moral sensibility that will be useful when they return to the world to take up their leadership role in society. And of course it links itself to the evaluative sense of culture. John Henry Newman makes this clear in an early version of the ideal: ‘Liberal education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence’ (Newman, 1852, p121).
2.2.1 English Secondary Schools as Monasteries Vs English Secondary Schools as Markets The conflict between liberal and vocational conceptions of education are the two polarised options that determines the educational purpose of English Secondary schools (Pring 1994). This is a long-standing contrast in English education, one that became visible in the Victorian writings of Newman, Mill and others as they developed an understanding of liberal education (e.g. Newman 1902, Mill 1965). This liberal, anti-vocational education is one strand of the two opposed options justifying schooling. However, some of liberal education’s most important features – the development of the mind, intelligence, academic engagement, the intrinsic worth of education, all captured in the notion of “education for education’s sake”, and a subject-based, largely academic curriculum – have been traced by educational historians, and John White in particular, to roots that reach back into seventeenth century Protestant Puritan religious communities, mediated by the influence of a particular Parisian logician called Ramus (White 2006a). White’s thesis suggests that from this early period education was modelled on ideas that would be later labelled liberal. Liberal education can thus be conceived as being a modernized, secular development of what White describes as ‘Ramus legacy’. The conservative educational philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterized schools that thought of themselves in this way as being like monasteries (Oakeshott 1985). This metaphor captures the thought that the purpose of schools is to create a space for engagement with things of the mind and soul, largely disregarding any specific practical relevance such studies might have, charged with the task of making ‘people good’ and self fulfilled (Pring 1994). Oakeshott writes of schools as an ‘…unexpected invitation to disentangle oneself from current happening’ (Oakeshott 1985). Contrasted with this is an alternative conception of the purpose of education and schools, one focused explicitly on the relevance of studies to economic need. This is the option that conceives of schools as vocational. Oakeshott is again helpful in providing the metaphor of schools as markets to capture this ideal. Here schools are conceived rather like assemblages of guilds, providing training and the skills necessary for a world of work. This view of educational purpose contends that engagement with industry, commerce and earning a living are paramount in legitimising the existence of schools. 2.2.2 Flourishing of the Individual – Education and the Market Both of these opposing justifications are premised on the idea that education should in some way bring about well being, but obviously they come to very different conclusions as to how education can contribute to achieving this. By the time the Liberal Ideal was being articulated in the nineteenth century there was a political reality that was part of deciding the role of schools. A modern democratic state is the context for the debate between schools as monasteries and schools as markets. Given this political reality the question arose: how best achieve flourishing citizens? Schools as monasteries and schools as markets are alternative responses to this question. Those who argue that the market can be justified in terms of flourishing have argued that if flourishing is just a matter of subjective choice of whatever a person wants to be fulfilled, then it may be argued that there is nothing in this that prevents it from being in the market orientated realm. If this were so then this would suggest that there is a role for the market in education. John O’Neil discusses this in terms that seem to line up well with this perspective. He writes: ‘Well-being can be identified with the satisfaction of fully informed preferences. The position allows for error but still holds that whether something is good for a person depends ultimately on what they would want or value. What is good for us is still dependent ultimately on our preferences’ (O’Neill 1998, p47). O’Neil suggests a view that binds educational values to the market place in a way that denies that they are from separate realms. O’Neil argues that the market is just the mechanism to bring about flourishing lives and that education is just one institution, alongside others like the National Health Service that is designed to support a flourishing life. This view argues that the market is more than being merely a tool for satisfying basic needs. O’Neil is presenting an argument that denies this. He suggests that the market ‘…can bring with it, too, an ethical conception of the final ends of human life. It locates these… in the satisfaction of fully informed individual preferences. As such, it is itself an educational vehicle…’ (White 2002, p172). Yet the argument is about broadening the scope of what the market model can achieve and doesn’t move away from opposing any ideal that might claim that education has no business worrying about such matters. And the idea of markets as being truly able to conceive of ‘an ethical conception of the final ends of human life’ is criticised by those rejecting the model. These opponents argue that the view assumes that choices made in the market place really are the preferences of individuals (Sumner, 1996, p115-16). The market requires monetary transaction. If preferences can all be chosen in the market place then all preferences have to be expressible in monetary terms. But this is clearly not possible. Some preferences can be thought of in terms of the market but others can’t. Friendship and love are not measured in market terms. Equally, some preferences I have may not result in my well being. I may be an idealist and chose to live in a way that will secure a good life for citizens of Pakistan in a hundred years time. It won’t make any impact on me because I’ll be dead by then (Griffin 1986, p23; Sumner 1996, p126). Or what if what a person wants is trivial or mad? (Rawls 1972, p432). Rawls imagines someone who wants to count blades of grass in a city park. The person may find satisfaction, but there are doubts that we would want to say that this person’s life was flourishing. In schools, some children are given tasks that are easy to keep them happy. They may be happy for all the time they are in the school. But there are doubts that this is a flourishing education. Against the idea of subjective wants is the idea that there are things that are objectively good because they are rooted in human nature. There are profound things that humans want and ought to want. If there are, and they can be identified, then these are what education should be ensuring that everyone has access to. Of course, deciding what these objective goods are is not straightforward and free from dispute. John Stuart Mill thought that the pleasures of the mind were more important than other pleasures. He also thought that some people knew better than others what the objectively important pleasures were (Mill 1861). Both aspects of Mills’ position can strike some as being unacceptably elitist (Skorupski 1992). But there are people who think that experts can help non-experts understand their own ideas better. A skilful art critic can help induct a non-expert into appreciating the beauty of a picture, for example, and this suggests that there are ways in which what a person thinks and feels and understands, can be formed into a commonly agreed perspective through rational activity (Budd 1995, p38-43). Values of art appreciation seem to blend the personal preferences of an individual with the objective reality of the art work itself and also a set of reasons that are shared by those who try and appreciate the art. Those agreeing with the view of schools as monasteries take the end of ‘flourishing’ to require more than providing individuals with the opportunity to make decisions based on their own personal preferences. They argue that flourishing and well-being require judgements to be made that develop from social, collective endeavour in schools and elsewhere. Critical awareness, and the ability to think about and select (which is also a process of de-selection) values are central to the good life in the context of a democratic state education. Education then becomes something that is not to do with a market place of good intentions or easily measured preferences but something more profoundly wrapped up with the ethical concerns of democratic life. Proponents of the idea of schools as monasteries understand flourishing as more than merely satisfying major desires. For them schools have a separate and distinctive set of values from those of the market. For example, Harry Brighouse argues that flourishing is the aim of education (Brighouse 2005, ch3). He contrasts this understanding of what education is for with those who think that it should be designed to help the economy grow. He cites Frank (Frank 1999) who thinks that once a certain level of financial well-being is reached, further financial gain do not significantly contribute to flourishing. He draws on Layard’s view of happiness and that understanding flourishing in economic terms and in terms of just being happy fundamentally misunderstands the idea (Layard 2005, p63). Brighouse writes that ‘flourishing is a richer property than happiness, sensitive to many more features of a person’s life than just her inner states’ (Brighouse 2005, p47). What this shows is that educational discussions about English schools have developed a rich and powerful set of arguments where different and opposing values are presented as justifying the existence of schools. Without a rich discourse opposed to the market justification of schools many current thinkers about this sector of education would not be able to articulate their ideas. For example, the educationalist Stenhouse writes that educational value is found in ‘the fundamental process of learning by taking our part in the social life of groups…’ (Stenhouse 1975). The vivid sense of the freedom and choice that he believes educational value brings is given in non economic terms where he writes: ‘As a pupil at Manchester Grammar School I had been fortunate in my sixth form experience to meet three teachers… who had opened ideas to me in a way that emancipated me by enhancing my sense of my own powers’ (Stenhouse 1983, pi) With the example of Stenhouse we are confronted with educational values that are very different from that justified by vocational priorities suggested by economic purpose. 2.2.3 Education as a Moral Activity Value in the market is not moral value. The contrast between market price and ethical value is one that is only possible if there are the two distinct realms, the market and the moral. When the educationalist Richard Pring argues that: ‘…education itself is a moral practice, part of the “humane studies” or humanities, rather than the social sciences. Ideally the “practice” should be in the hands of moral educators (who themselves should manifest the signs of moral development) rather than in the hands of managers, trainers, or “deliverers” of a curriculum’ (Pring 2000, p102), Pring is making clear this distinction and argues that if this is not understood we impoverish our understanding of education and of what teaching and learning is conceived as. Pring’s assault on schools justified in terms of having solely economic purpose draws on the notion of the arts as ‘embodied meaning’ (Langer 1997) where art is a kind of language (Frankova & Povolna 1993). He also draws on the ideas of Stenhouse (Stenhouse 1975) where the arts and humanities are understood as resources for young people to explore deep matters of concern. Stenhouse’s ideas are about education as exploration, a seeking for answers and testing out answers against evidence. The classroom is the place for engaged and serious thinking. It is an arena for all abilities, all genders, all ethnicities and backgrounds. It is a model of education that isn’t about experts imparting knowledge but is of the deliberation of serious issues by all. Nor is this impractical, esoteric, academic learning. Pring writes: ‘The humanities, not skills training or vocational courses, are in this respect central to the education of all young people as they are deliberating seriously about decisions and issues which concern them deeply’ (Pring 2000, p105). Teaching and what is chosen to be taught is then caught up in this idea. What is taught and how it is taught should be about enabling this sense making. Prings writes: ‘There may be many other worthwhile things to do in life; but the values that teaching is centrally concerned with are those of understanding or making intelligible the experiences one has and of making accessible yet further understanding and experiences’ (Pring 2000, p106). Whatever is being taught, then, is intimately connected with the value of making intelligible important things. This is the view that education and educators are part of a moral tradition that is to induct young people into a worthwhile way of understanding the world, of relating to the world, of experiencing it and relating to others in this world. It is part of a civilizing role that recognizes the moral duty to ensure all people are initiated into this world. It is linked to memory, to the passing on of wisdom and the depths of culture which is derived from an earlier understanding of traditional education where: ‘Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding’ (Sacks 1997, p173). The metaphor of schools as monasteries therefore captures a large web of interconnected ideas and ideals. It suggests that the purpose of schools is not exhausted by vocational, economically determined needs and objectives. It is also an historically well-established viewpoint about the purpose of schools, although one that is obviously not uncontested. 2.2.4 Education – Economy and the Market Just as with the liberal, anti-vocational ideal of schools as monasteries, the contrasting metaphor presenting schools as markets has a complex and rich set of justifications. The economic business of schools is expressed in a business language using key expressions such as ‘productivity’, ‘results’, ‘standards’ and ‘management’. As an example, writers sympathetic to the view of schools as markets such as Odden and Kelly write: ‘…the tax-paying public, the business community, and policy-makers still pressure the education system to produce results and to link pay - even school performance structures, more broadly - to performance’ (Odden and Kelly 1997, p11). Performance management, performance driven pay based on the delivery of targeted outcomes are strongly influenced by this approach. Odden and Kelly are taken by Pring as examples of thinkers influential in shaping the views of government in the UK about the role of teaching and education generally (Pring 2000, p107). Pring claims that the government Green Paper, ‘Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change’ (DfEE 1998a) is directly influenced by Odden and Kelly’s ideas and is connected explicitly with a vision of the teaching profession that contrasts strongly with the liberal one he articulates alongside the likes of Brighouse, Stenhouse and White. Pring points out that the language in the Green Paper is about ‘productivity’, ‘cost efficiency’, ‘effectiveness’, the ‘delivery of a product’ and so on. He argues that ‘quality’ is a key expression used by those who argue for an understanding of education as part of an economic discourse. He argues that in this context it refers to the idea of standards that are linked explicitly to performance indicators that can be measured and ranked at different levels. Attainment targets are part of this approach. ‘Quality’ is identified with preconceived outcomes, testable and public (e.g. Pring 1996, p58). ‘Diversity’ is about the means of ensuring ‘quality’ when discussed as part of this approach. So ‘diversity’ is part of the economic approach to education when used in education, such as in the White Paper ‘Choice and Diversity’ (DfE 1992). ‘Choice’ in the context of this language of business refers to opportunities provided by diversity to produce value. Pring argues that the choice of language used is important because it establishes a cluster of associations, metaphors and values connected with the market in contrast with those associated with the ethical. This language describes learners as customers. The teacher is thought of as a deliverer of someone else’s product. Pring is of course arguing for a contrasting vision of education, one which places each learner in a metaphorically ‘monastic’ setting where she is initiated into a community of practice where the teacher responds to the needs of each particular learner. And Oakeshott himself writes about education as introducing young people to ‘conversations between the generations of mankind...’ (Oakeshott 1972) and in such a transaction the idea of knowing in advance where the conversation will end up is nonsensical. The point of the chapter is to establish that the contrasting visions are essential to understanding schools in England because the debate has been crucial in determining justifications for having schools at all. The chapter also shows that the view that is contrasted with the market vision is sophisticated and complex. An example of both these points can be found in the way Citizenship has been developed into the recent English Secondary Curriculum. It is a subject that was being discussed as early as 1978 (Crick & Porter 1978) and as a new curriculum subject in the Crick report of 1998. But a subject for Citizenship was only thought to be needed because the very purpose of the whole school curriculum was not understood as encompassing the very skills, understandings and qualities that citizenship was now supposed to bring to education. Bruner as early as 1966 had suggested that learning be based around three fundamental questions - What makes us human? How did we become so? How might we become more so? And the school curriculum was to explore the possible answers. Pring argues that introducing Citizenship ‘…fails to see that all teaching, when conceived as a moral practice concerned with values and conceptions of what it is to be human, necessarily is a preparation for citizenship broadly conceived’ (Pring 2000, p110). This approach articulates issues that aren’t at the heart of the market metaphor view of schools. Indeed, Pring goes so far in his opposition to that view that he denies that it can actually be educational. Pring thinks that the market approach to education has established non-educational teaching. Schools that embody this approach are therefore not educational establishments at all. Pring himself states this unambiguously when he writes that ‘…Not all teaching is, therefore, necessarily educational’ (Pring 2000, p111). The view that education and learning and teaching can be discussed in economic terms, in terms of business, loses the moral imperative of education. Schooling, teaching, learning understood in terms of the economic metaphors is therefore not educational. Pring explicitly argues this when he says that: ‘The danger is that, as we adopt a very different language of teaching - a language which for the sake of increased productivity and improved standards as conceived by those who think in business terms - this essentially moral purpose and character of teaching will be lost’ (Pring 2000, p111). The point that is important for the thesis is that Pring thinks that the two metaphors, of schools as monasteries and schools as markets, are incompatible metaphors. They contradict each other. This is clear if the liberal, monastic view is labelled anti-vocational, and the market one ‘vocational’. As they stand they are irreconcilable and speak from different worlds. To adopt a theoretical language that will be explained and used later in the thesis, they are different and opposing discourses. 2.2.5 Education – Culture and Monastery What the chapter has done so far is show that the school system of England has been conceived through competing and contradictory justificatory visions. The detail of the competing visions is important, but so is the fact that they both have co-existed without either one gaining enough predominance to totally exclude the other. What this next section shows is that these ideas are connected to a specific culture functioning in a particular political context, that of a modern civil democratic state. This provides evidence that educational value is also found in cultural and political realms and not just the economic. The American philosopher Dewey is a key thinker for many of those arguing for an anti-vocational purpose for schools, but he is also interesting in that he presupposes a certain political reality. Prings’ ideas about education are essentially moral and rooted in a Deweyian tradition of education where education is generally understood as a ‘social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong’ (Dewey 1916, p81). According to Dewey, education arises out of a community: ‘Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge - a common understanding - like-mindedness as the sociologists say’ (Dewey 1916, p4). ‘Like-mindedness’ involves communication and sharing. Communication and sharing need not imply consensus. Communication can be the communication of differences. Sharing also can be one of sharing difference. The community is bound at a deeper level by an educative process that brings differences together in understanding. Rich and poor communities could therefore be part of a whole community through education, as could an urban with a rural one. And the political organisation dealing with this in the modern state has been democracy. Linked to the notion of community is the notion of culture. For Dewey a prime importance of education is to ‘initiate young people into a cultural heritage - whether that be the specific cultures cherished by particular groups or a common culture that transcends the particular ones and creates unity amidst diversity’ (Pring 2006, p7). Culture is understood as ‘heritage or a social tradition.’ It is transmitted from the community, is learned and is shared (Parsons 1952, p52). Culture has been used in two senses, however. It is sometimes used descriptively to describe the practices of a community, such as when we talk about ‘gang culture’ or ‘slum culture’. It is also used evaluatively, so that to be cultured is a mark of evaluation where something is valued as being superior to something that is not cultured. So educators sometimes write about cultures that are powerful and enabling. A Pringian/Deweyan University culture is seen evaluatively like this, as being a culture that puts people in touch with the fruits of a broader horizon of work and achievement than one limited to a ‘folk culture’. The danger of this evaluative approach is that it can be frozen in time and become disconnected from actual life and experiences. Yet for the thesis the key point is that there are competing ideas about how to manage modern multi-cultural societies, and in modern England these ideas are typically a form of political democracy. Alongside cultural realities, these political ones have required a vocabulary and so understanding schools in terms of these political principles has also been another set of values that educators have engaged with alongside the market and monastery opposition.
This next section explains the influence of political principles in this domain of the English Secondary school curriculum. There is an extensive and ongoing literature relating to these issues of justification (White 1990, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). The National Curriculum has to be based on principles that justify a National Curriculum in principle and these will relate to political principles. 2.3.1 Political Principles The National Curriculum that determines what is taught in English Secondary schools is based on the aims and content that are intimately linked with the kind of society and the kind of citizens we wish to live in and with. White thinks that ‘the only defensible form of a national curriculum is one that is genuinely committed to democratic principles, not least equality of political power’ (White 1990, p106). What this raises is the idea that decisions about schooling in a modern democracy will have to express political values. Again, the important thing to note is that in England, society has features peculiar to a civil society that illustrate the balance of power between competing sources of value. One influential theory of civil society is that it maintains a balance of power between the individual, the state and the society (Gellner 1994, MacFarlane 2000). It is a social arrangement that refuses to allow any section of that arrangement be too powerful and dominates everything else. So no government organisation, religious organisation, business organisation and so forth are allowed to monopolise everything else. It is a defining contrast with other types of social arrangement. Marxism claims that the state is carrying out the necessary determinations of the economic realm. Ironically the liberal monetarist theories of Milton Friedman which the Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher admired and was influenced by were similarly impressed by the supreme power of the economy to determine everything. The peculiar assumption of a balance of power forbidding any one area of influence to monopolise everything is something that defines the kind of social arrangement found in England and may well be thought to have carried over into the arrangements of organising its educational system. 2.3.2 2000 National Curriculum Reform Schools originally justified themselves in terms of religion. The mind was cultivated so that the Divine pattern of the Universe could be grasped. As secularisation gradually replaced theological reasons the cultivation of the mind was justified by the liberal educationalists in terms of a moral imperative to better oneself. An educated life was better than an uneducated one according to this thinking, and it was only through education that an individual could flourish. Education had an ethical justification arising from a commitment to ensure that the pupil’s well-being is to do with her growing to understand his or her own moral responsibility towards others. Fulfilling life is understood in the English National Curriculum as a commitment to others within a democratic society that is constituted by such a commitment where ‘…The personal development of pupils, spiritually, morally, socially and culturally, plays a significant part in their ability to learn and to achieve’ (DfEE/QCA 1999, p10-12). To ensure that everyone was able to fulfil their commitments as a citizen they had to be educated into the autonomous life of a democracy (White 2002). The 2000 Handbook for the 2000 English National Curriculum has a four-page statement about aims and values. The first draft, which remains essentially the same in the final more complicated version (DfE/QCA 1999 p10), states that the first aim of education in the curriculum is ‘a belief in education as a route to the well-being and development of the individual’ (DfE/QCA 1999). This objective may be summarised as being ‘self-fulfilment’. Self fulfilment in an autonomous democratic society needs its schools to providing its citizens ‘…with whatever acquaintance is necessary with a wide range of possible intrinsic goods from which to make informed choices’ (White 2002, p171). If there is to be real choice, then there cannot be any question of biased items being offered to skew choices. For each person, ‘If their major preferences are for the acquisition of material goods or others’ recognition and they have no place for intellectual or other objective list pursuits, they can still lead a flourishing life if successful in attaining their preferred goals’ (White 2002, p171). Harry Brighouse has written extensively on this, agreeing with White and Pring that in a large multi-cultural society like England the very idea of autonomy itself may be something not valued by a section of the community. He takes as an example a religious group that wishes to resist modernity and hold on to its traditions, including the ideal of education as a life of critical autonomy. This issue is complex just because it involves cultural and political values (Brighouse 2005). What thinkers such as White, Pring and Brighouse express is how very complex the notion of an intrinsic worth of education is and how hard it may be to know what it would be for any individual. What the chapter has shown so far is that these are questions that raise issues of deep moral, cultural and political kinds. Failure to consider all these domains in trying to answer the compelling question of what justifies a school would be to misrepresent the issue of education and schooling as it has arisen historically in the UK. This will be a crucial point when considering the education policies introducing ICT into English Secondary schools.
2.4.1 ICT and English Secondary Schools What the next section of the chapter does is give an example of how the complexity of the historical development of ideas about schooling in England has affected it and suggests that introducing ICT into such a context involves ICT with this history and the realities it has produced. The example looked at in this section is how a subject-based curriculum was invented because of prevalent ideas about educational purpose. The thesis is not about ICT as a curriculum subject, but by taking this aspect of English Secondary schooling it is possible to understand in miniature what the thesis is interested in, which is how far the ICT policy for English Secondary schools can be understood as either continuing or breaking from its historic roots. It is focused on RQ2 of the thesis. So this section is a case of examining some small detail to provide evidence of a broader point that the rest of the thesis will pursue. The curriculum in English Secondary schools has been designed along monastic, liberal lines wherever it uses a structure of academic subjects. Historically, the idea of English secondary schools using discrete academic subjects taught in separate short units of time is something that was developed by dissenting religious groups in the eighteenth century and has evolved into the secular version that one finds today (White 2006). The 1988 National Curriculum was organised using ten traditional academic subjects. However, ICT is different because ICT, IT as it was then, was initially identified as a theme that ‘…should be taught through the foundation subjects’ (White 1990, p105). Historically the vocational schools in England have been associated with lower status groups, such as working class and women. Inclusion in a mainly intellectualist education system meant that non-academic subjects acquired a low status. White notes that it was only in the 1960’s that egalitarian educationalists began to demand a relevant curriculum for all classes (White 2006, p123). From this perspective, ICT’s introduction into such a school culture may well have been influenced by residual attitudes from this history. The 1988 English National Curriculum however didn’t innovate towards the inclusive curriculum based on relevance. Instead it universalized the academic curriculum. The inclusion of technology and music were the only differences to the academic curriculum of the dissenters in 1904 (Aldrich 1988, p22). ICT, as a branch of technology, was imported into the curriculum as a subject of low status, associated with elementary education for lower class boys. 2.4.2 The Peculiar Presence of ICT Subjects are inward looking in two distinct ways. They are supposed to reflect the inner working of the human mind. Miller writes that Ramus, the originator of the puritan/dissenting view of subject based educational curriculum structures, ‘… taught that logic is the formalized or regularized version of the natural intelligence’ (Miller 1939, p144). Subjects are inward in this intellectualist sense. But they are also inward looking in a different sense, the sense that they are independent of one another. They are aimed to develop domain-specific understandings and knowledge. ICT however has been defined in the National Curriculum since 1988 more in terms of a cross-curricular skill embedded in all subjects rather than a subject in its own right. It was originally part of a subject called ‘technology’ that comprised ‘design and technology’ and ‘Information Technology’. By 1995 it had been separated out and become a National Curriculum subject in its own right, as well as a cross curricular dimension to be found in all areas of the curriculum. But its status as a separate subject is subordinate to its cross curricular status. ICT has been considered outward looking in two senses. It is outward looking in that it is defined more as a skill than as an intellectual subject. Outward here means something akin to ‘not of the mind’. But it is also outward looking in that it is conceived of as a skill that is to be used in all subjects (Kimbell in White 2005). ICT finds itself in a curriculum orientated towards isolated academic subjects, even if its overall aims make a subject based inward academic curriculum seem odd. It is specified as a skill that is cross-curricular, as well as a subject in its own right. ICT is subjected to two gravitational pulls; one towards a subject base and another towards a more inter-subject base. Inevitably, the status of these two forces will be influential. In the English Secondary Curriculum the subject base has tended to be high status (linked as it is with intellectualism, as we have seen) and the cross-curricular lower status. 2.4.3 ICTs’ Role in the Curriculum The chapter has tried to do is show that there are forces of influence that are derived from a specific educational debate that influence ICTs introduction into English Secondary schools. These forces are specifically nuanced by the particular context in which they are embedded. Outside of an English context, as has already been noted, the distinction between monastic and market conceptions of schooling may well take a very different form and have different influences. So, for example, the difference between vocational and anti vocational subjects may not be anything like it is in England, Germany, for example, gives vocational subjects much higher status than in England and in other educational systems monastic and market conceptions of schooling are not polarised to the extent as they are in the English model. Different cultural and political realities bring about different educational realities. One of the issues that the thesis is concerned with is whether ICT policy has understood this, or whether it has proposed an ICT in education policy that largely ignores these factors. ICT is often discussed in terms of its enormous presence in contemporary education. This thesis has as its focus English Secondary schools and it is usually claimed that ICT has been successfully introduced into these schools. Indeed its presence is often contrasted with other areas of the curriculum that have not been able to command such vast resources nor sustain a similar presence. However, this thesis challenges the straightforwardness of this view because it challenges the idea that there is a straightforward perspective on ICTs role in these schools. If the small example of subject development is taken as an example of what the concern is, it is immediately noteworthy that ICT was identified as a problematic presence in a curriculum designed around subjects right from the beginning of the National Curriculum. ICT is a subject that throughout the period of the case study undertaken (1995-2010) has been included into the core educational part of the curriculum whilst at the same time being excluded from the same educational vision as the other parts. ICT has a large inter-subject element which allows it to cross over the whole curriculum and which contrasts with the separate subject, inward directed orientation of the curriculum organisation. What isn’t clear is whether ICT is conceived of as a useful tool for resourcing other subjects or whether it is being conceived as a new element that transforms old subjects into a more relevant newness more fitted for a transformed vocational reality beyond school. The former approach would endorse the monastic approach to schooling, the latter a market approach. The relationship between these two views of education is complex, as has been discussed above. The Deweyian ideal of educational value being about passing on ‘culture’ can be translated into elitism because the idea of culture can be used to suggest elitism (Dewey 1916). The ideal can freeze certain values and attitudes and help develop attitudes that are conservative. Sometimes ‘culture’ in the evaluative sense has meant that as a presence in education the mark of a cultured person is frozen in a time. ICT, as a new subject with powerful change-credentials attached, could be resisted because it lacked a history, a cultural pool from which to establish itself. ‘High culture’, in the sense of high status evaluative culture, has not included ICT yet within education. Yet outside education, ICT has acquired status as a transformational agent, a defining technology for the future. This highlights the important point for the thesis, that complex historical forces for schooling don’t necessarily reflect those for technology, and that there could be contradictory elements when school and technology are combined. And the English secondary school culture is itself one riddled with different ideals and values. Pring’s favourite educational philosopher Dewey argued against a vision of education that placed individuals into a three-tiered hierarchy, one which until relatively recently was adopted by the English Secondary school system. Dewey understood it as reflecting an elitist division that stemmed from the ideas of Plato and ended in the three way division of types that schools were then set up to educate; those who were good with their hands, those who were good and those who were good with abstract thought. He summarized the thinking that he criticized as following: ‘In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to the labouring or trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the state, its defenders in war, its internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are capable of the highest kind of education - and become in time the legislators of the state - for laws are the universal which control the particulars of experience’ (Dewey 1916, p90). The English Secondary school system organised itself along similar elitist lines and the point of raising this issue is to point out that if this culture maintains a belief that labouring and trade are linked to appetites and supplying human wants, and if these are associated with values of the market, and further that these are awarded low status, then any area of the curriculum associated with these will also be awarded low status. The simple point here is that vocational areas of schooling have historically been conceived of as being of low status. Trying to understand the place of vocational and non-vocational approaches to schooling in the English Secondary school context without accounting for the status of monastic and market conceptions of schooling is to ignore the historical development of these schools and ignore current discussions about their purpose and justification. As an example of what this means for these schools now, it is possible to trace the impact on ideals of monastic education on current practice. What White calls a ‘Ramist legacy’ gave abstract subjects pride of place (White 2006, p159). These abstractions were subdivided into discrete parts each of which were to be known and tested. Learning was to be taught as efficiently as possible with no time wasted, hence the development of school timetables, optimal class sizes for instruction in the proscribed curriculum matter and so forth. And there are those who argue for this approach even in the modern context. O’Hear, who is a traditionalist educationalist who finds educational elitism attractive writes that: ‘Education... is irretrievably authoritarian and paternalistic... imparting to a pupil something which he has yet to acquire...The transmission is... inevitably between unequals’ (O’Hear 1991, p5). O’Hear thinks that a comprehensive ideal, which opposes the selective school approach which has tended to embody the monastic approach to education, is the reason why standards in education have declined. He claims that ‘It is highly plausible to see the egalitarianism which stems from the writings of John Dewey as the proximate cause of our educational decline’ (ibid., p28) because he thinks that real education needs the withdrawal from the world in order to gain the intellectual excellence that genuine education embodies and that only a small elite are capable of genuine education. The viewpoint implies self-contradiction, because on the one hand he argues that standards are falling, which suggests that he thinks everyone can benefit from ‘genuine learning’, whilst attacking the egalitarianism that assumes just that. The school as monastery idea can result in an ideal of an education for an assumed intellectual elite, removed from the reaches of most people and from practical experience. This would narrowly interpret the metaphor in terms of the dissenting roots of curriculum formation in English secondary schools discussed earlier (the Ramist legacy) with an assumption that this inevitably leads to educational elites. But it has been argued that educational aims are about creating a more cohesive and enriching community based on the ethical requirements of a democratic society valuing autonomy and a flourishing life embedded within a culturally complex mix of associations underpinned by a deep like-mindedness. This is a much richer reading of the ‘schools as monasteries’ metaphor. Schools and Universities may well be required to be places set apart from the parochial, partisan and sectarian societies in which they exist, but only so they are places which can develop the kinds of critical learning such a viewpoint considers necessary to flourishing. But the point of this section is not to try and sort out the conflicting strands of the educational landscape that has been a formative presence for English Secondary schools. Rather, it has taken a small aspect of what interests the thesis, the ICT curriculum as part of the school curriculum in English Secondary schools, to indicate just that point, that there are different and competing discourses, technical, economic, cultural and political, that all contribute to understanding these schools.
This chapter has taken a brief and schematic look at the way English secondary schools have been understood. It has used Oakeshott’s distinction using the metaphors of ‘schools as monasteries’ and ‘schools as markets’ to highlight the way the English School Secondary system has been characterised. In doing so, it has provided evidence that political issues arising from schooling in democratic states with individuals with disparate and different sets of values are also important in trying to organise legitimizations for these schools. The chapter has suggested that the English educational system is not a template that is generalisable but is specific to its own historical context and traditions. The chapter has mentioned the idea of different and competing discourses but has not explained exactly how ‘discourse’ is being used. That will be the job of later chapters which will in particular show how values are articulated through discourses. The chapters about the two case studies using critical discourse analysis are largely about interpreting ICT schools policy to discover what discourses are actually being used. What will be interesting will be to compare and contrast the discourses of English secondary schooling as outlined in this chapter with what is revealed in the two case studies. This chapter has discussed an aspect of ICT in English Secondary schools, that of its place in the curriculum, in order to provide evidence that ideas about the purpose of schooling affect how ICT is understood in this context. It has suggested that that understanding will involve political and cultural issues as well as those of the economic and the technological. This is important when questions are asked about the purpose of ICT in schools and in particular, how policy introducing ICT into English Secondary schools is justified. The critical discourse analysis of the two case studies will therefore show points of comparison and contrast. Before moving to the case studies, however, the next chapter, chapter three gives an outline to the particular history of the policies introducing ICT into English Secondary schools.
CHAPTER 3:ICT IN SECONDARY ENGLISH EDUCATION
Information Communication Technology (ICT) has now been used in areas of the English secondary school curriculum for over twenty years; it has been introduced into secondary education through a series of heavily funded government initiatives since the launch of the microcomputers into schools initiative in the early 1980s. This chapter will examine the short history of ICT in Secondary Education concentrating on some recurring debates. The chapter first looks at what the government has introduced into English Secondary schools. It outlines the funding and policy initiatives that have introduced ICT into this sector and then examines the reasons that have been given for this huge investment. It continues by looking at the impact of the initiatives on the schools, recognising that measuring impact is complicated by the difficulty of knowing what impacts are due to ICT and which are not.
Major initiatives pushing ICT into education began in 1980. For some commentators (e.g. Ball 2008) this was a time when a decisively new approach to education was being formulated. The newly elected Conservative Party Government of Mrs. Thatcher has been taken to begin a process towards educational reform, including the introduction of computers into schools that the New Labour government of 1997 continued. Computers were not as developed as they are today so other commentators have suggested that it wasn’t until the Blair Government of 1997 that ICT was able to take on a plausible central role in the development of the New Labour ideology (Selwyn 2008). However, there is no doubt that the period between 1980 and 2007 did see a growing importance in the role of ICT in educational policy making and a steady stream of policies were produced to increase the presence of ICT in English schools generally and English Secondary schools in particular. Between 1980 and 1986 the Conservative Government introduced their ‘Microelectronics in Education Programme’ (MEP) that used £32 million to promote the use of computers in schools. This was a period when developments in ICT were beginning to become pronounced in the general culture. For example it was in 1983 that the Macintosh 128k was announced and throughout the decade of the 1980s the world witnessed the development of both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft as part of the defining technology of the age. The first independent version of Microsoft Windows was released in 1985 and this development of computer technology throughout this decade enabled the technology to become part of a background noise about what sort of society and world was being developed. As the technology became more fashionable and powerful it became a defining technology for a government policy agenda that was about producing transformations responding to the challenges of the new. The government injected money into schools to increase the use and the presence of computers into schools; this included the ‘Micros in Schools Scheme’, which was a £16 million subsidy from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) aimed at purchasing computers between 1981–1984. We then saw that 1982 was designated ‘Information Technology Year’ (IT 82) this confirmed that the Government of the time was taking computers seriously. A Government programme to increase IT awareness further was introduced between 1983–1987, the ‘Technical and Vocational Education Initiative’ (TVEI) which spent £240 million to promote technical and vocational education in schools. The TVEI provided an environment in which teachers ICT enthusiasts could begin to develop teaching and learning ideas using computers. A software subsidy from the DTI provided £3.5 million to subsidies the purchase of educational software in 1986. The ‘Modem Scheme’ was a DTI subsidy of £1 million to enable schools to purchase modems for their microcomputers between 1986–1988. The ‘Microelectronics Education Support Unit’ (MESU) was set up with £3 million, then £5 million annually; it later merged to form the ‘National Council for Educational Technology’ (NCET), becoming Becta in 1998. So what we see here is the emergence of a major organization in the ICT educational landscape, an organization that New Labour has employed as a key partner in its ICT and schools projects. A £19 million grant was given to English schools between the years of 1987–1993. This grant was an Education Support Grant (ESG) for IT in schools. Further funding from 1993 via ‘Grants for Educational Support and Training’ (GEST) was awarded. In 1992–1995 a ‘Computers in Primary Schools’ initiative was awarded £10 million. The high cost of computers is reflected in the money designated by these policies and initiatives and reflects how important it was to those making the decision to input such money that schools be computer rich. Between 1996–1998 the ‘Educational Departments’ Superhighways Initiative’ (EDSI) provided £10 million of sponsorship from industry and elsewhere to schools. Though the rhetoric of ‘superhighways’ is now obsolete the use of such a term reflects the dynamic enthusiasm that policies about ICT brought about. Between 1996–1998 the ‘Laptops for Teachers Project’ spent a total of £27 million to provide portable computers for teachers and head teachers. In 1998 the ‘National Grid for Learning’ (NGfL) established £100 million (in first phase alone) for hardware, software and Internet connections for schools. Between 1999–2002 training for teachers and librarians cost £230 million from the New Opportunities Fund (NOF). The National Grid for Learning (1998-2002) has been replaced by the ‘ICT in Schools Programme’ at the DfES. The bigger expenditure of the late 1990’s reflects the rise in real costs of computing as well as the renewed vigor of the New Labour government’s identification of its own agenda with the potential of the new technologies. A New Labour Government committed unprecedented levels of financial support for ICT in schools since coming to power 1997, including £1.367 billion through grants administered by LEAs known as the Standards Fund (DfES 2002). With matched funding from LEAs, this has been estimated as being approximately £1.8 billion in a seven-year period up to 2004 (DfES 2002). In a recent review of this Selwyn (2008) cites a figure of over £5billion of spending to introduce ICT into schools over the period from 1997 to 2007. The enormous spending is identified as being part of the government agenda. This funding has led to an enormous presence of ICTs in schools. For example, since 1998 over 100,000 teachers have received a computer through DfES-funded initiatives. Ofsted (Ofsted 2002) and DfES (DfES 2003a) surveys indicate that in Secondary schools the computer: pupil ratio is now 1:5.4. The average numbers of computers per school has increased from 100.9 in 1998 to 192.7 in 2003. 82% of teachers are now reported as feeling confident using ICT (compared to 61% in 1998) and 43.3% of secondary teachers have access to an electronic whiteboard of whom 27.3% use it regularly. 64.5% of secondary school teachers have access to personal email at school. There is found to be a close correlation between the availability and regular use in these surveys. Large majorities of secondary teachers now have access to curriculum-related software. A Conservative Government began this well-established evidence of enormous spending introducing ICTs into Secondary schools in England but the incoming New Labour government have developed the process. For example Selwyn (2008) identifies three phases of this New Labour initiative: the 1998 to 2002 ‘National Grid for Learning’ initiative and associated NOF-funded teacher training programme; the 2002 to 2005 ‘ICT in Schools’ drive and associated Curriculum Online and e-learning credit schemes; and the current ‘Harnessing Technology’ agenda underpinned by the DfES 2005 ‘e-learning strategy’. The story of ICT’s introduction into English Secondary schools is not just about staggeringly huge amounts of money and resources being invested but is also one about a developing awareness of ICT as having a defining role in the transformation of education as a whole. From being introduced for the first time into the National Curriculum in 1988 as just a part of Design and Technology, IT has developed into ICT and is a high status statutory non-core foundation subject taught in all the Key stages as a discrete subject. It was the incoming New Labour Government of 1997 that set challenging targets for the use of ICT that has achieved this. In the government’s ‘Connecting the Learning Society’ (DfEE, 1997a) was proposed a National Grid For Learning (NGFL) which would create, ‘a mosaic of inter-connecting networks and education services based on the Internet which will support teaching, learning, training and administration in schools, colleges, universities, libraries, the workplace and homes’. As this quotation suggests, ICTs were expected to bring about transformations of the whole of the education, linking schools to wider communities of learning in a manner fit for a modern learning society in a global world. Government funding has continued to the present day and shows no sign of stopping.
When people are discussing the topic of ICT in UK Education they typically use as key reference points reports of Government Committees and policy documents. The way these policies evolve through use and critique means that they cannot tell the whole story of why ICT and how ICT has been introduced into UK schools. Nevertheless, they are important as they help pick out the crucial elements that shape the way this reform process has taken place. Therefore, critics and commentators find explicit economical, political and societal rationales for having ICT in English Secondary Schools embedded in documents used as part of the reform process. In this section the thesis briefly summarises some of the explicit rationales in some of the key documents used to explain governmental thinking about ICT and schools. The Mckinsey Report (1997) was important in summarizing the state of computers in schools in 1997 and then setting out recommendations in line with the New Labour vision. It pointed to the fact that up until then investment in ICT in schools was about hardware and signaled that the new agenda placed ICT in an educational space, which it had not occupied before. Because of this, the link between ICT, education and the economy started to become established. For this reason this report is considered important in beginning the process of redefining educational values in terms of those of ICT policy values. This process will be discussed more fully in the next chapter when the thesis looks at how a new policy and discourse has been developed by the New Labour agenda. This report cleared space for new thinking about ICTs. By saying that the current use of ICTs was poor and that understanding of their potential was also poor, the report cleared a space for a new agenda for schools and education that linked education with a vision of a global economy and an information society. The ‘Connecting the Learning Society, National Grid for Learning’ (1997a) was a document that the New Labour Government used to announce their ideas of transforming education in the UK using ICT related initiatives. It suggested that through ICTs a connected learning society would begin that would respond to the idea of a knowledge or information society and the requirements of a globalised economy of knowledge workers linked to an ICT superhighway. Education would be an essential part of this modernistic, connected ‘weightless world’ (Coyle 1997). Following on from this, discussions about this idea led to consultation on launching The National Grid for Learning (NGfL). Mee (2006) summarises the government intervention as intending to… ‘stimulate the growth of the UK e-learning market… the outcome would be that demand driven by the public sectors schools market would sustain a larger e-learning market supplying a range of hardware, software and services’ (Mee 2006, p5). The NGfL was presented by the government as the ICT tool that would enable schools to access resources fit for twenty-first century learning, an exciting and bold attempt to make schools fit for the purposes of a modern information age. The document made all this explicit: ‘In the last 20 years, business has been transformed by new technology, particularly computers and communication networks. But education has been affected only marginally. We cannot prepare our children for the world of tomorrow with yesterday’s technologies. We shall therefore create a new National Grid for Learning for the Millennium, to unlock the potential of these new technologies in schools and more widely, and to equip pupils and other learners for this new world’ (DfEE 1997a, p41). The Stevenson report (1997) which was commissioned by the Labour Party whilst it was still in opposition, examined the extent of ICT use in Schools and came to two key conclusions: that ICT in English schools was primitive and not improving and that there should be a national priority to increase the use of ICT in schools. The report also connected with the DfES National Grid for Learning (1997a) in its intention to centralize control of ICT policy in school. It was at this time and through these reports and consultation documents that New Labour began to redefine the nature of education to fit the political and economical priorities of globalization. Importantly it suggests a break with the policy of introducing computers into schools begun by the Conservative Government, broadening the understanding of ICTs to be one of transformation of education. This in turn was seen as being part of a modernizing agenda that sought to transform public sector institutions and culture to fit a new, global information society and knowledge economy. The establishment of the National Grid for Learning in 1997 and 1998 was an important part of the strategy to link up schools and boroughs using ICT. The NGfL is a tool which enables teachers and pupils to connect with learning resources and has subsequently developed into a London Grid for Learning (LGfL) and can be seen as a forerunner of the introduction of Managed Learning Environments (MLE) into schools. MLEs include virtual learning environments (VLEs) and are software systems designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting where pupils and teachers participate online. These developments were presented as ways of inducting schools into the ICT superhighways of the new globalised information society. It was also crucially a way for the government to set up a market for high quality educational software and establish links between education and business and the businesses that would provide this. This Public/Private partnership approach is a clear example of how the business and market economics encroached upon educational values through a transformational agenda (DfEE 1998b). Throughout these documents, the ideal of educational transformation is foregrounded and throughout the development of the reform process this has remained an important feature. That transformation remains a key element of the ICT policy is clear in Department for Education and Skills document (DfES 2002). The emphasis has continued through to 2005 where educational transformational change linked to a view of societal change remained a constant of explicit government literature, even when, as Mee (2006) notes, Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) reports indicated no more than incremental change throughout that period (Ofsted 2004). The DfEE 2005 document maintained the transformational agenda. Up until the present day government policy retains the link between transformation and educational reform; for example, the current Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative, which is a massive capital investment initiative, is explicitly about transforming schools and the development of state of the art ICT is a major part of its brief. Looking at these documents we can begin to identify certain reasons for the introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools and some of these are discussed in the next section.
In this section I will briefly indicate the reasons given by government in policy documents and position papers justifying the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools. 3.4.1 Economic Reasons3.4.1.1 Vocational - Up-Skilling of Workforces Throughout the documents the link between the economy and the introduction of ICT in English Secondary schools is made clear. The New Labour policy agenda for ICT in education ‘…was driven primarily by concerns over enhancing competitiveness in a globalizing economy…’ (Selwyn 2008, p1). The transformation of education to be ‘fit for the twenty-first century’ was something ‘regularly espoused’ (see Selwyn 2002). According to some critics (e.g. Selwyn 2008 p7, Jensen and Lauritsen 2005) ICT was thought to act as a relay for a whole set of policy requirements, ‘…a package, shiny in its vagueness, of ideas-balls thrown in the air, in the hope that someone will catch them-and formulations that are yet unfulfilled with any practical or even ideal content’ (Jensen and Lauritsen 2005, p368). Selwyn argues that ICT in schools was a way of New Labour changing policy focus towards adaptation to globalization. Selwyn cites Cole with approval: ‘If globalisation is used ideologically as the raison d’être of New Labour economic policy, then modernisation is the conduit through which the policy is introduced’ (Cole 1998, p323). Cole refers to Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, saying that the combination of ICT and education as being ‘the best economic policy we have’ and as a crucial element in making ‘the individual and business fit for the knowledge-based economy of the future’ (Blair & Schroeder 1999, p2). In the policies devised from 1997 to 2007, the link between economic well-being and ICT in education is developed. According to this view, critics see schools as ‘core institutions of capitalism’ (Garnham 2000, p142). The introduction of ICT was part of an attempt to up skill a workforce for the global economy and of changing the nature of schools to adapt to the supposedly new requirements of the global economy. Critics argue that the new policy space created by New Labour has meant that the thought that ‘the best economic policy is a good education policy’ (Beckett & Kingston 2007) has become uncontested amongst policy makers across the political spectrum (Selwyn 2008, p10). ICT policy in schools are taken by many commentators to ‘obscure the structures of power and real shaping economic and commercial concerns behind the ostensibly bland, neutral face of educational ICT as proposed by New Labour’ (Selwyn 2008, p8; cf Sussman 1997). 3.4.1.2 Administrative - New Managerialism and the Modernisation of the Public Sector/Private Sector Reform Enthusiasts for the new technologies also presented ICT as a technological innovation that would lead to better systems of management in schools. Communication would be enhanced as ICT systems replaced the inefficiencies of older systems (Cunningham et al 2004). Since the introduction of ICT begun in earnest under New Labour digital communication systems have been continually introduced and updated, from e-mail systems to MLE and VLE systems. Record keeping ICT is seen as a key way of delivering this Managerialism agenda; this is evident from the management systems and administrative software and hardware found in schools. Developments such as Naace (the professional association for those concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of information and communications technology), ICT Marks, SIMs (Schools Information Management Systems), Fronter, MLE/VLE all show that ICTs are being introduced to play a dominant role in the administration and management of schools at many levels. Since 1997 these elements have become mandatory and schools without access to them are severely hampered. For example, an English secondary school with a SIMs or equivalent system would have huge difficulties accessing examination results, compiling its registration lists in accordance to National requirements and so on. Continual professional development (CPD) for staff has regular updates of ICT for administrative purposes as a key feature for many staff and OfSTED are required to assess Secondary schools in terms of their use of this area of ICT as well as curriculum use (Fox 2004; for an evaluation of this use of ICTs see Cunningham et al 2004; Kirkup et al 2005). 3.4.2 Political Reasons3.4.2.1 Nation-building and Citizenship There are apparent political drivers for placing ICT in schools. The political ideal of ‘moving the education service into the twenty-first century and creating a connected society’ (Jensen & Lauritsen 2005, p364) was a political ideal linked to a perception of economic realities and necessities. Selwyn (2008, p8) emphasises the ideological link between the economic and political aims of the New Labour agenda that places such a high premium on ICTs being placed in schools. In this he explicitly agrees with other theorists of education who understand the policy to place ICT into schools as being part of a broader agenda to change educational values themselves. ‘The debate about the role of the new technology in society and in schools is not and must not be just about the technical correctness of what computers can and cannot do. These may be the least important kinds of questions, in fact. Instead, at the very core of the debate are the ideological and ethical issues concerning what schools should be about and whose interests they should serve’ (Apple 2002, p442). Apple and Selwyn are both keen to interrogate the political agenda of the policies around ICT and schools, suggesting that to just examine the technologies is to miss an important political, ideological context out of which the New Labour policies are produced. So dominant political themes of ‘...widening participation, increasing personalisation, flexibility, collaboration, staff development and partnerships’ (DfES 2005) connect ICT with a language of increased access and democratic participation and the value of social justice. On-line learning, virtual schools and virtual universities reflect this political aspect of ICT. Use of ICT to address issues of poverty and the under-privileged are also reasons for introducing ICT into schools. The idea of a ‘digital divide’ is a reason why ICT has been brought into schools, addressing the failure of certain social groups to have access to ICTs and also of the failure of certain groups to access meaningful uses of ICT (Selwyn 2004). Using ICT as a way of developing closer and better links between homes and schools, ensuring a more meaningful relationship between schools and the communities they serve are also part of this agenda (e.g. Ministerial Taskforce on Home Access 2008). This is both part of the political agenda of widening participation as well as a social reason focusing on providing an inclusive education to all through developing further links between home and educational provision. 3.4.3 Social Reasons3.4.3.1 Digital Divide/Home School Links As suggested in the previous section, political reasons address social problems, such as access to meaningful use of educational ICTs beyond schools. Though schools have been required to consider factors contributing to inequality, including socio-economic status, social capital and gender (Livingstone et al 2005) there is little literature about the impact of this work. A small-scale project run in Northern Ireland, the C2K initiative, has been evaluated and considered positive (PwC 2004). Larger scale work on this has not been recorded. There is evidence that home use of ICTs is different from that in schools and that ICTs are used with greater autonomy by children in home contexts (Livingstone et al 2005). 3.4.3.2 Teaching and Learning ICT was introduced in schools with a view to transform schools although there was little by way of explicit formulations of what this might mean for teaching and learning pedagogies. Documents and policies emphasized skill sets that were imagined to be requirements of the global knowledge economy. This links teaching and learning with the vocational rationale for ICTs in schools noted earlier. The pedagogic significance of ICT reforms is often rather thin and is often little more than emphasizing the use of ICTs across the curriculum and the potential for increased learning. There is nothing explicitly detailing a link between a preferred model of learning and teaching and ICT in the policies although there has been much work by commentators and critics in making such links (e.g. Crook 2002, Selwyn 2008). The issue of ICTs and the kind of teaching and learning practices they require is complicated: if software packages, for example, are designed to be used in a certain way then of course ICTs can be said to determine certain practices. However, the question is about whether ICT has to be designed to specify a particular practice rather then whether it does. The rhetoric of politicians and practitioners seeking to support e-learning initiatives tend to emphasise the role of ICTs in raising achievements, compared to face-to-face communication even though there is little evidence to support these claims (Dutton 2008). 3.4.3.3 E-Learning – VLEs as Social Capital Resources Some ICT platforms, such as VLEs and the development of on-line courses, have been produced as ‘anytime, anywhere’ resources providing young people the opportunity to develop collaborative learning (Davies et al 2005) and to share resources (Somekh et al 2004). In turn the development of virtual learning environments has been advertised by policy makers and enthusiasts for ICTs in schools as being able to provide a focus for the development of institutional resource and information sharing. Yet in an overview of these developments a Becta report (Becta 2006a) concluded that there was ‘little evidence of any impact of VLEs in schools…’ (Becta 2006a, p52). In the next section the thesis addresses the impact of the introduction of ICTs into English Secondary schools generally.
3.5.1 The Breadth of ICT in Education There is strong evidence of the ways in which ICT is now established in English Secondary Schools as a result of the initiatives and funding. 43.3% of secondary school teachers have access to an electronic whiteboard; 27.3% use it regularly. 65.3% of secondary school teachers have access to personal email at school. The computer: pupil ratio is now 1:5.4. Average numbers of computers per school has increased from 100.9 in 1998 to 192.7 in 2003. 82% of teachers are now reported as feeling confident using ICT, compared to 61% in 1998 (DfES, ICT in Schools Survey, 2003b). The majority of secondary schools have well-equipped ICT suites providing 20–25 networked workstations, intranets, connections and ‘clusters’ or stand-alone machines around the school. According to Mee (Mee 2006), schools are now supporting ICT investment with their own funds. The Secondary sector spends £281 annually on hardware and infrastructure and £51 million on curriculum and software (Selwyn 2008 p705). According to Laurillard (2008 p34), the UK generally ‘…has better figures than most countries in terms of the technological infrastructure for education’. The establishment of organisations like Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) and the charity Futurelab supports schools in their development of ICT use and helps maintain the high visibility of ICT in the educational landscape. As noted above, ICT is now part of the core curriculum. It is embedded into the cross curricular model. Ofsted inspects it. There are school accreditations for the effective use of ICT. There are more computers now in peoples homes linked up with schools. It has become a management and leadership tool, a resource for teaching and learning and for school administration (Condie R & Munro B 2007, p76). This all suggests that ICT is now a major presence in English Secondary schools. The major achievement of this reform process has been to place ICT at the heart of education. There are claims for some improvement in achievement due to ICT in schools but these tend to be based on small scale projects (See for example, Condie R & Munro B 2007, p25, Laferrière, Breuleux, & Bracewell 1999; Scardamalia & Bereiter 1996; Bereiter 1998; WestEd 1998; Berge & Collins 1998; Brown 1994; Baker, Gearhart, & Herman 1994; Kulik 1994; Sivin-Kachala 1998). This seems a small point but is important when considering the claims being made for ICT’s impact in schools. It tends to be on the base of such small-scale studies and projects that many of the large claims about the transformational potential of ICTs are sustained. 3.5.2 The limitations of the Depth of ICT on Education Claims that ICT will lead to a ‘transformation of education’ have largely failed to materialise if transformation is taken to mean more than mere access and presence (Selwyn 2008 p705). ‘Only one in six schools and colleges are getting the full benefit of using technology in a truly effective way’ (Crowne 2007). Initiatives like UK Online are making little difference to social inequalities (UK Online 2007) and the UK continues to fall behind other comparative countries in ICT skills (Leitch 2006). The evidence of significant positive effects on pupil achievement is at best inconclusive. A major review of the impact of ICT on attainment in English schools concluded that ‘…the weight of evidence is insufficient to draw firm conclusions’ (Condie R & Munro B 2007, p24). Cuban notes how current enthusiasm for ICTs is similar to enthusiasm for dominant technologies in the past, which have not been fulfilled, (Cuban 1986, 2001) ‘As for enhanced efficiency in learning and teaching, there have been no advances…in the last decade…The link between test score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested’ (Cuban 2003 p178-179). Leys comments that the link between education and technology threatens educational values, citing Polyani in this claim. ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society... Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed’ (Karl Polyani 1957, p73, quoted in Leys 2001, p4). Wellington (2005) writes that education is a value-laden process and cites Paulo Freire (1996), ‘…it can never be a neutral activity; nor are science and technology neutral, let alone science and technology education’. These general criticisms are based on specific studies. Though the policy discourse has highlighted the vocational purpose of introducing ICT into schools there is little evidence that it has succeeded in these aims. There is a strong body of evidence, going back two decades, to show that a narrow, skills-based approach to ICT education in schools is counterproductive (see, for example, Wellington 1989; Somekh 2000; Dillon 2004). There is growing evidence that the simplistic model of transferring skills from school to workplace that is a central part of the ICT initiatives in secondary schooling is a poor model, (e.g. Seely 2003). There is also growing evidence that for many applications there is no transfer of skills (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991). Where there can be, in certain aspects of science teaching, for example, (Newton and Rogers 2001) the term ‘application skills’ has been developed to refer to a set of general, strategic skills of value in using ICT to explore scientific questions. What this presupposes is an avoidance of a narrow, skill based training (Wellington 1989, 1993). The impact of ICT on education has been negligible according to the literature evaluating the impact of ICT into English Secondary schools (for example see Becta 2006a). ICT was claimed to be a motivational tool which would increase performability, especially when used with hard to reach pupils, the disaffected and disengaged (Passey et al 2004, Valentine et al 2005). This links with the idea of ICTs helping pupils fulfill their potential (DfES 2003b) and is linked to key performance indicators of Value Added (VA) and Contextual Value Added (CVA) which became embedded in Ofsted inspection for schools during this period. The notion of ‘performativity’ in education at all levels has been a driver in English educational institutions since the 1980s (Lankshear et al., 2000). ‘Performativity’ (a term coined by Lyotard 1984) calls for all ICT in schools, colleges and universities to make the ‘optimal contribution to the performance of our social system’ and ICT is thought able to add value to learning (see Newton & Rogers 2001, Wellington 1999). The perceived failure of the massive investment to bring about transformation of education has been explained as being caused by a variety of different factors: institutional and organisational factors of schools and institutions being constrained by their physical, spatial and temporal aspects (see Selwyn 2007a, 2007b, 2007c) and the multi-agency requirement of these initiatives that failed to come about (Younie 2006). The collaboration between schools and the private sector and business has not been successful despite hopes that private business would be established as secure partners for schools (Younie 2006). ICT was also expected to develop the links between home and school but the literature questions the extent to which ‘a connected learning’ was developed (Franks 2004, p169). Though there is much literature about the potential for this to happen, in terms of the potential for ICTs to develop society in which learning is increasingly accessible and adapted to individual needs’ (e.g. Becta 2001, Becta 2006a) and create an ‘improved quality of life’ (DfEE 1997a), there is little evidence that this has actually occurred. Selwyn (2000, p96) notes that the literature so far on the impact of ICT on developing this home/school connected-learning potential indicates no widespread development. Wellington (2001) and Kerawalla & Crook (2002) found that home computer use had very little in common with school use and even though Wellington (2001), estimated that there were seven times as many computers in UK homes as there were in schools there was little evidence of home use supporting learning in schools. Work on issues around the ‘digital divide’, (Selwyn & Facer 2007) again indicate that ICTs impact on developing learning links between school and home have been limited so far, confirming a general perception of 1997 that the overall state of ICT in schools was ‘primitive and not improving’ (Stevenson 1997, p6) and that this had remained the case a decade later. There is also a perception that the potential of ICT to motivate innovation and pedagogical transformation for teachers has instead become linked to the issue of initiative overload. ICT policies may still be jokingly referred to as ‘IT into cupboards schemes’ (Collins et al., 1997). On top of this ICT has been linked with increasing the administrative workload of staff in schools and the negative impact of Managerialism (Ball et al., 1994). What becomes clear in the critical literature is that there are contradictory strands to ICT use in schools: one strand that emphasizes the innovatory use of ICT, another that sees ICT as supporting more traditional views of educational and learning which results in “an uneasy, sometimes quite contradictory, combination of […] imperatives” (Buckingham & Scanlon 2003, p192). This failure to achieve an agreed and unifying vision for the introduction of ICT can be seen as contributing to the failure of establishing clear criteria for success. Research into the ICT initiative into English schools is further complicated by the wide variety of strongly held attitudes towards the initiatives, from the supportive (e.g. Papert 1980; Heppell 1999) through the agnostics (e.g. Daiute 1997; Oppenheimer 2003) to the antagonists (e.g. Cuban 2001; Cuban et al, 2001). This research can as a result of this produce a confusing picture. Potential and actual benefits are continually confronted and there is no decisive judgment. This supports the observation that discussions about the uses of new technologies are ‘essentially’ contested. (Gallie 1955). Summarising this perspective Oppenheimer writes: ‘When technology’s boosters look at a computer, they see almost nothing but opportunity, an educational messiah. Technology’s critics, meanwhile see merely danger, a mechanical devil that encourages the death of the humanistic traditions. ...The truth of course has its feet in both sides of the debate’ (Oppenheimer 2003, pxvii). The research offers no agreed measures of effectiveness (Underwood & Dillon 2004, Davies et al 2003). Lesgold (2000) argues that most research can’t be generalized over the whole system. Some argue that the quality of the research is poor, offering a contested argument that links the low status of the old tertiary sector Polytechnic College to ICT to perceptions of those running the RAEs (Gardner & Galanouli 2004). Another strand of criticism of the research of ICTs in schools argues (as was argued at the CAL ’01 conference) that: ‘too often those of us involved in educational technology live in the ‘here and now’ or in the ‘maybes of tomorrow’. Quiet reflection on where we have been and what we can learn from the past is often not seen as a priority. In ignoring early lessons, of course, we build our foundations on sand. It is vitally important that we now begin to build a history of educational technology use’ (Underwood & Scanlon 2002, p1).
The general conclusion of this chapter is that nearly everything discussed regarding ICT in English Secondary Schools is contested. In particular it is hard to know exactly whether any of the ICT reform agenda has been successful or not because the success criteria is difficult to identify. If success is in terms of ICT being a dominant feature of English Secondary Schools then success has been achieved to some extent. On the other hand if success is about transforming education in deeper senses such as the pedagogical practice and impact on the lives of young learners both within and beyond the classroom then the judgment on whether success has been achieved is more difficult to make. What is clear is that ICT and education have become fused by the political agenda of the last twenty years and that this is likely to continue into the future. As we have seen some people have argued that ICT was never intended to be a precise programme for educational change but rather was to be used as a symbol of a new kind of world, (Jensen and Lauritsen 2005, p368). This perception links to a criticism of the kind of research that has predominated the literature looking at ICTs in schools and education generally. Very early on critics such as Selwyn (1997) were arguing that much of the literature about the topic was based on quantitative rather than qualitative research and that there was resistance to understanding ICT in terms of broader theories of society and sociologies of technology (see also Abbott 2001). Although Selwyn’s points have been contested (e.g. Underwood 2004; Gardner & Galanouli 2004) this thesis agrees that theory is important and is attempting to understand the introduction of ICTs into English Secondary schools in terms of social theory. This chapter has given a brief history of the introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools. The chapter has discussed the government initiatives, its defining policies and the assessment of its success as presented by commentators and critics. The chapter has given a brief survey of the way ICT has been introduced into English Secondary Schools. It has noted that since the New Labour initiatives beginning in 1997 ICT has been a central feature of educational reform and that this reform agenda has been one that aimed at transforming education. Economic, political and social reasons for this agenda have been briefly examined and the positive and negative results of the initiatives summarized. What follows in the next chapter, is a more detailed discussion of how these policies became practice by discussing it in terms of Ball’s Policy Sociology in so doing the thesis will introduce the idea of a policy discourse and revisit some of the issues discussed in this chapter through the lens of this critical tool.
CHAPTER 4:ICT POLICY DISCOURSE
In the previous chapter the thesis gave a brief historical overview of the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools. What commentators and critics of this have suggested is that the policy of putting ICT into schools was part of a broader policy than merely the introduction of a new technology into education. It is this that the present chapter intends to discuss. The chapter investigates the reasons behind such enormous investment in ICT and examines the link between ideas about modern society and the role of ICT and education in that society. Using Stephen Ball’s ‘policy sociology’ it will then examine the way a new kind of policy making occurred under the New Labour Government beginning in 1997. It will examine the claim that a new policy discourse has been consciously created by a whole range of public sector reforms that decisively altered the public sector, including education. The focus will be to look at how the purpose of schools was changed and the role that the introduction of ICT played in doing this. The thesis will then look at how the ICT reforms have been discussed and criticised. In particular it will try and show how understanding the reforms in terms of a new policy discourse informs both this support and criticism. Certain key terms are used in the following way. ‘Ideology’ is used to refer to a cluster of key ideas that constitute the way reality is perceived by a group or individual. So when the chapter talks about the ideology of the New Labour project it is referring to the cluster of key ideas that constitute what New Labour believe about the world. ‘Discourse’ is used as being about the language, images and other social communicative practices that are used to produce and maintain that ideological stance.
As noted in the previous chapter the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools began as a major part of the incoming New Labour Governments determination to meet the perceived challenges of the knowledge economy and globalisation. The economic imperatives of a ‘knowledge economy’ were the reasons given in policy documents and briefing papers for a radical transformation of the public sector, including education. In fact education was seen as a key element in this reform as it was seen as the key to up-skilling the UK workforce in order to make the UK economy competitive. Research literature supports the idea that Policy documents and position papers all support this move towards the ‘economism’ of education, (e.g. Selwyn 2008). When the then Prime Minister writes ‘Education is our best economic policy…’ (Blair 2005) he makes explicit this feature of education policy. 4.2.1 The New Information Society/Knowledge Economy Construct The terms ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information society’ are key elements of the New Labour policy agenda and form an essential part of its ideological understanding of modern society. Although they are not the same thing, they were used as such in promoting a new reform agenda and this chapter also makes little distinction between them (For a discussion see Peters 2001). They are key elements of the ideological understanding of modernity that the New Labour policy makers accepted and connect up with ideas about the digital world, of connectivity, ‘…the interconnectivenness of everything’ (Dreyfus 2001, p10), networked worlds, and the interconnection of people, objects, information and organisations alongside the ‘flat world’ thesis that barriers of time and space are dissolved through the internet and other ICTs (for discussion of this see e.g. Kelly 1995, Cavanagh 2007, Selwyn 2009a). According to the ‘knowledge economy’ construct, knowledge and education can be treated as a business product whereby educational and innovative intellectual products and services can be exported for a high value return. This construct has clear roots in the ‘Information Society’ sociological construct of Bell and many of the thinkers associated with it were early enthusiasts for Bell (Its historical roots are discussed in the next chapter). For example, Drucker in “The Effective Executive” (1966) opposed hand workers with head workers, arguing that the time of the head worker had arrived. The construct claims that information and knowledge are replacing capital and energy as primary wealth creating assets (e.g. Leadbeater 2000a). Leadbetter claims the new economy is ‘a new stage of capitalism’ involving ‘living on thin air’ (Leadbeater 2000b). This metaphor is picked up by Coyle’s idea of ‘weightlessness’ (Coyle 1997) which contrasts early industrialism’s material value found in heavy stuff (iron, steel and coal) with the weightlessness of the new industrialism’s valuable stuff (information, knowledge, communicative expertise). The centrality of ICT in this new economy is also part of this construct of a ‘knowledge economy.’ The necessary mobility of information flows through ICTs. It is the defining technology, enabling flows of information that were impossible to achieve without it. Knowledge and the flow of information are key elements of value in this type of economic and social reality. Through the development of ICTs, in particular the Internet, every point in the interconnected system becomes ‘a potential recipient and provider of information’ (Selwyn 2009a). This is reminiscent of Bell’s ‘Information Society’ construct, and is now subject to many criticisms (Kumar 2005), which will be examined in detail in the next chapter. Peters (2001) offers a sympathetic critique of the role of the knowledge economy in ‘national education policy constructions.’ By sympathetically handling and updating many of the themes of Bell’s ‘Information Society’ Peters suggests that, despite critics dismissing the construct as useless to sociology, the term retains some usefulness in understanding ICT reforms in schools. This approach is supported by Webster who writes that: ‘…the concept ‘information society’ is of little use to social scientists, and still less to the wider public’s understanding of transformations in the world today. The term perhaps has some heuristic value for the social scientist (Lyon, 1988: 8), in so far as it encourages scholars to focus attention on an indisputably important feature of the world today – information’ (Webster 2002 p22). The suggestion in this thesis is that it encouraged politicians to build a whole policy discourse around it (e.g. Ball 2008). Peters begins by quoting Foucault’s remarks on Marx: ‘…we live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilisation of knowledge presents a fundamental problem. If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so. Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of this knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analysed’ (Foucault 1991, p165). This perspective takes up the theme of the centrality of knowledge to society which is the defining feature of the ‘Information society/knowledge economy’. Peters claims that the economic importance of education is fundamental to understanding ‘new global knowledge economy’ (Papadopoulos 1994). He cites the OECD and World Bank stressing the link between education and economic success and the role of education to develop ‘human resources.’ Education for these bodies is about up skilling and the production of research and scientific knowledge. Drucker (1993) and Porter (1990) link economics and productivity to education and show how competitiveness in the international marketplace has been transferred to educational discourse. Thurow (1996, p68) argues for a technological shift towards man-made brainpower industries. The role of national governments is then seen as restructuring national education systems and redesigning the interface between universities and business in the light of these shifts. Handy (1984) suggested the same sort of shift. A key assertion of Handy, picked up by many, was his identification of a change in the nature of employment so that a full employment society was becoming the part employment society, labour and manual labour was being replaced by white collar knowledge work, industry was declining and services rising, hierarchies and bureaucracies were losing their appeal, networks and partnerships were replacing them and that people having a one organisation career was becoming rare whilst career changing was becoming more fashionable/necessary. All this suggested that a new education agenda of choice, flexibility, variety, ‘home as classrooms’ and ‘workplace as school’ (ibid p146-147) would be required. As we saw in the previous chapter, these are themes that played a large role in policy documents and discussion papers produced by and for the New Labour Government from 1995 onwards. Drucker, Cairncross, Canter and Leadbetter are all quoted by Hargreaves (2000) as discussing education in terms of this discourse and education’s need to promote new forms of knowledge and learning. Education became something that involved understanding learning in terms of meta-cognition, thinking about thinking, integration of formal and informal learning skills, knowing that and knowing how skills, access and evaluation of knowledge, of having different types of intelligence, (e.g. Howard Gardner 1983), of developing team work, creativity, of knowledge of how to transpose and transfer knowledge, of being able to cope with ambiguity, unforeseen events, multiple careers, of being able to redesign oneself, make bespoke education and training paths for oneself and so on. Education was therefore to be understood as something reflecting some of the core ideas of the new digital information society and knowledge economy. ICTs were embedded in such an understanding but so were the notions of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘connectivity’. In a recent discussion of these issues, Selwyn has called this way of understanding education ‘The Educational Seductions of Internet Connectivity’ (Selwyn 2009a). Knowledge management and information creation and flow were positioned as being keys to embedding the central idea of the transferability of knowledge across contexts. Peters acknowledges that these ideas have been around many years, linking up with the ‘constructivist’ educational theories of Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner et al. However Peters claims that linking up the knowledge and economy via policy is a new twist in this familiar story. What is driving the development of these ideas are no longer learning theories but these economic theories. So the new feature in this vision of education is the link between the discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘national educational policy’. Peters identifies five key features to his understanding of the knowledge economy: the economics of abundance, the annihilation of distance, the de-territorisation of the state, the importance of local knowledge and the investment in human capital. Peters references the UK governmental 1998 White Paper, ‘Our Competitive Future’ as a defining policy document that fused educational policies to the knowledge economy discourse, as discussed in the previous chapter. The new discourse was about a new growth theory, highlighting the role of education in the creation of human capital and in the production of new knowledge (Solow 1956, 1994). The World Bank report ‘World Development Report’ of 1988 is also referenced as claiming that a consensus was emerging about the importance of education for creating human capital directly affecting knowledge accumulation, productivity and growth. Education in the literature explains the growth of national income (e.g. Romer 1986, 1990). This critique implies a version of Lyotard’s ‘logic of performativity’ (Lyotard 1984) in the post-modern condition (Peters 1995, 1996, 2001). Briefly, Lyotard’s theory is that knowledge is legitimised by how well it performs and in the context of a society dominated by ICTs, as he sees it, knowledge is judged by how effectively it minimises the required inputs for any tasks whilst maximising outputs. Efficiency is its prime value. The question then becomes ‘how does this prescribe education policy?’ Discourses of the knowledge economy turn knowledge and information into capital units. The discourse develops an economics of information and knowledge. A sociology of knowledge and education developed to understand these new features. There were grand theories developed such as Nico Stehr’s ‘knowledge economy’ and Robert E Lane ‘the knowledgeable society’ of 1966. Also Drucker (1969) Bell (1973), Touranine (1974) and Masuda (1981) all produced grand theories of how a knowledge and information society might work. The dominant role of Communications and ICT is unquestioned in this discourse. Peters makes clear the huge literature reflecting this. (e.g. Castels 1997, 1998, 2000; Peters and Roberts 1998; Blake and Standish 2000). The idea of a knowledge economy was therefore seen as being linked firmly with the dominant technology and this in turn ensured that when New Labour turned to these ideas it linked them decisively with ICT. This is a key connection to many critics of the policy discourse of New Labour who claim, like Webster (2001), that the notion of an Information Society is misleading and that therefore the reasons for having ICT in schools are misconstrued too. There is an extensive literature that has challenged the idea of a knowledge economy and an information society. For example, Coffield (2000) discusses several ways it has been understood. The main criticisms in the literature are that it constructs a narrow instrumental approach to the economics of knowledge and intellectual culture, in respect of which knowledge is commodified. So, for example, ‘everything is viewed in terms of quantities; everything is simply a sum of value realised or hoped for’ (Slater and Tonkiss 2001, p162). Clearly, applying it to education changes the purpose of education. Education becomes a type of ‘Academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). In a dramatic shift of purpose, education becomes the acquisition of a commodity for a job rather than a preparation for life. It excludes the liberal conception of education discussed in chapter two which includes political and cultural purposes. This is something the thesis will return to in the next chapter when it examines Ball’s work on policy discourse. As the thesis also noted earlier in the case of Webster (2002) the evidence of the existence of an actual knowledge economy (as opposed to just the construct of one in a dominant reform policy discourse) is claimed to be weak at best. The construct is found to ‘overemphasise and over-simplify…’ (Kepp 1997); empirical evidence shows that the proportion of economic activities involving new technologies and ‘new science’ (e.g. bio-engineering) remains relatively modest. Peters (2001) writes about this as a ‘hyper-discourse’ where entrenched clichés about the future is converted into policy and in turn the language of policy becomes the language of futurology. Following on from this critics argue that by continually focusing on a knowledge economy and the essential role of ICT in this new economic reality, inequalities between a wired world and unwired world are created. The construct creates unbridgeable gaps between people and also between countries (Grant 2007; Selwyn 2002). To conclude part one of this section, then, the New Labour policy reform introducing ICT into schools has been highly influenced by notions of the ‘knowledge economy’, even though scholarly criticism disputes the reality of such a notion. Next, another important aspect of the New Labour policy reform is discussed, one that is linked to ideas of a ‘knowledge economy’ but can be discussed separately. This is the construct of ‘Globalisation’. 4.2.2 Globalisation as the Second Key Feature of the Current New Labour Policy Discourse Two ways of understanding the idea of Globalisation are found in the educational discourse; Globalisation as a one world thesis and Globalisation as the entwining of the local with the global . 4.2.2.1 Globalisation as One World The first way of interpreting globalisation in the educational discourse is as a ‘one world’ thesis which discusses the future of nation states in terms of four interrelated literatures, about changes in the economic, political, cultural and social realms. Much of the literature about this aspect of policy discourse construct asserts that the economic realm dominates (e.g. Ball 2008 p25). ‘Globalisation’ is thus a construct in which the limits of the Nation State are discussed. The idea is that Globalisation overcomes the limits of a national boundary and raises the question of the nation state’s ability to steer the economy and its politics. The construct is used to frame questions such as, ‘Can a nation hold onto cultures given the proliferation of Global corporate power and Global franchises like MacDonald’s and so forth?’ So for instance, Giddens writes: ‘Globalisation is not just an “out there” phenomenon. It refers not only to the emergence of large scale world systems, but to transformations in the very texture of everyday life’ (Giddens 1996, p367). For a small number of people it is claimed to have created a new space and set of possibilities beyond national identity or tradition (Elliot and Lemert 2006). Zygmunt Bauman talks about ‘globals’, a new kind of citizen of Globalisation. Living as a global involves new forms of work within the knowledge economy involving head work rather than hand work, discussed in terms of ‘symbolic analysis’ (Reich 1991, p171), ‘articulation’ rather than ‘creation.’ In the context of this reading, educational services are an increasingly important international trade commodity. This becomes reflected in increased student mobility and teachers coming from overseas. This position is criticised in general because the erosion of the nation state’s role is overemphasised, as is the impact of Globalisation. This is the literature of the myth of the powerless state (e.g. Weiss 1997 or Harvey 1996, who coined the phrase ‘globaloney’). The importance of this point of view in terms of ICT being introduced into English Secondary schools is that it is often given as a reason for ensuring students are ICT literate. Competition in the global economy is seen to require such literacy. This view has been popularised by writers such as Friedman (2005). 4.2.2.2 Globalisation as the Entwining of Local with the Global ‘Globalisation’ has also been understood in a relational or vernacular way. This proposes that Globalisation is not considered as having a deterministic logic that inevitably replaces the local. Instead it reconsiders Globalisation as something that ‘… invades local contexts [but] it does not destroy them; on the contrary, new forms of local cultural identity and self-expression are causally bound up with globalising processes’ (Giddens 1996, p367-7). This takes Globalisation as allowing for a global generic feature to be reflected in a local idiom. An example would be the difference between Disney theme parks in USA and France where although the same global corporate franchise operates they are able to reflect local, national sensibilities to some extent. In this discourse the claim is that ‘generic global policies are polyvalent, they are translated into practice in complex ways’ (Ball 2008 p31). To conclude this section then, the thesis has proposed that two big ideas, that of a ‘knowledge economy’/’information society’ and that of ‘globalisation’ have been key to New Labour’s introduction of ICTs into English Secondary schools. They are dominant parts of the Ideological beliefs driving the New Labour policy agenda. In the next section the thesis examines how this has happened, using Ball’s ‘policy sociology’ approach.
4.3.1 Public Sector Reform and New Ways of Making Policies New Labour’s initiative to introduce ICT into English Secondary Schools is understood as being part of a wider general policy discourse. This thesis makes a distinction between English education and rest of UK because it focuses on ICT policy in English Secondary Schools. However it understands that policy development in England reflects a broader context, recognising that educational policy in England reflects world trends in both form and content and is linked to policy making and perceived economic needs that go beyond educational policies. The new policy discourse has been hugely influential in three ways: it changed the nature of policy making; it changed the way public sector was conceived; and it also changed the way policies were understood by policy sociology. The thesis shall briefly examine these three strands below, beginning firstly with policy making itself. 4.3.1.1 Hyperactivism, Policy Epidemics and a New Way of Policy Making New Labour introduced a new kind of policy making in order to respond to the perceived challenges of the knowledge economy and globalisation. This is a policy making at a hugely increased pace of change that has been called ‘hyperactivism’ (Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987). As an example of this terrific rate of policy making that has been so characteristic of the new policy agenda, in just a single month, July 2000, there were 106 items, including 39 Statutory Instruments, concerning policies related to education and employment published by the DfES. Hyperactivism has led to Levin’s notion of ‘policy epidemics’ (Levin 1993). This term refers to the flood of interrelated reform ideas. Both hyperactivism and policy epidemics are part of a new kind of policy technologies. They ‘involve the calculated deployment of forms of organisation and procedures, and disciplines or bodies of knowledge, to organise human forces and capabilities into functioning systems’ (Ball 2008, p41). New Labour’s project has been to use these technologies to transform the very nature of the public sector and this crucially includes education. Policies and supporting documents have been continually produced in order to create a seemingly never-ending rollercoaster of reform. The impression of constant movement and innovation has been an end in itself for this approach to policy making (Ball 2008). 4.3.1.2 The General Policy Discourse, the Educational Discourse and the ICT in Educational Discourse The New Labour Ideology of Knowledge economics, Globalisation and the central role of the digital technologies has developed a discourse to establish and maintain the Ideology. Policy has been a vehicle for the discourse, delivering the key messages and rendering invisible alternatives to it. So of course the effects of the policy discourse have not just transformed the way policy making is conceived. The effect of hyperactivism and policy epidemics has led to claims that ‘the traditional time-space configurations of schooling are being significantly reworked by policy. The ecology of education, what it looks like, when and where it happens, is being changed and, as a result, so too is the learner’ (Ball 2008, p 3). The policies have been used to create a dominant discourse. This policy discourse, as does any discourse, privileges certain ideas, topics and speakers and excludes others. It reveals an attempt to escape from old social divisions subordinating talent to social status and where individual and social wellbeing are elided. The policy discourse revealed by Ball (2008) redraws boundaries in new ways. Ball argues that through this the public sector is re-imagined. Education policy is therefore to be read in the light of this overall discourse. The discourse has been managed and maintained through the hyperactivism and policy epidemics. ‘Language is deployed in the attempt to produce certain meanings and effects’ (Edwards et al 1999, p620). The policy discourse produces positions in which people are invited to speak, listen, act, read, work, think, feel, behave and get their values shaped (Gee et al, 1996 p10; Ball 2008, p5). Policies affect teachers, learners and parents, choosers, leaders, consumers, managers, lifelong learners and entrepreneurs, in fact anyone and everyone who gets involved. Following the literature about this (e.g. Edwards et al 1999, Ball 1997) the thesis assumes that policy discourse produces a sense of what is inevitable and necessary. This leads to looking at the ICT policy for English Secondary Schools during the period the thesis is focused on and asking what the discourse was making inevitable and necessary. The discourse was more than just focused on the educational. It entailed a ‘re-narration of the public sector… to consolidate an unstable equilibrium of compromise among different social forces around a given economic, political and social order’ (Jessop 2002, p6). Jessop identifies the purpose of the policy hyperactivism and policy epidemicism of the time as an attempt to rethink ‘compromises’ between different domains within a social order. Policy sociology analyses policy as a process, not an object. This is partly because problems policies are designed to fix change. It is also because they are not uniformly applied and so no analysis must overestimate the rationality of policies. Indeed they are often messy, contradictory, confused and unclear (Ball 2008). Ball presents a good guide to the significant contours of the subject guiding the background assumptions of the thesis. Ball further argues that The UK government’s approach to public service reform throughout this time was about developing policies that enabled joined up reform based on performance management, voice and choice, contestability and workforce ‘remodelling’ (2008). Managerialism was a new way of organising institutions in this discourse, eroding notions of public service and substituting them for Lyotardian perfomativity (Lyotard 1984), means-end efficiency, target setting and so on. (Gerwitz et al 1995, Gerwitz 2002) Education was part of this joined up reform programme. What this suggests is that the rationale for any education policy is not be discernable purely from within education itself. The causes for certain reforms were not domain specific as such and to discuss all educational change by reference to educational reasons distorts reality. So, for example, issues of equality became prominent in policy developments generally, not just in education. ‘Equality’ was understood in terms of a generic policy discourse of economic participation and performance. In education policy, therefore, equality in relation to race, gender and social class were understood in terms of that economic discourse rather than in terms that a purely educational focus might have given it, where perhaps issues of social justice would have been prominent. Education policy gave emphasis to parenting responsibility and social exclusion, where Academies and Trusts were created as solutions to underachievement in socially disadvantaged areas in order to maximise the economic human resources of the state (Ball 2008, ch4). These were all part of the dominant Ideological priorities of the New Labour agenda, which was primarily economic, to do with a new kind of value and a Global extension of the market. ‘Equality’ as a means of social justice has been subtly substituted for a different meaning of ‘equality’, one understood in terms of upskilling its workers in the context of Global knowledge economics. Ball’s analysis of education policy sociology confirms some of the dominant themes already identified in the thesis earlier. He argues the policies deliberately changed the role of the state towards schools by their production of ‘new learners’, the subordination of education to the economy, a policy convergence across countries and sectors, the privatisation of public sector education and the joining up of social and educational policies. As already noted in the thesis there is a considerable literature about the intra - dependence of Education policy, economic necessity and general public service reform and Ball draws on it. The generally agreed perspective of this literature is that ‘within policy, education is now regarded primarily from an economic point of view’ (Ball 2008, p11), that there has been an ‘…astonishing displacement of “society” within the late modern educational pattern’ (Cowen 1996, p151) and that education has become subjected to ‘the normative assumptions and prescriptions {of} economism’ (Lingard et al 1998 p84). Policy sociology discourses are considered important in this literature for two reasons. Discourses contribute to ‘…the construction of the need for reform, particularly in the case of globalisation and international economic competition and the requirements of the knowledge economy’ (Ball 2008, p13). They also provide the obvious and necessary policy responses and solutions. In this way, the discourse creates the problems to which they are solutions. The introduction of ICTs into English secondary schools is from this perspective a solution to a problem defined by the discourse. If a global knowledge economy requires ICT literacies and the education system isn’t equipped to meet this requirement then reforms need to follow to resolve the problem. Discourse makes other points of view disappear and makes that of the discourse appear natural and one of ‘common sense’. Olssen argues that through analysing educational policy discourse it is possible to see that ‘…globalisation and education comprise the dual mantras of ‘third way’ politics’ (Olson et al 2004, p245). Ball’s analysis discovers a rhetoric of reform (General public policy reform, not merely educational) coupling improvements in social justice, equity and the maximisation of participation (Ball 2008, p17) to enterprise and economic success using the idea of a ‘meritocracy’. Summary So, the policy discourse has created a new social space in which a mobilised set of rationales and understandings has brought about a new hegemonic understanding of social spaces, including the space occupied by education and its values. And as noted, this constructed space is broadly economic. Though there is no settled agreement about the precise definition of the discourse, through contested understandings of a kind of knowledge society certain key features are identifiable as being necessary. A decisive link between education and economic success is asserted and the economic space articulates a market form, e.g. (Sayers 1995, p104) ‘…markets are a social construction whose birth is difficult and requires considerable regulation and involvement by the state.’ This ‘considerable regulation and involvement’ has been taken to an extreme by the New Labour reformists who have used ‘policy epidemics’ and ‘hyperactivism’ to construct and then maintain the discourse. The new policy paradigm brings about a ‘new moral environment’ (Ball 2008, p45) to be understood in the terms of market economics, of producers and consumers, self-interest; ‘…an increased …orientation towards the internal wellbeing of the institution and its members and a shift away from concern with more general social and educational issues within ‘the community’ (Ball 2008, p45; Gerwitz et al, 1995; Gerwitz 2002, Reay 1998; Willmott 1993; Lyotard 1984 writes about how the discourse creates structures and systems that ‘…make individuals “want” what the system needs in order to perform well’). Briefly, then, the educational policy discourse has brought about the following effects. Firstly, a decisive link between cultural and political reform has established ‘managerialism’ as a new mode of power within the discourse’s social arrangement. New managerialism’s role is to shift power away from professional-ethical regimes of public services, including schools, to replace these regimes by economically orientated ‘entrepreneurial-competitive regimes’ (Ball 2008, p45: Clarke et al 2000; Troman 2000, p349 and his ‘culture of distrust’). Also the articulation by the policy discourse of ‘performativity’ and accountability has added to this shift from an ethic of service to one of business competitiveness (e.g. Ball 2008; Husbands 2001; Shore and Wright 1999). Secondly there has been a decisive link between the new economic reality and a ‘new’ social reality constructed in various ways as ‘Globalisation’. Though Globalisation has been understood in two distinct ways what it has been used to do in the discourse is suggest that there are economic opportunities and threats that require a radical change to social norms linked to the eroding notions of a Nation. In this context of rapid and Global change, education is seen as a way of responding to challenges presented by this new and digitally mediated context. Thirdly there has been a decisive link made between the message and the messenger. The way policy is made using ‘policy epidemics’ and ‘hyperactivism’ creates an impression of continual change that supports the message that everything is changing. So, as noted earlier, there is a new reality for policy itself, understood as a reform process whereby this continuous reform is seen as an end in itself (e.g. Ball 2008, p44; OECD 1995, p9). This links with an embedded self-referential ‘futurology’ within the discourse, where how it expresses itself reflects the message being expressed. This also emphasises the ‘communicative texture’ of the processes involved, where the language of the New Labour ideology is continually present as new policy. For this reason the analysis of policy as discourse seems particularly apt. 4.3.1.3 The Changing Nature of Policy Sociology - How the New Policy Discourse has Altered Policy Sociology ‘Policy’, understood as ‘policy discourse’, has to be seen as a process rather than a document. There is no single defining moment common to all policy processes which can be identified as the beginning or end of a policy. It can be a messy and contradictory process involving not just those who think up the policy but also those who draft it into a document, those who publicise the policy and those who implement and receive it. It involves a range of institutions including government think-tanks, departments, schools, businesses and other agencies. Policies are part of the mobilisation of discourse by symbolic as well as practical means. To understand a policy is to try and grasp a system of values and symbolic systems that legitimise and account for political decisions (Ball 2008, p13). It is in the light of these changes and the new role of the policy discourse that commentators and critics have started to change their approaches to understanding the discourse and the policies. There are now moves to move analysis of policy from just knowing what’s happening and how come to asking what can be done about it (Troyna 1994, p72). Some policy analysis attempts to become influential in policy formation itself (Gale 2005). Policies before New Labour were analysed in terms of how they moved from initial proposition through to implementation. This led to analyses of policies being ‘technocratic and managerialist in orientation and concerned mainly with implementation questions’ (Lingard 1993, p36). According to Gale (2005) ‘…they set out quite complex and intricate arrays and flowcharts of policy making processes’ and tended towards offering what Ball called ‘… tidy generalities’ (Ball 1990, p9). The picture promoted by this research was a linear, two-dimensional representation of how policy was produced and implemented. As Gale summarized this: ‘Agreed values in one end, policy outcomes out the other’ (Gale 2005, p2). One of the radical things that has happened to policy sociology is that this simple-looking theory of policy formation has been transformed and largely replaced. It has partly been transformed by ideas ‘cannibalised’ by the discourse surrounding the ideas of post-industrialism discussed in the next chapter. Stephen Ball was among the first to claim that until this shift there had been a ‘theoretical and epistemological dry rot built into the analytical structures’ (Ball 1994, p15) of policy research where policy studies in education were dominated by analyses from the fields of political science and public administration. This has changed. Ball (1994) argues that policy texts are ‘cannibalised products’ that carry meanings representative of the struggle and conflict of their production. The approach asked for ‘interpretations of interpretations’ (Rizvi and Kemmis, 1987) or ‘refraction’ (Prosser 1981; Freeland 1986). While there is recognition that policy texts are themselves political acts or ‘textual interventions into practice’ (Ball 1994, p18), they ‘enter rather than simply change power relations’ (Ball 1994, p20, emphasis original). The approach attempted to discover ‘what can be said, and thought, but also ... who can speak, when, where and with what authority’ (Ball 1994, p21). It was a radical new approach, opening up new ‘ways of talking about and conceptualizing policy’ (Ball 1994, p109). Bourdieu has said, ‘the field of positions is … inseparable from the field of stances … Both spaces … must be analysed together’ (Bourdieu 1993, p105). Approaching a policy as a discourse was a matter of trying to ‘establish “discursive limitations”’ (Henry 1993, p102) on policy outcomes. Importantly, policy as discourse doesn’t confine itself to the initial production of policy texts and the context of such production. Instead it examines how it mutates throughout the process of its existence, so its reception becomes a way of understanding production. In a sense a policy is thought of as a continuous process, of something that is always in a state of becoming as different parties act on it. So policy text production is considered more fluid than the earlier, linear approach. Educational policy text production includes the interpretation and involvement of teachers and other social actors. For example, Gale, looking at a policy for an aspect of Australian higher education identified six strategies used by social actors in the production of the policy discourse, ‘…trading, bargaining, arguing, stalling, manoeuvring, and lobbying’ (Gale 1997; 2003). Gale and Densmore (Gale & Densmore 2003, p36-53) ‘… demonstrated that teachers are indeed policy makers in the tactics they employ and the use they make of policy to exploit opportunities and generate possibilities in contexts of practice’ (Gale 2005). Yeatman’s (1998) calls teachers and other actors in the process ‘policy activists’; in Sachs’s (2003) terms, the latter calls them ‘activist professionals.’ Giddens (1994) has referred to this as a ‘generative politics’ and policy actors are to be understood as ‘determining their own fate’ (Yeatman 1998, p19). Understanding this justifies the thesis analysing the role of teachers as activist professionals in the formation of policy discourse. It also suggests that the thesis, in engaging with the policies as discourse, becomes part of the policy discourse itself and its researcher becomes a ‘policy actor’ too.
The chapter has examined the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools as a policy discourse introducing and maintaining the New Labour ideology of a globalised, digital knowledge economy and information society. This chapter has identified the constituents of this policy discourse and surveyed the policy sociology that sees the 1980’s onwards but the New Labour period beginning in 1997 in particular as a period of a specific type of policy making process in which the specific ICT policy for education has been articulated. The ideological position of the discourse is one that requires a further examination however. It is also clearer how the discussion of Oakeshott’s two metaphors of school purpose in chapter two relates to this phase of policy making. According to what has been discussed in this chapter the metaphor of the school as a market is one that seems to dominate policy formation. In the next chapter the thesis looks at the history of the ideology that forms this discourse, its critics and in doing so will begin to formulate ideas for deconstructing the discourse that has placed ICT into English secondary schools.
CHAPTER 5:CRITICS OF THE ICT POLICY DISCOURSE
This chapter will look at how the ICT policy discourse has been discussed in the critical literature. In particular the chapter will try and show how understanding of the new policy discourse informs both support and antagonism to placing ICT in English Secondary schools. ICT was brought into schools through the current policy discourse. One of the key questions is whether the role of ICT in English Secondary Schools can only be understood in terms of that discourse. Much of the critical writing in the field of ICT in Education is concerned to dissociate ICT from every aspect of the policy discourse. Because of this the chapter does not find a pro and anti debate useful in trying to understand the role of ICT in Education. Rather a more nuanced approach is attempted in order to reflect the current debates around ICT in Schools.
5.2.1 Critics of the General Education Policy Discourse In this section the thesis considers attitudes towards this discourse. There are writers who oppose the discourse and who resist it in terms of a different understanding of the purpose of education generally. These writers offer resistance to the discourse, opposing the ideology that links educational values to those of economics and technology. Although the formulation of this policy discourse has been identified in the thesis as perhaps beginning with the Thatcher Conservative Government of the 1980’s (see e.g. Ball 2008) and most vociferously with the New Labour Government of 1997 onwards (e.g. see Selwyn 2008) there have always been prominent educationalists opposing the identification of educational values into those of economic and technology (see Chapter 2). So we find in the late nineteen fifties Fromm writing ‘Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions’ (Fromm 1957, p67). More recently Giroux has written critically of the discourse that ‘[t]he main role of the teacher-turned-classroom manager is to legitimate through mandated subject matter and educational practices a market-based conception of the learner as simply a consumer of information’ (Giroux 2000, p92). Kenway and Bullen write in a similar vein: ‘…schools have found themselves in a problematic situation. High ideals tend to fade away as State-provided finances decline and as the State 'encourages' closer partnerships between education and industry. Educationally sound and attractively packaged curriculum materials fill the hole in the resources budget of schools and offer technologically sophisticated 'solutions' to the pedagogical problems of overworked teachers. These pressures have created a conflict of interest between schools' mandate to educate, and their moral and ethical duties to protect children from exploitation by consumer culture’ (Kenway and Bullen 2001, p102). There is a huge critical literature opposing "the language of efficiency, standards, competency, assessment, cost effectiveness [that] impoverishes our imagination and limits our educational and political vision" (Beyer & Apple 1998, p7) and the new hegemonic bloc that links education with market economics, knowledge economics and globalisation. Leys comments that the link between education and technology threatens educational values, citing Polyani in this claim: ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society... Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed’ (Karl Polyani 1957, p73, quoted in Leys 2001, p4). There are alternatives to the ideology that underpins the policy that introduces ICT into schools . Critical pedagogy is an example of an alternative educational vision that current discourse renders invisible. Wellington (2005) writes that education is a value laden process and cites Paulo Freire (1996), ‘…it can never be a neutral activity; nor are science and technology neutral, let alone science and technology education’. Writers taking this critical stance to the discourse generally ask, as Giroux does in ‘Rage and Hope’, ‘The critical question here is whose future, story, and interests do the school represent... Critical pedagogy argues that school practices need to be informed by a public philosophy that addresses how to construct ideological and institutional conditions in which the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority of student becomes the defining feature of schooling.’ (Giroux 2000) Critical theorists like Giroux challenge the hegemony of the educational discourse that is so contained within an economic imperative. If ICT is seen as an essential constituent of the discourse then it too is part of the problem. 5.2.2 Critics of ICTs Role in the Educational Policy Discourse Critics of the discourse raise questions as to whether ICTs transform or just add on to existing social structures (Gane 2005, p475). A question regarding the disuse of ICTs to oppose the discourses assumption about universal use is another suggested avenue of criticism (e.g. Anderson 2005). Critics have noted that some aspects of the vision of learning endorsed by the educational vision ICT finds itself placed in is anti-social. Some argue that continual learning in a virtual reality is not unproblematically good because it could undermine social interactions (Thompson 1995). Other critics link ICT to the issue of the ‘control society’ and the way ICTs can make education part of the ‘surveillance society’ (e.g. Lyon 2006, Poster 1995). Hope (2005) discusses this in terms of ICTs providing capacities to both carry out surveillance and resist it. Cuban (e.g. 2001) discusses the possibility of schools having an inbuilt resistance to ICTs, suggesting that there are cultural needs that schools answer that ICTs threaten. Resistance to ICTs is in this case seen as a clash between different educational visions of the kind discussed in chapter two. Another way of criticising the discourse is to try and link ICT with ideas about teaching and learning that are disconnected from the discourse itself (e.g. Cranmer et al 2008, Selwyn 2007a). All these approaches are powerful ways of criticizing the discourse whilst maintaining a positive view about the potential of ICTs in schools. The interesting work in the field of ICTs and education is in this more nuanced approach whereby the dissociation of ICTs from their setting in the discourse is theorised and researched. 5.2.3 Review of Literature Seeking to Dissociate ICT from its Setting in the Discourse Many who oppose the new policy discourse seeks to dissociate ICT from its setting in the discourse. Enthusiasts for the introduction of ICT into schools tend to do so from a perspective of futurology that suggests ICT can transform education without necessarily being part of the economic hegemony. Leading proponents of techno-enthusiasm such as Heppell, Buckingham, Downes, Abbott tend to focus on the need for better understanding of the relationship of ICTs to positive educational transformation without necessarily referencing the new discourse. Often, the futurology strand is referenced by enthusiasts for ICTs in education such as Heppell but without endorsing the deterministic logic of the whole discourse. So, for example, writers who are enthusiastic about the potential of ICTs but not for their current use in schools point to ways in which ICTs can be understood as positive educational resources without attachment to the current educational discourse. This has led to divergent research into potentially different ways of understanding ICTs in education. So for example there are ongoing projects researching how young people use ICTs at home and at school (e.g. Sefton-Green 1998; Downes 1999; Kerawalla and Crook 2002; Somekh et al 2002; Facer et al 2003; Holloway and Valentine 2003, Selwyn N. 2002) in order to suggest ways in which education should transform itself. Studies of socio-economic reasons for inequalities of ICT use (e.g. Rudd 2002), of the impact of gender on ICT use (e.g. Harris 1999; Volman and van Eck 2001; Rudd 2002, Colley et al 1994) of how techno-popular culture could be introduced into education (e.g. Green and Bigum 1993; Marsh and Millard 2003) of the impact of age (e.g. Colley A. & Comber C. 2003), discussions about the digital divide (e.g. Facer K. 2002) and of the affect of perceptions about ICT on education (e.g. Somekh B., Lewin C., Mavers D., Fisher T., Harrison C., Haw K., Lunzer E., McFarlane A. & Scrimshaw P. 2002) tend to position themselves as part of a critical discourse arguing against the current educational discourse whilst remaining positive towards the potential of transforming education using ICTs. 5.2.4 Different Ways ICTs are Understood as Transformational Whilst Remaining Outside of New Labour Educational Discourse ICTs are repositioned in this literature so that they become means of positive transformation outside of the terms of the dominant discourse. It becomes possible to make links between the teaching and learning of ICT to a constructivist model theorized by Vygotsky and Dewey (e.g. Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye, O’Malley 1996) without apparent reference to any economic thesis. However this takes place within a managerialist setting that is part of the economic discourse where achieving efficiency is the prime value. ICTs can be rethought to enhance the flattening of hierarchies (Nunes 2006) and the generating of ‘connectivity’s’ leading to a new relationship between learner and teacher based on enquiry, networks of mutual support systems, informality and meaning-making rather than information receiving (Siemans 2004). Learning through ICT becomes about better connectivity (Siemans 2004), personalization (Green et al, 2006) self-determinisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) and what Selwyn calls ‘rather more “messy” social relations and structures’ (Selwyn 2009b, p5). A further powerful approach to dislocating ICT from its role in the educational policy discourse has been to rethink what is meant by ICTs. ICT in the policy discourse is linked with a notion of ‘technological determinism’. The core idea is that technology determines certain preconceived outcomes. ICTs are produced within the educational policy document as the technology that will produce knowledge and communication as required by a global knowledge economy. ICT is defined in terms of what it is determined to accomplish. Therefore a powerful approach of the dissociationalist agenda is to reconceptualise ICTs as being anti-essentialist. This is what the next section is about. 5.2.5 Attempts to Reconceptualise ICT in an Anti-essentialist way to Dissociate it from the Policy Discourse McLoughlin & Dawson (2003) argue that technology needs reconceptualising because theoretical models of organisations have failed to deal with technology and its relationship to organisations. In particular the work criticises attempts to position technology so it is something that has effects on organisations via some sort of ‘technological determinism’. The educational policy discourse articulates a transformation of schools (and education generally) and therefore it can be argued from this perspective that the education policy discourse constructs ICT in such a way. Critics of ‘technological determinism’ (a core concern of critiques of organisations in the 70’s e.g. Braverman’s ‘labour process theory’ (1974)) seemed to replace technological determinism with economic determinism (see also post-fordist criticism of Bell’s ‘Information Society’ (Kumar 1995, updated 2005). Opposing technological determinism was an emphasis on the social choices in organisations and work design over above technological requirements. Pettigrew emphasised politics of decision-making (Pettigrew 1973) – roughly grouped as Organisational politics/process or power process analysis of technological change (Badham 1993, Thomas 1994). This new politics and process perspective required contingent factors such as the contextual referents for decision makers to be considered rather than assuming that a technology alone could determine what would happen in an organisation. Technology then becomes reconstructed as a process with indeterminate outcomes (e.g. Wilkinson 1983). This answer raises new issues. If technology was a process without a determined outcome then how could one know what was and what wasn’t technology? Some attempts at defining technology in terms of apparatus, equipment, hardware and software leads to ‘soft determinism’ enabling and constraining choices in an organisation. Zuboff (1998) addressed this through a distinction between ‘automating’ and ‘informating.’ Automating replaces human intervention; informating makes human activity more visible. Choice is a social issue rather than a technological issue and so informating allows for human intervention and therefore generates the possibility of unpredictable outcomes. Grint and Woolgar (1997) argue that this is again a form of technological determinism. They claim Zuboff assumes a choice between what to do with technologies but does not challenge the informating capacities of the technology itself. ‘The impression given is that there can be no dispute over the potential capacity of the technology, just whether or not this [actual] potential has been realised.’ (Grint & Woolgar 1997, p124) This gives a strong impression that it is the characteristics and capabilities of the technology that are transformative. ‘This is to treat such technology as though it is a separate and parallel system to the social and organisational’ (Grint & Woolgar 1997, p25). Grint and Woolgar argue that ICT has to be re-understood outside the construction of technological determinism completely. So their question becomes: how can technology be understood outside of technological determinism? They answer that beyond technological determinism is ‘technology as a social construct’. ‘Technologies … are not transparent; their character is not given; and they do not contain an essence independent of the nexus of social actions of which they are a part. They do not ‘by themselves’ tell us what they are or what they are capable of. Instead, capabilities – what, for example, a machine will do – are attributed to the machine by humans’ (Grint and Woolgar 1997, p10). They think it follows that there is no distinction at all between human and machine beyond whatever has been socially constructed. ‘Technology’ becomes a text within a socially constructed discourse. Interpretation of a technology and what it can do is a matter of agreeing meanings rather than discovering anything determined in the technology itself. They argue for ‘Interpretive flexibility’ where a wide range of explanations as to what technology can do are presented and where closure of interpretation comes only when a social group of users decide that their interpretation is fixed (Pinch and Pijker 1987, 28). Only then is the meaning of any technology stabilised. This feature is often never reached so the meaning of technologies is understood best as something continually in a process of being closed and stabilised. Technology is understood as a text continually being rewritten and written (Grint and Woolgar 1997). ‘Technology’ is no more than ‘congealed social relations’ (Latour 1999). The Case of Steve Woolgar: A Key Figure Attempting to Dissociate ICT from The Policy Discourse Steve Woolgar (Woolgar ed. et al 2002) offers a key critique of the ICT education policy discourse. He challenges the construction of ICT that informs that discourse. In particular the idea he critiques is the one that predicts and attempts to enact that technology will create ‘radical transformations in the structures of information and data flow’ (Woolgar 2002, p2) He asks ‘Are fundamental shifts taking place in how people behave, organise themselves, and interact as a result of the new technologies?’ (Woolgar 2002, p2) and further, on interpersonal relationships, communications, social control, participation, inclusion, exclusion, social cohesion, trust and identity. These are all claims of the educational ICT policy discourse derived from versions of the construct of a ‘knowledge economy’. Woolgar critiques the claim of this idea that we are in transition to a ‘virtual society’ (e.g. Gibson 1984, Stephenson 1993) Notions of a ‘Cyberspace’ (e.g. Pierre Levy (1997, 1998) as the natural precondition for inevitable technological future, the social scientific use of virtual technologies and their theoretical possibilities and problems (e.g. Hine 2000, Wakefford 2000), the idea of ‘homesteading on the electronic frontier’ (Rheingold, 1993) and the promises of unbounded sociability (e.g. Castells 2001, p119) coupled with mixed results for these utopian ventures (Watson 1997, Jones 1998, Kolko and Reid 1998, Du Val Smith 1999, K Ward 2000) and confused ideas about what a ‘community’ is and entails (Smith and Kollock 1999) make Woolgar doubt the construct as a whole. Woolgar argues that the Virtual society is but one of many ‘epithetised phenomena’ (Woolgar 2000a), which are merely ‘descriptions used to conjure a future consequent upon the effects of electronic technologies’ (Woolgar 2002, p3). References to remote learning, e-learning, digital banking, global village, tele-working and so on all suggest deep and profound change. He argues that it is generally now recognised that initial research on the social impact of electronic technologies was polarised between the negative and the uncritically positive (Kitchin 1998, Gauntlett 2000). He wonders whether we are beyond the hype and perceives some shift of attitude (e.g. Shields 2000, p11… ‘The 1990’s appear to have seen societies in retreat from the liminoid qualities first celebrated in visions of cyberspace and virtual society’). However he agrees with Castells who discerns that questions about the role of technologies on society are still ‘couched in simplistic, ideological dichotomies that make an understanding of the new patterns of social interaction difficult’ (Castells 2001, p117). One response to this may be to have more informed empirical research and some think the technologies themselves make this possible (e.g. Castells 2001). But Woolgar still perceives too much faith in the claims of technologies and so much critical thinking about the role of ICT ends up with a top down, synoptic depictions of the effects of technologies In response to this Woolgar asks whether we are constrained by the components that make up research into the effects of technologies. He identifies four key components that do this. The first is the sweeping grandiloquence of rationales that are looking for a totalising depiction (Woolgar 2002, p6). If we are witnessing growth of ICT then who is the ‘we’ and what technologies are we meaning and for whom does it matter? The formulations assume, presume and promise a uniformity of opinion and effect. Woolgar questions this and asks whether fundamental shifts are really happening. To answer he says that there must be clearer questions as to which people we are talking about and what differences to which behaviours in particular do these universalising claims refer to? He then asks us to question assumptions that the experience of the new technologies is related unproblematically to general overarching macro-level trends. Another way of saying this is to say that looking at macro-trends doesn’t offer clues as to how the technologies are being used on the ground! ‘We have reached the point in the evolution of the field where we need to disaggregate the phenomenon, to focus much more on bottom-up experiences, on the nitty-gritty of actually making the damn modem work. We need to ask critically whether, to what extent, and how such everyday experiences relate, for example, to shifting patterns in employment to the development of wider social networks, and to global society’ (Woolgar 2002, p7). Then he challenges the confidence put into claims about the effects of technology, for example, the stories of ‘home delivery’ leading to the establishment of shops where people can come pick up their shopping! He argues that this confidence stems from specific constituencies such as supply-side electronic industries, advertisers, media and so on and avoids other areas where the confidence would be less secure and seem less obvious.
The persistence of confidence even in the face of apparently obvious setbacks he thinks is in part explained by the interrelationships between these three features working as a mutual self supporting system. This aspect of the policy discourse, what he calls ‘the discourse of the definite’ ((Woolgar 2002, p7) is what pervades rationales for current analysis of technology according to Woolgar. Woolgar argues that the confidence comes from universalising claims that makes sense only in discrete contexts. He argues that the universalisation must end and be replaced by identifying the constituencies and networks within which the discourse takes hold and flourishes (Woolgar 2002, p8). Clumping aggregation, top-down synoptic causation and definitive outcomes are the three things which make up the phenomenon to be understood. Finally, Woolgar criticises the tendency to adopt the terms of debate such as ‘virtual vs. real’. This is Woolgar recognising the way the policy discourse, and the ICT discourse that it includes as an essential part of it, reifies and determines the very terms of discussion through what it chooses to include and exclude and how it understands them. Woolgar wants to interrogate the very terms of the debate without disengaging from them. (Woolgar 2002, p9) The terms of debate are constructions of the dominant discourse and so as such are not natural and ‘given’ but are deeply motivated i.e. relations, meanings, implied connections, performed communities of associations. Woolgar is approaching ICT educational policy in terms of challenging some of the core meanings of the dominant educational policy discourse. He suggests a strategy of modifying and hedging the claims being made from within the discourse as a strategy to analyse (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1986, p75-88). He denies that there is a single objective and audience to a research proposal (so ‘hedging’ is part of a way of appealing to a more cautious, academic audience). He questions the possibility and desirability of separating technology from impact and agrees that this might be thought to imply a technological essentialism that he denies. But this would be to misunderstand his motivation. ‘This very separation should instead be brought into scrutiny as part and parcel – perhaps even as the crucial central focus – of the phenomenon to be explained’ (Woolgar 2002). As a result a construct such as ‘Virtual Society’ becomes ‘Virtual Society?’ where the crucial use of a punctuation mark is used to bring different audiences into coexistence. Woolgar also notes the difficulty of synthesising research findings across a broad area of social-scientific areas and topics. Woolgar would have us not separate technology from setting because he understands that setting is constitutive of technology. The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context which requires a rehabilitation of the concept of ‘non-use’. For Woolgar, what is happening regarding ICT is also to do with what’s not happening. He argues that the fears and risks associated with new technologies via the discourse are unevenly distributed within the narratives of future shock stories and emperor’s new clothes stories. He argues that virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities. So, for example, the so-called paperless office is not actually paperless and that this is a new relationship that his Virtual Society captures. Woolgar is claiming that the more virtual a thing becomes the more real it becomes too. He gives as an example the fact that teleworkers travel more once they tele-work (Woolgar 1998). He suggests that the more global we become, the more local we become. These are, he believes, counter-intuitive findings but it is instructive to ask, counterintuitive to whom? And if not, what has happened to our intuitions over the last ten years or so? And of course his approach challenges the hegemonic assumptions of ICTs in the policy discourse. Woolgar’s project is to get under the skin of synoptic visions of technological impact. He requires critics to look at the implications rather than impact of ICT policy. In so doing he hopes to dissociate ICTs from the policy discourse, and create a space for developing ICTs in education that are not locked in to the hegemonic vision. Critics of Woolgar: Essentialist Vs. Anti-Essentialist Debates about ICTs Of course there are those who disagree that ICTs can be treated anti-essentialistically. This is the kind of debate raised when someone is shot. Is it the gun that is to blame, or the person using the gun? The Woolgar/Grint vs. Robert Kling debate illustrated the issue. Kling argued that technology has some transformative powers beyond social construction. This is a discourse that constructs an essentialist approach where’ ‘technical capacity is viewed as inherent to the technology (artefact or system) (Grint & Woolgar 1995, p50). This discourse tends to assume that these capabilities have either been derived from scientific method or ‘from the linear extrapolation and/or development of previous technologies’ (Grint & Woolgar 1995, p50). Woolgar and Grint argued against this. They gave the example of a gun – they denied the technology had the power to kill and maim because the capacity to kill and maim is a social construct. But it is possible to question the way Woolgar separates an effect of technology from the technology. It might be argued that its effects are an essential part of the technology, which is what in fact the dominant essentialist technology discourse assumes. Against essentialism but sceptical of a purely ‘technology as text’ discourse, Russell and Williams (2004) think it important to ask how we are to understand this negotiability of technology? What role does the materiality of technology have? Do artefacts have affects over and above socially constructed properties? How can social interactions and communications be mediated by technology? The Role of Organisation in Understanding ICT: An Alternative to Woolgar Technology seems to become purely a matter of language (or of thinking) rather than materiality in Grint and Woolgar’s construction. For some, the materiality of technology matters. The Woolgar and Grint approach of ‘technology as language’ has been adapted by adding a concern for the dynamic interpretive interplay surrounding design, development and use of technology within and between organisations using a metaphor of technology crystallising in particular contingent circumstances (Fleck 1993). Also, Grint and Woolgar’s approach has been further challenged by drawing a distinction between production and consumption (31). So, in this critique, the social shaping of technology occurs both outside and inside adopting organisations (e.g. Dawson 2000, p51-56). It also involves consumption both in and out of an organisation. So political processes of choice and negotiation are shared by a broader network of socio-economic relationships and structures. The disagreement with Woolar’s position isn’t fundamental. The idea that technology is constantly open to new interpretation is challenged. McLoughlin and Dawson (2003) contend that though there is no final place of interpretation of technology there are periods when meaning is stabilised across a number of stakeholders and users which can then constrain and/or enable the use of technologies. They may also unlock previously stabilised technologies and as with Dawson’s position seems to be sympathetic with loosening the direct effects of the materiality of technology (McLoughlin and Dawson 2003, p33). This continuing critique of technological discourse has opened up questions as to the relationship of technological change and organisational action. If technologies are not always as open to interpretation as Grint and Woolgar et al claim then the possibility of dissociating ICT from the policy discourse may be more difficult than proponents of this idea think. This is a worry that drives the next part of the thesis. If ICTs are by nature really more part of the actual policy discourse than critics think then ICT in schools is just a tool for enabling the continuation of the discourse. Opponents of the educational vision embedded in this discourse but who are also wanting ICTs to be a positive force in schools are then faced with a dilemma when confronting ICTs in schools. If ICTs have to be embedded in education according to the terms imposed by the dominant discourse then removal of the discourse removes ICTs. It is because of this that approaches to technology from theorists like Woolgar, Grint, McLoughlin and Dawson are important contributions to unbuckling ICT from the dominant policy discourse. An alternative (or supplement) to Woolgar’s idea of treating ICTs as texts is to examine the relationship between ICT and its users. This approach can agree that technology isn’t totally open to interpretation but that the role of actors enables escape from any claim the ICTs have to work in a certain way and have necessary effects. Actor-focused studies of technology and organisations place a central focus on the role of technology users in assessing the impact and understanding of technology (e.g. Pettigrew 1973, Buchanan and Boddy 1983, Wilkinson 1983, Weiss and Birnbaum 1989). These approach changes in organisations as being linked to strategic choice perspectives on organisations rather than the result of technological determinism (Child 1972). There are different approaches to theorising the effect of different actors on technology. Both ‘Social action’ approaches within sociology of organisations, (e.g. Goldthorpe et al 1968) and ’Labour processes’ approaches (e.g. Baverman 1974, Noble 1979, 1984) explain how technologies were constructed for certain political purposes. They drew attention to the socio-economic context, legitimacy, organisational actors’ interests shaping technological change (e.g. Daft 1978). In this approach, technological change is constructed as an outcome of political negotiation and practices (e.g. Kantor 1988, Barley 1990, Clausen et al 2000) such as ‘Collective co-operation’ (Burgelman and Sayles 1986, Day 1994, Laurila 1998) or ‘Managerial succession’ (Child and Smith 1987, Langley and Truax 1994, Boeker 1997, Zucker and Darby 1997) and assumes that people are central to the adoption and implementation of technological change (Preece 1995). Co-evolutionary and structurational approaches emphasise an ever-enduring interplay between technologies and organisations over time. Technological change is theorised as being produced and influenced by organisational communities formed around technological innovation (e.g. Tushman and Anderson 1986, Anderson and Tushman 1990, Rosenkopt and Tushman 1994). A cyclical nature of change is thus identified. Technology and organisations change in a form of successive cycles. Change is both a matter of intention and serendipity. Actors at different levels of an organisation make change possible (e.g. Burgelman 1996, Lovas and Ghoshal 2000). Technological change and organisational action are constructed as being inherently inseparable (e.g. Barley 1986, DeSanctis and Poole 1994, McLoughlin and Dawson (2003) Orlikowski (1992, 2000). In these approaches ‘Technology’ becomes understood as a behavioural product construed in use and influenced by the interests and characteristic of users. This contrasts with essentialist readings of technology as well as with the anti-essentialist, post modernist idea of technology as metaphor or text (Grint and Woolgar 1997) by making more of the interplay between constructivist understandings of technology and its materiality. However, it assumes with Woolgar that technological change is unpredictable. Adoptions by actors cannot always control change in predictable ways and there is nothing deterministic in the implementation of technology. This is important in the context of trying to deny claims that technology is predictable. The dominant discourse puts ICTs as central to its vision because it makes claims about what it necessarily will bring about. These theorists denying the predictability of technological outcome, use and development are thus important in undermining these central claims in the discourse. The advantage claimed for an ‘actor focused approach’ over Woolgar’s more post-modern ‘technology as text approach’ is that it can foreground actor impact whilst preserving the facticity and materiality of technology (e.g. Floyd and Lane 2000). It is able ‘… to provide analytical means which enable us to make sense of the materiality of technology as a ‘hard place’ and the interpretative flexibility of technology as a social construct’ (McLoughlin and Dawson 2003).
The chapter has sought to show that the policy discourse placing ICTs into schools understands the technology in a certain way. Technology is understood as bringing about the new social reality of Globalisation and knowledge economies. Much of the literature surveyed in this chapter attempts to question this assumption. Technology and its effects become a matter of social interpretations and actions and these are not as predictable and deterministic as the dominant discourse suggests. Woolgar has been taken as an important theories in this by taking an position very clearly opposing the idea that technology have to be defined in ways determined by the technology. His idea that technology should be understood as texts, open to and dependent on different readings, is an important stance opposing the assumption of a single correct interpretation that is embedded in the dominant discourse. Other theorists have been briefly signalled to show that there is a sophisticated body of work that undermines a central feature of the claims being made about the role of ICTs in the dominant educational discourse. They all are plausible reasons for explaining why the introduction of ICTs into Secondary schools has not had the impact predicted by the discourse. This critical literature gives plausibility to the claim that technology is unpredictable. However, the central point of all this discussion is that there are several powerful approaches to dissociating ICT from the main ideas of the dominant educational policy discourse. The thesis recognises, though, that so long as ICTs are understood as being from within the discourse many of the problems for education remain. The discourse has hegemonic status and does not appear to be weakening. ICTs are a central part of this. The power of discourse is to fix some meanings and exclude others. The approach taken by critics in this chapter attempt to reintroduce excluded meanings about technology. What the analysis of the educational policies suggests is that the discourse is resistant to these alternative positions. Much of the literature that welcomes ICTs transformational power tends to be critical or agnostic about the policy ICT discourse in which it is embedded and many enthusiasts for ICTs tend to argue for ICTs in schools despite the dominant policy agenda rather than because of it. This has led to a rather confusing picture whereby an almost defining symbol of the new discourse, ICT, is being used as both a symbol of much that the discourse embodies as well as much it opposes. The thesis finds that there is much more momentum in the transformational agenda which seeks to establish a different kind of educational purpose than that established by the current discourse. It tends to be one that sees education and ICT as a process open to continual debate as to what it potentially can be. Techno-enthusiasts tend to theorise about ICTs role in schools to open up the debate about the purpose of education, of what learning and teaching are through examining their complex relationship with ICTs. They challenge essentialist, fixed views of this relationship and propose opening up new conceptual spaces within which a different educational discourse might be proposed. One thing that all the critics seem to suggest is that there is clearly a problem to be solved, in that they are proposing ways of developing understandings of ICT different to that proposed by the policy agenda. However despite all the critical literature and research the thesis has established that there is little indication that the discourse is changing and its hegemonic status remains untouched. Much of the critical understanding of this policy discourse has attempted to retain enthusiasm for the transformational benefits of ICT in education by problematising the way ICT has been understood in the discourse. This literature has argued that ICTs can’t be used in any one predictable way. As the thesis noted when examining the policy sociology of Ball in the previous chapter, discourse is a social practice primarily using language and images to produce and maintain a certain fixed set of ideas and understandings. In so doing it attempts to remove alternatives. It requires the predictability the critics deny. In the next chapter the thesis intends to build on the issues this literature raises. However, it intends to telescope away a little from inside the discourse itself and ask a question about the origins of the discourse itself. In maintaining itself there are references to key ideas, as examined in earlier chapters, such as the ‘knowledge economy’, the ‘information society’ and ‘globalisation’ that all frame the way ICT policy in schools and elsewhere is supposed to be understood. Woolgar et al have exposed the interpretive texture of technology that denies the idea that anyone can predict how ICTs have to be used and what outcomes will follow from their use and development. What the next chapter does is to question whether the idea of being able to cluster the ideas of the ideology is as necessary and possible as the discourse makes it seem. Just as Woolgar et al expose the false claims of the determinism of technology, denying its predictability, what the thesis is going to do is try and show the invalidity of the claim of the dominant discourse that changes in technology and changes in education can be measured using the same value. The next chapter then looks at the way the introduction of ICT into schools has roots in certain ideas about modernity, in particular the theories around post-industrialism. It will try and show that theories of post-industrialism have been very influential but have also involved misunderstanding the nature of technology and the nature of educational processes. In enquiring into the origins of this misunderstanding the chapter will show that one theory of post-industrialism avoided the mistake. The theory was dismissed and its important insight missed by its critics. The consequences are reflected in the dominant policy discourse.
CHAPTER 6:
The question of why ICTs have not been transformative in the ways that the discourse enthusiasts suggest has led to speculation about the nature of ICTs themselves (e.g. Woolgar and Grint, 1995), the nature of schools (e.g. Cuban and Tyak 1995) and many researchers in the field of education and ICT have tried to work out reasons for the apparent non-transformational impact of ICTs on schools (e.g. Selwyn and Facer 2007, Cuban 2001, Selwyn 2008) as was argued in the previous chapters. Obvious enthusiasts for ICTs, such as Heppell, remain enthusiastic about ICTs’ potential to transform even though they recognize that the potential is still largely unfilled beyond small scale projects. In this chapter the thesis proposes looking at the original versions of the powerful discourse that has placed ICT as the defining technology of a global knowledge economic vision. The thesis proposes that many of the defining features of the vision which were developed first by Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Government of the 1980s and further developed by the New Labour Government of 1997 onwards were taken from ideas about the changing nature of modern society being discussed in the late 1960s. It was being proposed that a radical shift was occurring in the developed first world economic social systems, one where societies were progressing from a state of Industrialism to one of post-Industrialism. The thesis suggests that out of the competing theories of post-industrialism the Thatcher and Blair/Brown governments in the United Kingdom developed policies reacting to its implications. One of the early theorists of post-industrialism was the American sociologist Daniel Bell. His idea was that of an ‘Information Society.’ Bell figures largely as a key figure in the development of the sociological construct of the ‘Post-Industrial Society’. Alan Touraine first used the name ‘Post Industrial Society’ in 1971 but even the most formidable negative critics of Bell’s theorising of the construct agree that Bell produced a powerful though ultimately flawed account of what this might be (Kumar 1995). In the light of these criticisms, it is important to be clear that Bell is not being used because his theory of an Information Society is considered good sociology. The thesis has already noted that there is a large consensus within the sociological community that Bell’s construct of ‘The Information Society’ ‘…is of little use to social scientists, and still less to the wider public’s understanding of the transformations in the world today’ (Webster 2002. See also Castells 2000, p10 who writes: ‘we should abandon the notion of ‘information society’). The thesis merely notes an aspect of his work that make a study of Bell’s work compelling. This is an aspect of Bell’s theory that has been either overlooked or summarily dismissed: that the axial principles are separate realms. As will be argued in this chapter, this offers a new and potentially fertile ground for considering the place of ICTs in this discourse. It is therefore important to note that the reference to Bell in this thesis should not be taken to suggest that it is about Bell’s construct in any broader sense. It certainly does not require close alignment with the enthusiasts for Bell’s theory (e.g. McHale 1976, Martin 1978, Evans 1979, Toffler 1980, Gates 1995, Negroponte 1995, Dertouzos 1997, Angell 1995), all of whom disregard the single aspect of Bell’s sociological construct that the thesis foregrounds and which the next section of the chapter will briefly outline.
The single idea taken from Bell is simple but hugely contested. Bell uses the notion of an axial principle to argue that there are different realms, each with a different governing logic. For Bell there are three different realms: the techno-economic, the cultural and the political. Figure 1 illustrates the independent realms. Figure 6.1: Bell’s Axial Principles
According to Bell, to assume culture and economics are regulated by the same values and develop in the same way involves making a category mistake. The axial principles enable different kinds of change to be identified for each realm. Crucially technological change has to be understood in a different way from cultural change. The idea that one machine makes another obsolete makes sense and describes the way technology makes processes more efficient. The motor car replaces the horse drawn cart because it is more efficient. The idea that one cultural idea makes another obsolete is not the way cultural change happens; many cultural ideas come back, whereas old technologies do not. Samuel Beckett didn’t replace Shakespeare but added to Shakespeare and was added to by Shakespeare. The linear change of technology is contrasted to the ricorso, deepening, circular movement of cultural change (Bell 1980). In his essay ‘Veblen and the Technocrats’ Bell writes about the utopian prophet Theodore Veblen and his attempt to forge a view of society that elevated the engineer to the role of the Philosophers in Plato’s Republic (Bell 1980, p69-90). What is interesting is Bell’s comment that Veblen’s Utopianism was based upon an unrestricted belief in technology to bring about the rationalistic society. Bell calls this the ‘rationalist fallacy’ (Bell 1980, p87) and comments: ‘No matter how increasingly technical the underlying social processes become - and in the advanced industrial countries, with the rapid growth of computer technology and the consequent effect on the labour force, the process is rapid indeed - social change, at bottom, is a political decision; or rather, the crucial turning points in society are ultimately determined not by cursive social changes, but only as these changes come to a head in some political form’ (Bell 1980, p87). Veblen is an instructive figure, in that in his Utopianism Bell presents us with a theory that emphasises production rather than consumption; shows contempt for non-productive elements in society such as merchants, soldiers, priests, bureaucrats and lawyers; and showed contempt for the academic learning of his time, which drew him into a final ironic situation identified by Adorno (Bell 1980 p89). ‘Every happiness barred him because of the pressures of dreamless adjustment and adaptation to reality, to the conditions of the industrial world, showed him its image in some early age of mankind.’ In this the technocrat longs for the restoration of some ancient world, a kind of ‘reversion’ as Adorno has it to a world where the producer and her technology can, unfettered by parasitic groups of non-technocratic producers, bring about Eden. For Bell, Veblen is therefore developing a picture of what may well be an early version (he died in the 1920’s a disappointed, outsider figure) of what drives the current policy discourse. Bell writes of Frederick W Taylor: ‘… indisputably the shaper of ‘modern’ capitalism in establishing the principles and methodology of the rationalisation of work in terms of ‘efficiency’ the ideas of Veblen and his technocratic dream seems to be one that schools are familiar with when arguments for the introduction of the digital technology are being proposed’ (Bell 1980, p90). My argument has been that principles for supporting the introduction of ICT in schools are cast in terms of greater rationality and efficiency, principles that in terms of techno-economics are dominant but in the cultural and political realms are not applicable. Bell suggests that to talk like that is to ignore these other realms and is in fact to substitute them for the economic realm. Bell resists reducing explantions of change to a techno-economic base : ‘There is in human nature a capacity for creativity and surprise - to reorder things when he has the will. The fundamental question is not one of the machine - or, as EM Forster once asked, of what will happen when the machine stops - but of will, and the possibilities of rational cooperation. Those remain the recurrent questions of all political and social life’ (Bell 1980, p65). Bell asserts that to ignore other realms in trying to understand and manage any social system would be to make the mistake of ignoring crucial factors of other realms governed by different logics. The cultural and the political realms are not accidents of a parasitical class, as Veblen and the technocrats believed, but are rather necessary and vital features of any social landscape that mustn’t be ignored.
A second source of this Bell roots in Descartes’ revolution of concepts. Descartes and then Kant began thinking about thinking as a way of organising rather than as merely copying. The idea of the mind as something active, as a formulator of plans reworking the categories of nature meant that the idea of reworking, reformulating, changing and rerouting nature became operational. Francis Bacon and Karl Marx are described by Bell as being ‘prophets’ of this view. For Marx technology is the way that mankind will be released from slavery to nature and become freed from bondage. ‘The “end of history” is the substitution of a conscious social order for a natural order. The unfettered reign of technology is the foundation of abundance, the condition for the reduction, if not the end, of necessity’ (Bell 1980, p19).
It is at this point that the thesis finds a space for education that isn’t regulated by the techno/economic realm but rather by principles from other realms. And it will be recognised that a similar thesis has been propounded before in terms of education and technology. In his book ‘‘Back To the Rough Ground’ (Dunne 1993) he reintroduced an Aristotelian division between two kinds of thinking. Techne is aligned with thinking that makes or produces (poiesis) things. It is practical, technical thinking that enables calculation, measurement, efficiency, means (ta pros to telos) end (telos) thinking, whereby ends can be specified in advance and reached by following a prearranged, planned method (Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics Book 6). Poeiesis was the activity of producing outcomes. In contrast to techne, another type of knowledge was Phronesis, which was a more personal, experiential, supple and less predictable and measureable knowledge which brought about activity as praxis. Praxis aims at conduct in a public space with others which attempts to realize excellences that are recognised by her community as making up a worthwhile life. Praxis was less detached, more intimately concerned and connected with how one understood oneself and ones relationship with others than poiesis. It was reason that worked in contexts that were more unplannable, subjective, non-linear than those where poiesis worked. Dunne calls one ‘technical reasoning’ and the other ‘practical reasoning’. He claims that the modern era’s self-image has been that of a technological society. ‘Technical reason seemed to be bolstered by the full energy of the Industrial Revolution – reinforced by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill as well as by the confidence in science of what was still an Age of Progress…’ (Dunne 1993, p11) Dunne argues that the predominance of techne has distorted our self-image and that without Phronesis a more personal, committed, flexible type of intelligence is ignored. It is a type of intelligence required for religion. John Henry Newman in his ‘A Grammar of Assent’ showed that religious thinking was inexplicable and distorted if understood as a form of techne. Collingwood in his ‘Principles Of Art’ argued a similar case for understanding art. Dunne argues that a similar category mistake has been applied to education. The point of mentioning Dunne’s idea here is to draw attention to the idea that Bell’s idea of separate realms of change and action, governed by different axial principles, was already something familiar in educational discussions. Chapter 2’s discussing metaphors of schools as markets opposed to schools as monasteries is another example of this. The affinities between these two examples of separate realm ideas taken from education suggested that Bell’s theory might well be useful in the context of education even if sociologists found little in its detail to recommend it generally.
The distinction between technological/economic and educational realms is a relevant issue when discussing Bell’s realms. The claim of the thesis is that education is a practice of the cultural realms rather than the techno/economic. Its axial principles are therefore irreducible to any other axial principles. This is a view found in many educational theorists. Representatively, Lawton and Cowen (2001, p17) write that, ‘For 2000 or even 3000 years educational discourse used the language of philosophy and religions and not of economics. Defining how to live wisely in the world (and not how to live well off it) has been the oldest educational question’. Yet contemporary educational practitioners working from within the current policy discourse are constrained in their efforts to work with this agreed discourse. A leading post-modernist critic of the discourse argues that the current discourse makes it ‘…difficult to imagine a community of learning that reaches into both the past and the future and is constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation’ (Lasch 1995, p40). The challenge is to respond to those who feel no obligation to distinguish between educational and economic values. According to McLaughlin (2000) current educational policy is construed as encouraging individuals to become consumers not citizens. The policy discourse has mutated education into a business model creating an educational sector that is ‘obsessed by cultivating the ability to stay on top of the latest trends’ (Totterdell 2000, p131), with bespoke curriculum offers and with ‘personalization’, all of which accepts a need to treat individuals as customers. The thesis reads Bell as offering a theoretical position that claims that this approach changes the subject. An education system that tries to develop according to economic and technological axial principles is one that is no longer education. This is a position familiar from my earlier readings of Pring in chapter two. What the use of Bell does is to propose that there may well be something about the very nature of culture, and therefore education, that means that it will always offer a clash of values to those of technology and economics. The ICT education policy discourse determines this perspective. Bell offers a theoretical tool useful to crack open the discourse, identify the extent of how much it subsumes other realms and in doing so may well offer an explanation of why it has so far seemed incapable of addressing issues that raise values not addressable in a techno-economic framework. The key issue of ‘digital divide’ involves values such as equality, self-expression and Bourdieu’s (1993, 1997) notion of ‘human and social capital’ (e.g. DiMaggio and Hargittai 2002, Grant 2007, Wellman 1999) that perhaps seem intractable in the dominant discourse because that discourse has suppressed the axial principles of political and cultural realms that best incorporate these values.
The theory of the division of realms and their axial principles was developed out of Bell’s construct of an ‘Information Society’ (Bell 1974b) which was Bell’s theoretical construct of post-industrialism. This construct involved several features that have been considered requirements of the current policy discourse discussed in the thesis even though it has largely been discredited as sociology (e.g. Kumar 2005; Grant 2007). These involved an optimistic Enlightenment belief in progress that predicted the dominance of professional and technical employment (especially scientists and engineers), of an increased need for education and training, leading to an emergence of better educated workforce (general up-skillling of society), in the growth of the service sector and white collar jobs replacing declining blue collar heavy industrialism, in computers being the defining technology of the social arrangement, of information/knowledge becoming the new chief commodity, of the centrality of theoretical knowledge for innovation, of work becoming conceived as a game against/between people rather than against nature/fabricated nature (Naisbitt 1984, Coyle 1997, Stonier 1983, Drucker 1969, Toffler 1970). All of this is governed by the Axial principle of efficiency. Bell made clear that all this took place in a techno/economic realm which could not exhaust social reality. Most of those enthusiastic towards his view of the Information Society ignored this, assuming that it affected not just the techno-economic realm but also the political and the cultural realms as well. It is this element that my thesis takes up again as offering an interesting paradigm shift to the dominant theories constructing post-industrial discourse.
There is a huge literature that shows how many aspects of Bell’s theory of an ‘Information Society’ has either been displaced or disproved (e.g. Kumar 1995, Webster 2002, Mackay 2001). Kumar, a powerful representative of the criticism of Bell’s position, provides an authoritative overview of Bell’s approach to post-industrialism and how it has in turn been rendered largely obsolete by two chief rivals (Kumar 1995). In this section of the chapter I shall review the literature that extensively critiques Bell’s idea of the ‘information society’ and contrasts it with its chief rivals, Post-Fordism and Post-Modernism. When specifically addressing the single idea that the thesis is taking from Bell, the separation of society into three realms, Kumar writes; ‘‘If the coming of the information society is, as all claim, as revolutionary a change as the coming of industrial society, then one would surely expect profound changes to occur throughout all society, and not simply – as Bell would have it – in the ‘techno-economic structure’.” (Kumar 1995, p13) The thesis thinks Bell’s approach offers a constraint to the claims of the techno-enthusiasts by rejecting this expectation. So where techno-enthusiasts may argue that ICT in the policy discourse can be changed there may be still an assumption that it can determine cultural and political changes. Bell’s theory of post-industrialism conceived the influence of technology to be purely in the realm of the economic. Cultural and political change would be ordered by different axial principles. It is this aspect of Bell’s construct of an Information Society that even enthusiasts for the theory found too improbable to take seriously (Kumar 1995). Toffler, an ardentent enthusiast for Bell’s Information Society, writes about ‘the rise of a new civilisation’ (Toffler 1981, p5) and another enthusiast, Naisbitt (Naisbitt 1984, p281-2, also p211-29), looked forward to a complete restructuring of institutions based on the computer (Kumar 2005, p15). Others write about the notion of an Information Age as being a ‘consensus society’ (e.g. Stonier 1983; Meyrowitz 1986, p321-3; Sussman 1989, p62-3), a plentiful society (Stonier 1983, p213; King 1982, p27) a ‘Computopia’ (Masuda 1985, p625-32), and Angell wrote about how it was ‘… a new order … the future is being born in the so-called Information Superhighways…[and] anyone bypassed by these highways faces ruin’ (Angell 1995 p10). All of these readings of Bell assumed that the whole of society would be altered rather than just the techno-economic realm. For Kumar the second version of Post-industrialism was Post-Fordism. What Kumar calls Post-Fordist critics have powerfully dismantled much of Bell’s version of Post Industrialism. There are many reasons for Bell’s theory to be seen as inadequate. Webster (1995, 2002) is typical of many critics who argued that the idea of an ‘Information Society’ was inadequate as a tool for understanding and explaining the world because it was too imprecise about the terms it used and that it confused quantitative change with qualitative change. In particular: the criteria for determining exactly what an ‘Information Society’ was remained unclear and inconsistent. It was also unclear how ‘information’ was being used in this context. A critic, Stevens, wrote that: ‘so diverse are the definitions of information today… that it is impossible to reconcile them… there is little consistency in the way in which the term information is used… resulting in an assumption, probably incorrect, that there is a broad underlying definition of information that encompasses all uses of the term in all fields that is commonly and widely understood’ (Stevens 1986, p5). Zhang Yuexiao reported 400 conceptions of the term ‘information’ in research literature over various fields, emphasising the issue (1988, p400). What critics thought was being claimed was that more information (whatever that was) led to qualitative social change without explaining how this happened (e.g. Giddens 1985, p178; Postman 1985; Washburn and Thornton 1996). It was vague about other key terms, such as ‘theoretical knowledge’ (Kumar 1978, p219-30; Stehr 1994; Webster 2000; Giddens 1994, 1981, p262) and ‘technology’. Post-Fordists tended to assume a deterministic approach to technology of the sort critiqued by Woolgar discussed earlier. Post Fordists were reluctant to admit that there was anything significantly different in the modern social organisation despite the quantitative increase in information and knowledge used all assumed that there was no division of realms and also that it was a fact of social reality that was obvious. Kumar’s third version of Post-industrialism, which he calls the Postmodernist approach to Post Industrialism, is understood by Kumar as making the same assumption, that though there isn’t a single cause or dominant perspective explaining social reality, denying the inflexibility and determinism of post-Fordist arguments about a ‘control society’ (e.g. Beniger 1986, Webster and Robins 1986) it assumes all realms and perspectives can be in principle at least used to explain Post-Industrial discourse. It too, therefore, claims that there is no impermeable division of realms governed by different axial principles and change logics.
Notions of post-industrialism developed against Bell’s construct of the Information Society, as noted above. What follows is a brief summary of these developments. A Post-Fordist Post-Industrialist construct arose out of its criticism at a time during the 1970s of an oil crisis. These critics thought Bell’s theory far too optimistic, arising at a time of abundance and perceived economic success and technological innovation. In place of Bell’s optimism it offered a pessimistic Enlightenment view. It argued that more information doesn’t create a new society (e.g. Webster 2000) and that Bell was being ahistorical (e.g. Hirsch 1977, Stretton 1976) and that the new technology merely continued trends that had begun a long time before. It was merely a phase of capitalism (Webster 2000). For the post-Fordists the idea of post-industrialism was just a new version of a ‘control society’, a development of the scientific management ideas of Taylorism, developing a discourse of managerialism (e.g. Gerwitz and Ball 2000). All that was happening was that mass production techniques were being refined/developed (e.g. Beniger 1985, Rosenbrock et al 1985) in the new context of Globalisation and new ICTs (e.g. Webster 1986, 1989, 2001) involving more bespoke and flexible modes of production and distribution involving small-batch production, economies of scale, specialisation of jobs and products to increase responsiveness. ICTs were understood as being central to this and new types of consumer were replacing ideas of social class. But the post-Fordists did not think any of this was positive and progressive. Through the rise of white collar workers and the feminisation of the workforce (Ball 2008), post Fordists emphasise the role of ICTs to control. For example de Benedetti writes; ‘Information technology is basically a technology of coordination and control of the labour force, the white collar worker, which Taylorian organisation doesn’t cover’ (de Benedetti 1979). They claim that what resulted was deskilled clerical work rather than a general upskilling (Cooley 1981, Boden 1980, Forester 1987, Rosenbrock et al 1985) that led to further professional deskilling (e.g. Baran 1988, p697). The fact that the new economy required a deskilled workforce for many of its service jobs was taken as a decisive contradiction of Bell’s optimism and also the view that more and better educated workers were needed. A Post-Modernist construct of Post-Industrialism was critical of the post-Fordists. It was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the Enlightenment agenda of progress because it sought to replace that agenda with a post-Enlightenment one. It was critical of the Post-Fordist reluctance to engage with alternative perspectives to its own and its failure to engage with perceptions of contemporary people who do find ICTs as positive and doing more than delivering oppressive social control mechanisms. The post-modern perspective refuses to think that there is just one single dominant perspective and so it understands the viewpoint of Enlightenment progress as one view among many other competing views. However, it does tend to see ICT as a defining technology of this post-industrial age, radically configuring notions of space and time of mass production via virtual realities and a radically discontinuity with the past. It also sees information displacing land, labour and capital as the key value (e.g. Stonier 1983, p8) but by focusing on the ‘communicative texture’ of the post-modern world it focuses on the potential of ICTs to develop the potential of this texture over discourses, messages, images, exponential growth and radical transformation of everything. It is a perspective of radical discontinuity and fragmentation: ‘A profoundly atomising and disintegrative cacophony…inescapable’ (Lyotard 1984). There’s a sense in which post-modernists over-generalise principles of culture in the same way as techno-economicists overgeneralise the principles of their realm. It is clear that the current policy discourse placing ICT into schools has drawn on Bell’s optimism but ignored the division of realms Bell built into his theory.
The policy discourse used to introduce ICT into Secondary education links economic well-being to the centrality of ICT to successful post-industrial society. The dominant competing versions of Post-Industrialism all make this claim for ICT. It is carried forward into policy discourse generally and education policy specifically. In the literature policy is formulated in terms recognisable in the post-industrialism discourses. In each there is a general optimism about the impact of ICT. It is claimed that a new society needs new skills and that its workforce must be able to use ICT (e.g. Hepp, Hinostraza, Laval, Rehbein 2004). ICT is connected to productivity enhancement. Given that knowledge is what the new society has to produce more of, and education is a key to educational purpose, ICT is intimately linked to educational success. In the discourse, schools are required to revise learning practices and create better learning environments in order to produce quality education. ICT is at the core of this transformational agenda. The discourse of ICT education policies typically conceive of four approaches to ICT in schools (e.g. Kozma 2005). ICTs improve delivery and access to education. ICTs are the focus of learning. ICTs improve student understanding, increase the quality of learning and increase the impact of education on the economy. And finally ICTs improve knowledge creation, technology, technological innovation, knowledge sharing/access and contributes to the transformation of education systems to create sustained economic growth and social development. The discourse presents a set of key benefits of ICT to learners (e.g. Papert 1997). They are supposed to bring about enhanced motivation and creativity due to new learning environments. They create a greater disposition to research and problem-solve focused on real situations. They help achieve a more comprehensive assimilation of knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment. They have a greater ability to generate knowledge and a greater capacity to cope with rapid change, complexity and uncertainty than anything else. They develop new skills and abilities fostered through technological literacy (e.g. Kozma and Anderson 2002; Kozma and Wagner 2005; Hepp, Hinostraza, Laval and Rehbein 2004). This general glance at the discourse of ICT educational policy suggests a direct link between the discourses of Post Industrialism and ICT educational discourse. What is overlooked is Bell’s division of realms which offers a way of understanding constraints on the centrality of ICT in all these discourses. When Bell writes about ‘the cultural contradictions of capitalism’ (Bell 1976, 1974b, 1980) he grapples with the division of realms and the different axial principles governing them. It is recognition that the values of one realm may be directly opposed to those of another. So long as education is considered as part of the techno/economic realm then ICTs will also be asked to work according to the values of that realm. But if education is removed from that realm and placed within the cultural realm then ICT in education should be considered according to the axial principles of that realm rather than those of the techno/economic. The arguments of critics of the current ICT discourse tend to argue for a conceptualisation of ICTs as being aligned with values closer to those identified as cultural than techno/economic in Bell’s scheme. If education is understood from the cultural realm then a conceptual space has been found for the ICTs that need not engage directly with anything to do with the techno/economic. ICTs as ways of developing the values of self-expression reconceptualises its purpose in ways that align it with key educational values. Bell offers a conceptual space for ICTs that doesn’t require that it be considered in terms of the economy at all. In this way it enables thinking around ICT to be preoccupied with a cultural agenda, one that predates the existence of ICTs in schools. In this way the genealogical investigation suggests a way of thinking about ICT in schools before the educational discourse that placed it there was developed.
The chapter has investigated the recent origins of the current educational ICT policy discourse. The contested construct of post-industrialism has been considered as a root of the discourse. An overlooked feature of one attempt to understand modernity has been a tripartite theory of different realms in Daniel Bell’s idea of the ‘Information Society’, an aspect of his theory considered even by enthusiasts for his theory as being unlikely. The thesis is contending that perhaps the failure of the policy discourse to transform English Secondary Schools is linked to something like this ‘contradiction.’ By arguing that education should be part of the cultural realm ICTs are required to also be shifted in that realm to the extent that they are to be engaged in educational transformations of any kind. By decoupling ICTs from their techno-economic realm the thesis suggests that the ICT educationalists who are working at reconceptualising ICTs can reconfigure their arguments in terms of pure educational, cultural values rather than having to link up with those of the techno-economic. The thesis of realms and axial principles therefore shifts education itself out of the policy discourse. The thesis is using Bell’s division to allow for educational values to be separated off from techno-economic ones and analytically as a framework. The crucial thing to recognize is that the thesis is not developing a theory like Bell in terms of a thesis about post-industrialism. It recognizes that that is where the idea came from but it rejects that. Instead the thesis claims that educational values can be understood outside of the techno-economic realm. The point is to argue that the educational values are not to be confused with other values. This is the point of using Bell in the thesis. The reading of Bell is not Bell’s but is just a way of disagreeing with thinking of students as ‘consumers of educational output’ (Vanderstraeten 2004, p195) and of picking up Geoffrey Hinchliffe’s issue (Hinchliffe 2001) about whether education should have some sort of autonomy directed toward intrinsic ends, of being valued for its own sake as suggested by Oakeshott’s metaphor of schools as monasteries. Bell offers alternative discourses to the techno-economic and so he increases the range of vocabularies and values that can be used to speak about education. Bell opposes the idea that there is a foundation discourse, a single unified principle at the base of understanding society. Bell will be deemed a useful theory if it is more productive than assuming there is merely a single realm, that of the techno-economic. The idea is that it will link more satisfactorily with ways of talking about education and schooling (and in the particular scope of this particular thesis, English Secondary schools and education) than assuming a single discourse. In this, the justification for using Bell is purely in terms of whether it manages to achieve this. If, for example, the discussion about educational purpose understood in terms of a contrast between market and monastery (see chapter 2) is better understood using Bell than not, then the use of Bell will be justified. Justification is therefore ‘to the best argument.’ I can’t think of any knock down reasons for adopting Bell other than this. By taking the Axial Principles as ways of looking at the techno-reformist agenda there is the potential to analyse why despite the explicit and continuing confidence of the techno-reformists to change teaching and learning in schools there has not been the overwhelming success predicted. What the use of Bell does is to propose that there may well be something about the very nature of culture, and therefore education, that means that it will always offer a clash of values to those of technology and economics. The ICT education policy discourse determines this perspective. Bell offers a theoretical tool useful to crack open the discourse, identify the extent of how much it subsumes other realms and in doing so may well offer an explanation of why it has so far seemed incapable of addressing issues that raise values not addressable in a techno-economic framework. The key issue of ‘digital divide’ involves values such as equality, self-expression and Bourdieu’s (1993b) notion of ‘human and social capital’ (e.g. DiMaggio and Hargittai 2001, Grant 2007, Wellman 1999) that perhaps seem intractable in the dominant discourse because that discourse has suppressed the axial principles of political and cultural realms that best handle these values. Applying Bell’s theory of Axial principles to the educational policy discourse introducing ICT into Secondary schools is something that strikes me as being useful and has not been attempted before. This criticism does not deny, of course, that the construct of an ‘Information Society’ has largely been rendered obsolete as sociology. It has undoubtedly been influential in forming later formulations of post-industrialism and these in turn have been influential in determining the policy discourse for the introduction of ICT into Secondary Schools. The next chapter outlines the methodology for approaching a discourse analysis of some documents associated with the policy discourse currently being used by teachers in a selection of English Secondary schools. The documents themselves will be subjected to analysis and then the actors using them will also be analysed.
CHAPTER 7:CASE STUDY METHODOLOGY
The thesis has so far involved looking at literature related to the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools. Although recognising that this process began in the 1980’s the thesis has suggested that the main period of this agenda began in earnest with the New Labour Government which came to power in 1997 but had begun presenting policy discussion documents as early as 1995 (see chapter 2). The thesis has examined the way that the introduction of ICTs was part of a larger reform agenda that involved a reengineering of the public sector. The thesis has looked at this as a ‘policy discourse’ and has found Ball’s work on policy sociology helpful in sketching the main aspects of this discourse (see chapter 3). The thesis also looked at the recent history of some of the predominant terms used in the discourse and located them in various readings of ‘Post Industrialism’. Although as a sociological idea ‘Post-Industrialism’ and many of its constituent terms, such as ‘Information society’, ‘Knowledge economy’ and ‘Globalisation’ are considered suspect for being too imprecise and ambiguous (e.g. by sociologists such as Webster 2001), they are nevertheless used as key terms in the discourse affecting the change agenda. They will therefore feature in this thesis, albeit primarily as data rather than as an analytic frame. The thesis has then raised a question as to the role of ICT in this discourse. It has been used as a symbolic technology, capable of representing all of the positive futuristic elements of the discourse. ICT has been seen as a central cause of the transformations of modern society and something unavoidable, powerful and in many ways defining of what the new modernity is (see chapters 3 and 4). Education has been rethought as a response to this vision of the world and ICT in schools has been a key area of reform resulting in massive investment and a massive presence in schools. The thesis has examined the literature that fails to find positive educational impact following the massive investment and massive presence of ICTs in English Secondary schools. It has examined how critics and commentators, as well as enthusiasts for ICTs in education, have confronted this failure of transformation on any large scale (see chapter 2). There are various approaches to explaining the failure of impact and many of the leading theorists argue for a reconceptualisation of ICTs, of education, of schools, of agency regarding institutional change and so on. However there remains the question as to why these ideas have not yet brought about the required transformation in English Secondary schools (see chapter 4). The discourse analysis that is undertaken in the thesis is part of this investigation. The analysis wants to find out how the techno-economic values that dominate the discourse have their effect, and how there might be resistance and conflict within the discourses, reflecting Bell’s claim that there are alternative axial principles separate from those of the techno-economic realm. This chapter explores how to study these issues, within the context of Ball’s model of policy sociology. It looks at the general principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), briefly outlines different approaches within this tradition, and considers critiques of CDA. The chapter then shows how CDA will be related to Bell’s concept of the Axial categories.
ICTs are an essential part of the current policy discourse in English Secondary Schools developed by the New Labour Government since it came to power in 1997 (see chapter 2). The research problem being investigated in this part of the thesis asks whether the techno-economic discourse established in chapter 3 also applies to the policy process. A comparison with a subject pre-dating the discourse helps focus the problem. Mathematics taught in schools has been incorporated into the reform discourse. Changes to Mathematics however can be critiqued through understandings of mathematics that existed before it was linked with the discourse. Pros and cons of changes can then be evaluated by comparing mathematics in schools post 1997 with what it was like before. This procedure, of asking what it was like before the new educational reform discourse was introduced, can also be applied to education itself. Education existed before the discourse. It is quite possible to ask whether education in the discourse is different from what it was like before and develop ways of interpreting these changes from a variety of perspectives. This avenue is not open to ICT in schools. ICT in schools is prominent in the educational policy reform discourse (Ball 2008) and is associated with all of the claims made for the discourse, from globalisation to the knowledge economy. The introduction of ICT in schools is strongly associated with these reforms and it is hard to dissociate it from the discourse though perhaps it is not exclusive to it. It is for this reason that the thesis introduced an idea found in Daniel Bell’s sociology of post-industrialism. Bell resists the dominant idea that if there are changes in the technological/economic sphere, such as the development of a knowledge economy/information society and globalisation, that these are changes that will affect all aspects of society. In the previous chapter the thesis examined Bell’s use of the different axial principles governing three separate realms of society, the techno/economic, the cultural and the political, and his idea that change within each realm takes place according to different principles. The thesis is concerned with education and the place of ICTs in education. The reform discourse presents ICTs as educationally transforming agents, replacing previous notions of education rather then enabling better understanding of educational values. The discourse analysis is therefore asking how policies position ICT within English Secondary Schools. Having done this the thesis will apply the CDA to Bell’s theory of Axial Principles. This is what is new to the approach the thesis. By doing this the thesis hopes to discover whether the techno-economic realm, governed by the principle of efficiency, dominates the educational discourse at the expense of cultural and political principles? It is in order to highlight the possible roles of cultural and political principles that Bell has been introduced.
The literature reviewed in previous chapters has partially answered Research Question 1 ‘What happens when ICT is introduced to Education?’ and has focused on the case of English Secondary Schools. ICT has been introduced within an evolving policy discourse that has been broader in influence than just education. A general policy discourse has been implemented which has introduced ICT as its key technology and this has been placed into educational policy. RQ2 ‘How does policy influence this process? In particular what have the policies been? How were they formed? How are they expected to influence practice?’ some of these questions have been partially addressed in chapters 3 and 4. A striking feature of the policy process outlined in chapter three has been the assumption of an unproblematic transference from a general policy reform discourse of key ideas and concepts driving a techno-economic vision to an education setting. RQ3 is an attempt to raise the possibility that there might be a problem in the assumption of transference. It was for this reason Bell’s theory of Axial Principles has been introduced, which is a theory that suggests such transference is not only problematic but maybe a category mistake.
There is no single stabilised methodology identified by the term Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). However, there are some common features to work that use this label. CDA attempts to analyse the way texts and language relate to power structures within the social space in which they are brought into being and maintained. According to key CDA writers, discourse is ‘a form of social practice’ (Fairclough & Wodak 1997, p258). Discourse takes a deconstructionist stance towards texts, analysing them in order to reveal hidden connections and disconnections between its various constituents, such as the words it uses, its layout, the ordering and emphasis of points, rhetorical and genre pointers and so on in order to tease out the rich layers of meanings and the theoretical and ideological structures that govern writing and reading. Language in its context is of critical importance to CDA (Wodak 2001). CDA attempts to place understandings of how texts are constructed and meanings maintained within a social, historical and genealogical context. In order to do this it draws upon a diverse field of academic disciplines: linguists, philosophy, sociology, history and hermeneutical approaches from English Literature and the Arts. The production and maintenance of power relations are of particular interest to CDA theorists, and the key writers are Fairclough (1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2001, 2003), Van Dijk (1993, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001), Gee (1999, 2005), Van Leeuwen (1993, 1995, 1996), Wodak (1996, 2000, 2001) and Scollon (2001). Interestingly, CDA theorists tend to present their own versions of CDA in order to nuance their particular focus of analysis. This goes some way to explaining why there is a divergence of CDA methodologies within CDA itself. However Fairclough and Wodak (1997) offer eight principles that they argue constitute CDA but they cannot be considered defining as the practice of CDA itself would find such attempts to maintain a fixed position ironical in the light of CDA’s critical deconstructing agenda. The eight principles are useful however in capturing the flavour and atmosphere of CDA. The first of the eight principles that CDA focuses on are social problems. It looks to the language used within a certain social practice to understand how and how far the problems are connected with this language. This relationship is assumed to be hidden either on purpose or otherwise and requires teasing out by examining power relationships hidden in the texts used (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). So in the case of this thesis, educational ICT policy in English Secondary Schools is being approached as a problem that needs analysis. Research Question 3 involves asking whether the concepts being used in the ICT policy discourse are educational. Analysing texts may reveal how the discourse creates and maintains this problem. Their second principle is that CDA assumes that power relations are discursive. Power is fixed and re-fixed through negotiations within a discourse. Power is a key element in CDA. Foucault is a key figure for CDA theorists because of his work in this field and so because of this much CDA will be to some degree Foucauldian. Their third principle is that any particular discourse constitutes society and culture. According to this idea, to know a discourse is to know a society. Language is therefore assumed to have a huge power by CDA, which explains why textual analysis and linguistics have been influential. For CDA every nuance of language is terrifically important because of its relationship to understanding the whole of a social organisation. For example, subtle analysis of language can reveal the hidden biases towards particular race and gender groups in a society. Feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonialist theory is particularly adept at teasing out these biases. Discourses are also taken to be ideologically productive. Definitions of ideology are as diffuse and difficult to pin-down as definitions of CDA but ideology is about the interconnected set of dominant ideas that structure belief in the social context analysed. For example the literature reviewed in chapter three suggests that the general policy discourse is a vehicle for an ideology dominated by ideas of globalisation, ICT and the knowledge economy. CDA also requires that the historical context of a discourse be understood so that the forces from this context are also factors in how the production and reception of the text is contextualised within this historical moment, as well as the ideological and cultural elements that feed into and constitute understanding the discourse (Fairclough & Wodak 1997; Wodak 1996, 2001). Chapter two and chapter three have given details of the historical context of the discourse to be understood in this thesis. A further principle of CDA is that of ‘mediation’. This term is about how a text and society relate through a process whereby the text affects beliefs in the society which in turn effects readings of the text. CDA does not assume that texts determine how a society understands itself but rather the mediation is one of meanings and interpretations running back and forth, where production and reception is a discursive process of reflexivity. The dynamic nature of this mediation gives CDA an open texture (Fairclough 1992, 1995; Scollon 1998, 1999, 2001). In order to capture this some CDA theorists have introduced the idea that there are different ‘orders of discourse’ (Fairclough 1992, 1995). Wodak (1996), like van Dijk (1997, 2001), tries to capture the mediated nature of social realities analysed through the process. A further key principle is that CDA is hermeneutical in a rich sense. Hermeneutics offers an interpretation that also explains the social problem it has fixed on. It involves an openness to new interpretations and readings. It accepts as part of its own process that different readers and writers of texts will bring understandings that will destabilise any single attempt to fix an interpretation and explanation. CDA is particularly sensitive to how parts of a text relate to its whole, and how a single word, for example, may contain as much importance as larger elements. Meyer (2001) contrasts this approach with any ‘analytic- inductive’ approach, maintaining that this better grasps the complexity of a text’s language. Basic concepts have emerged for CDA. This is the analysis of the relationship between Macro vs. micro in the language of a discourse. This is the awareness that a micro use of language can also be part of a macro level use. So an expression of a personal opinion by an MP may be understood as a micro level use of language but may also be part of a macro level policy enactment. So in a preface to a government document, the opinions about globalisation may be read as enacting both a personal and a policy position. Many of the documents analysed in the discourse analysis in this thesis are introduced by Government ministers expressing both their own opinions and enacting policy in this way. CDA might analyse this through engaging with the different groups the person expressing the opinions may be identified with. So she can be identified as a member of various different groups. So her opinion might be one expressing the opinions of mothers, daughters, single parent, MPs, cabinet Ministers and so on. Analysis would then engage with the structures of power and the processes of mediation between her identity as a member of each group to understand how her expressed opinion in the text contributed to the discourse. Her contributions to actions would also be analysed as a producer, mediator and reader of the discourse. So too would the context in which the text is placed as well as the personal and social knowledge informing her opinions. CDA finally considers itself to be scientific in its approach to discourse, seeking to reveal ‘… opaqueness and power relationships. CDA is a socially committed scientific paradigm. It attempts to bring about change in communicative and socio-political practices’ (Fairclough & Wodak 1997). 7.4.1 Directions of Critical Discourse Analysis CDA has historical roots in the neo-Marxist analysis of the Frankfurt School pre the Second World War (Agger 1992; Rasmussen 1996) which emphasised a more fluid and open-ended, post-modernist approach which opened Marxism up to different interpretations and meanings. CDA’s current focus on language and interpretation may be traced to the emergence in the UK and Australia of ‘critical linguistics’ (Fowler et al.1979; see also Mey 1985). van Dyke suggests that developments in psycholinguistics, sociology, psychology (Birnbaum 1971; Calhoun 1995; Fay 1987; Fox and Prilleltensky 1997; Hymes 1972; Ibanez and Iniguez 1997; Singh 1996; Thomas 1993; Turkel 1996; Wodak 1996) reacting against assumptions of ‘asocial’, ‘acritical’ approaches dominant in the sixties set the direction of CDA development. CDA in particular is the development of a foregrounding of value-ladeness of all activities and thoughts. CDA assumes that every position of interpretation is governed by perspectives that are not always detected and are often deliberately opaque and difficult to grasp. CDA tends to position itself as ‘a different "mode" or "perspective" of theorizing, analysis, and application throughout the whole field. We may find a more or less critical perspective in such diverse areas as pragmatics, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, rhetoric, stylistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography, or media analysis, among others’ (van Dijk). This direction has meant that it is particularly attractive to a range of different theoretical approaches to analysis. Its stress on hermeneutical practice has meant that many proponents of CDA have been attracted by a post-modernist analytical framework which spurns any master-narrative but instead proposes a multi-layered and multi-vocal approach whereby texts mediate both within themselves, their different audiences and the different groups and sub groups making up the dynamic process of interpretive, explanatory practice within any field analysed. Power and control are also, as noted above, key concepts for CDA. A CDA will typically attempt to uncover the sources of power and control in a text. Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ is a key element of much CDA. Hegemony is the term used to identify the various ways that dominant groups ensure that their power is maintained through laws, norms, habits, rules and general consensus. In this thesis the general reform discourse’s hegemonic ideas about the modern world as being Globalised and being a knowledge economy and Information society, of ICT’s role as a defining, symbolic technology is being studied in terms of their hegemonic status. The CDA of the texts carried out in the next chapter is to uncover the operation of control and power in the texts and problematise them. A CDA may ask how powerful groups maintain their power over a public discourse like education. Symbolic force is one way where texts reproduce hegemonic views of a certain perspective (van Dijk 1996). Power over the production of such texts and power to restrict production of alternative views requires that analysis examines how this happens. Social, economic and political structures are all part of the process of regulating discourse and are therefore possible foci of a CDA. Both context (Duranti and Goodwin 1992) and the structure of texts involved in hegemonic discourse production and maintenance are part of CDA. Genre can fix content and perceived purpose and meaning of a text (Wodak 1984a, 1986) and CDA is sensitive to both included and excluded voices (Irvine 1974). Similarly, the choice of what topics are included and excluded from texts is important. For example who controls the choice of topics is important (Gans 1979). Just as men control topic choice and topic change in conversations with women (Palmer 1989; Fishman 1983; Leet-Pellegrini 1980; Lindegren-Lerman 1983) social elites and power groups control topics as a means of maintaining their favoured discourse. CDA therefore looks at the way elites control discourse but it also analyses the way powerful groups operate to control a discourse. The focus of CDA is on how the groups controls and maintains the created discourse. If there is widespread use and acceptance of particular discourses, such as that China is about to take over the world’s economy and take all the knowledge jobs, then a text may present the need for education in a way that exploits these beliefs. If people believe that computers are necessarily empowering then again a text may present ICT education in a way that exploits that belief (c.f. Wodak and van Dijk 2000). 7.4.1.1 van Dijk: Socio-cognitive model CDA has also engaged with media. van Dijk has been a key figure in this development. He argues that: ‘Discourse is not simply an isolated textual or dialogic structure. Rather it is a complex communicative event that also embodies a social context, featuring participants (and their properties) as well as production and reception processes’ (van Dijk 1988, p2). van Dijk has enabled CDA to move beyond just the internal stories embedded within the texts themselves and incorporate analysis of the practises and institutions of the production of texts themselves. This analysis involves an adversarial CDA which embodies an Us vs. The approach. Between a discourse and society lies a mediating model of beliefs of individuals of groups. These models are the combined and intertwined beliefs and attitudes of the groups that the individuals are members of and they are understood, according to van Dijk’s theory, as contrasting and opposing outsider group models. Polarised groups are therefore key to his CDA approach. Enthusiasts for the educational ICT policy discourse, therefore, would be analysed in terms of their opposition to groups who were not enthusiasts. van Dijk would analyse the historical, political and cultural context of the discourses in which this conflict arose, would analyse the different groups involved, especially the power relationships between the various groups, would identify the Us vs. Them opinions, drawing out both implicit and presupposed opinions and examining the formal structures of texts such as choice of words and rhetorical devices in order to help emphasise polarised group opinions. Wodak: Discourse Sociolinguistics Another direction taken by CDA has been the discourse sociolinguistics of Wodak, influenced by Habermas. Wodak writes: ’Discourse Sociolinguistics…is a sociolinguistics which not only is explicitly dedicated to the study of the text in context, but also accords both factors equal importance. It is an approach capable of identifying and describing the underlying mechanisms that contribute to those disorders in discourse which are embedded in a particular context-whether they be in the structure and function of the media, or in institutions such as a hospital or a school-and inevitably affect communication’ (Wodak 1996, p3) For Wodak there are three important elements to language that must be analysed in a CDA. Wodak thinks that language always involves power and ideologies and so any analysis of a text must examine the attitudes and values embedded in the power relationships exhibited in a text. She also thinks that language must be studied in its historical context so that events of the present and events during its formulation in the past are examined. Finally, Wodak thinks that any CDA must be systematically sensitive to the interpretivist stance of readers and listeners of texts and draws a conclusion from this hermeneutical approach that ‘The right interpretation does not exist; a hermeneutic approach is necessary. Interpretations can be more or less plausible or adequate, but they cannot be true’ (Wodak & Ludwig 1999, p13). Asking whether the discourses being examined in this thesis alter over time was something that arose from Wodak’s work. Fairclough Fairclough approaches CDA from what he calls a Critical Language Study perspective (Fairclough 1985, p5). This approach intends to be ‘…a contribution to the general raising of consciousness of exploitative social relations, through focusing upon language’ (Fairclough 1989, p4). The approach Fairclough takes is to try and bring social science and Systematic Functionalist Linguistics (SFL) together under a common theoretical framework. Interestingly, the approach of Fairclough has been one that has accepted much of what this thesis has questioned. Fairclough writes that: ‘…the past two decades or so have been a period of profound economic social transformation on a global scale’ (Chuliaraki and Fairclough 1999, p30). The CDA of this thesis intends to analyse how this assumption has been made to be taken for granted. Chuliaraki and Fairclough (1999) think that the changes ‘are to a significant degree ...transformations in the language, and discourse’ (p.). From this perspective CDA is about creating an awareness of ‘what is, how it has come to be, and what it might become, on the basis of which people may be able to make and remake their lives’ (p4). RQ3 follows the approach by asking whether within education in English Secondary Schools this is a legitimate transformation by challenging the naturalisation of the techno-economic agenda by destabilising interpretations of the language in the texts associated with the discourse. Fairclough, like van Dijk, has three elements to his framework for analysing what CDA calls a ‘communicative event.’ The first element is ‘text’, which his framework requires is analysed in terms of its ideological representations, the way it is constructed to highlight certain elements and the way it attempts to organise the relationship between the intentions of the writer and the reader. The second element is the discourse practice, which is an analysis of how a discourse text is edited through its initial production as text and then the discourse processes that change the text through processes of distribution and consumption. The text is never, therefore, merely the words on a certain page but has to involve the multifarious and evolving ways it is produced and mutated through processes of writing and reading and discussion, argument, adaptation, reinterpretation and so on. This kind of CDA is in a sense an acceptance of a Chinese whispers process of textual analysis where there is no definitive point of entrance into the process nor one for exit either. A core concept in Fairclough’s approach is ‘intertextuality’. Fairclough (1992, p84) defines intertextuality as, "basically the property of texts being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contradict, ironically echo, and so forth". What Fairclough’s approach is about is the recognition that meanings in texts (and out of texts too) are often composed of echoes and repetitions, some of them, ‘manifest intertextuality’, being overt and signalled through the use of quotation marks and reference acknowledgements and others, ‘constitutive intertextuality’, are the discourse conventions that structure the texts. So, for example, an official document may use formal conventions and these conventions are part of what makes the document official. The third aspect of Fairclough’s approach is what he calls the Sociocultural practice. This dimension echoes Bell’s tripartite division of social realms to a large extent in that he asserts a theory of three dimensions of sociocultural context for analysing a communicative event: the economic, the political and the cultural. Any CDA need not engage with all three levels but might examine just a single dimension to understand a ‘communicative event’. This socio-cultural practise overlaps with Bell, endorsing Bell’s logic of tripartite realms and Axial Principles explained in chapter 5. Banister Banister (Banister et al 1994) derives many of his ideas about CDA from Fairclough. However, unlike many who write about CDA, he has developed steps to structure the reading of text in order to identify discourses: ‘It should be said that these steps conceal the feelings of muddle and confusion that will overwhelm the research approaching a text for the first time. As the process of analysis goes on, this feeling of bewilderment will be succeeded by conviction that the analysis is banal… the steps in this analysis particularise and detail the conceptual and historical work of Foucault on the construction, function and variation of discourses as they pertain to the requirements of qualitative research… (Banister 1994, p96) The methodology used in this research will follow Banister’s stepped approach these steps will be outlined later in this chapter. 7.4.2 Criticisms of Critical Discourse Analysis
Connected with this kind of argument is the ironical fact that many non-emancipatory agents, such as advertising executives and PR publicists, are trained in CDA. The theory as such is therefore not inherently emancipatory and relies on the attitudes and politics of those using it to be so. Some Positivists claim that CDA is not scientific and that the author’s intentions can be misrepresented. The thesis does not claim that any of the findings are scientifically valid instead the thesis foregrounds Wodaks emphasis on the subjectivism of the hermeneutic approach. There is also criticism of CDA because it seems to imply that ‘discourse analysis’ is not critical. It is also criticised for claiming to be too ambitious: ‘It aims to achieve a very great deal more than other kinds of discourse analysis. Not only does it claim to offer an understanding of discursive processes, but also of society as a whole, of what is wrong with it, and of how it can and should be changed’ (Hammersley 1997, p252). However defenders such as Haig argue that CDA is more realistic now than it was at the beginning even though he claims that the issue of the warrant for making genuine knowledge claims is an issue seldom raised in CDA.
In the light of this background knowledge of CDA the thesis approaches the research in a particular way. Firstly, in answering RQ1 and RQ2 the thesis has partially established that there is a policy discourse dominated by what we have labelled the techno-economic realm. The work of Ball has been prominent in identifying this. What seems to be assumed in all the literature around this discourse, both positive and negative, is that this ideology is capable of delivering educational concepts. What this thesis is asking is whether this is the case or not. By applying the CDA to Bell’s Axial Principles the thesis hopes to find new understandings of the policy process running through the discourse of the New Labour reform agenda. What follows is a description of the steps constituting the CDA being used to address RQ3. There will be two separate parts to the research approach and each part will consist of a further two parts. Part 1a will be about the selection of individuals for the panel who will put forward documents to be analysed. Part 1b will outline how the documents to be analysed will be selected for inclusion in this thesis. Part 2a will outline the stepped approach as developed by Banister which will be used to analyse the documents. Part 2b will include two additional steps developed by the researcher, one of which will include using Bell’s Axial Principles. The research takes a case study approach. ‘Case study’ is an holistic research method adapted for analysing a specific individual case. Although there is little agreement as to what actually constitutes a case study (Merriam 1988), such studies tend to be able to bring to life a process orientated phenomenon such as the educational policy process that this thesis is investigating. The approach has some drawbacks: it rarely involves quantitative information, for example, and generalisation from the individual case is hard to achieve in a credible way. It relies heavily on interpretation and the application of theory, which is consistent with the use of CDA. However, so long as attention is paid to why the case is being studied then careful generalisation may be possible and the results of these studies can be as valid as other kinds of qualitative analysis methods. This particular case study is what Stake calls an ‘instrumental’ rather than an ‘intrinsic’ case study (Stake 1994). The interest in the individual case is in how it can help understand the external issue of how ICT is being introduced into English Secondary schools. There is no particular interest in the actual individuals and documents except in how far they help develop an understanding of the particular issues raised by the thesis. The thesis has made clear that this outside interest is why the case study has been chosen. Campbell sees a case study as a small step towards a grand generalisation (Campbell 1975). In this way the thesis is making a contribution to understanding the policy process by exploring how various actors take a role in developing and implementing policy. The approach commits the researcher to making choices about what to report and what to leave out. These decisions are expected to be made whilst writing the results. It is a deeply subjective process but researchers using this approach, such as Stake (1994), Campbell (1975), Hamilton (1980) and Yin (1989) for example, suggest that this is unavoidable and does not invalidate it. One of the key ideas for embarking on a case study is to capture what can be learned from studying what a specific group of people were reading as they took part in the process of introducing ICT into Secondary Schools in a particular place at a particular time, working at a local level within a national framework. The timeframe for this study was between 1997 and 2010. The reason for this particular ten-year period was that the research began in 2005 and therefore this time frame had already occurred. The period was a broad period allowing the analysis of documents to cover the period of intense activity around the issues of ICT in schools. In 1995 New Labour already started putting out their position papers although they were not yet in power. From 1997 onwards the policies putting ICT into schools begun, as discussed in chapter two, and it was for this reason that the time period of the case study was chosen. People from a single local area were chosen who were all involved in this National policy process. What is intended is that the meanings discovered in this small case study of this policy process weakly represents the process generally. The researcher has selected a small case study which seems to offer an opportunity to learn such a thing (Stake 1994 p243). 7.5.1 Data GatheringPart 1a: Key Actors Selection
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Part 1b: Document Sample Selection The analysis will be of selected written texts. Understanding that a text is more than merely the written text, but has to include the process of production and its maintenance through various audience readings and adjustments, as noted above when discussing CDA, each text will be read drawing on knowledge of the historical context brought to the text.
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7.5.2 Data Analysis
Part 2a: Critical Discourse Analysis The approach is influenced by Wodak’s understanding that language always involves power. Analysing the texts, therefore, means trying to tease out how power is used in the texts. Also, having researched the context out of which these particular texts had been produced, it will be possible to interpret them drawing on knowledge of this historical context. The thesis also found her remarks about having to take a hermeneutic approach helpful in answering critics charging CDA with making spurious claims of scientific objectivity. Wodak’s approach settles for subjective persuasiveness (Wodak and Ludwig 1999). The rigorous procedures that will be adopted for the analysis are to be used as scaffolding for plausible interpretations of the texts rather than attempts to produce definitive, empirical truths. Having asked the key actors to nominate the text and using the criteria in Table 7.2 above the analysis will proceed using steps developed by Banister see table 7.3 (Banister 1994, p96-104).
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By going through the steps described above the analysis will explore how discourses ‘form the objects of which they speak’, as Foucault puts it, rather than ‘…authors who speak through the text as if it were a kind of transparent screen upon which the writer’s intentions were displayed’ (Banister et al 1994, p100). Part 2b: Additional Steps to Banisters CDA Having completed steps A to T above the thesis will then move to part 2b of the research method, which will attempt to examine what this analysis looks like over time and through the lens of Bells’ Axial Principles. Table 7.4 outlines the final two steps in this analysis.
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Having completed the steps above the various data will be graphically represented to help clarify and give immediacy to the analysis. However, hermeneutical work will then be required to interpret what this raw data means. Only after this part of the analysis can a conclusion be reached.
This Chapter discussed approaches that could be used to generate evidence for the research questions. The theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been discussed as an approach to achieve this. Finally the methodology that the analysis will take has been detailed and an assessment made of what the analysis can and cannot be expected to achieve. The following chapter presents the findings from the document analysis for the case study (1995-2010).
CHAPTER 8:RESULTS OF THE POLICY ANALYSIS
Having completed the analysis as outlined in the previous chapter, this chapter presents the results. The chapter comprises the findings from the two part research approach. Part 1a presents the representatives who are referred to as actors (Ball 2008), and part 1b presents the documents selected. Part 2a will present the results of the CDA and part 2b will present the outcomes of the additional two steps. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the findings. In doing this the chapter attempts to answer RQ3: What concepts can be used to explain the influence of the policies? Are these Educational concepts? If not, does this make a difference?
8.2.1 Actors Part 1a of the research approach was to identify the key actors who within the context of this case could nominate documents for analysis. The key actors represented a mix of people working either within English Secondary Schools in North London or from bodies that worked with these Secondary schools. All were selected because of their role in giving or supporting teachers’ practice in light of current policies. They included representatives from Becta, from Cambridge Education, from a London Borough Council, from a City Learning Centre and from North London Secondary Schools. These key actors were chosen according to the following process: Head teachers of 10 English Secondary Schools in North London were approached and asked to identify the person most likely to influence the use of ICT in their School. Each head teacher nominated a person. This person was then asked to nominate key documents that they had used. The request to the head teacher produced a range of different staff, including a technician, two deputy head teachers, two heads of department, a bursar, an ICT director, two assistant head teachers, a CLC Manager and a Local Authority Senior School Improvement Officer. Table 8.1 provides a description of the institutions these people represent. Table 8.1: Membership of Actors
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8.2.2 Documents Selected Part 1b of the research approach was to establish the list of documents to be analysed. Below are the documents selected according to the criteria described in Chapter 7 section 7.5.1 (Table 7.2: Reference Criteria for the Selection of Documents). For a full list of nominated documents please see appendix I. Table 8.2: Short Listed Educational ICT Documents Included in this Research
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Not all are ‘policy’ documents but the way they were chosen by the actors is taken to be part of the policy process nevertheless. As Ball discusses in his policy sociology, a policy is a set of disparate documents and actors interacting in diverse ways. The fact that these documents were chosen as documents having an important role in the introduction of ICT in schools according to the actors is the key to understanding their relevance to the thesis. The fact that these are not so visible in other policy analysis suggests that they have failed to account for part of the policy process. This is a central contribution of the thesis in that it makes explicit the process involved in policy reform.
Having successfully accomplished Part 1a and 1b of the research approach by establishing a list of documents, which would serve as the focus of the CDA, Part 2a involved analysing these using Banister’s CDA approach which can be found in Chapter 7, section 7.5, table 7.3 (Banister 1994, p96-104). 8.3.1 Step A: Description of the text
8.3.2 Step B: Free association to the text
These four steps were completed together. The items and objects that were identified by an initial reading of the 9 documents are listed below: Teachers Pupils School leadership – Head/Leadership/Governors Parents Technical Support Staff Business Government Homes Schools/Colleges ICT Hardware ICT Software ICT Generally It is noteworthy that ICT hardware, ICT software and ICT generally are presented as three separate items this is because in the documents there is discussion of the hardware and software separately and that on top of that ICT is discussed in general terms without any specific reference to hardware or software sometimes it is to do with ideas about ICT which can not be categorised as hardware nor software. For example in the documents any reference to hardware is picked up, any reference to software is picked up however there are statements that do not refer to either of these explicitly but do talk about ICT. These are categorised as ‘ICT Generally’ statements. For example in the document ‘Secondary Schools ICT Standards’ (Becta 2003) there are statements on several pages such as ‘Good ICT opportunities lead to higher standards, ICT can create innovation, ICT can create confidence’ these will be read as being about ICT Generally. Through the list of items and objects, (people are included in this), the text is allowed to speak. The identification of this list was dependent upon reading the texts with reference to aspects of the research project in mind. Selection of ‘Business’, ‘ICT Hardware’, ICT software,’ and ‘ICT generally’ were partly chosen because of this awareness. Analysis of educational objects such as schools and colleges, and related persons such as teachers and pupils, were selected because they were considered essential aspects of English Secondary Schools, the domain the thesis is focused on. It was out of the initial reading of the documents that the 12 items/objects were selected. A second reading of the documents was undertaken, and more for each list item, this time focusing on the first item/object on the list (teachers) to map out how much ‘teachers’ were referenced in the documents. The documents in which these statements were embedded were using them in patterned ways, which began to be made clear as texts. Certain list members were discussed more than others were. So, for example, ‘teachers’ figured to some extent in all the documents. This was not a surprise given that the documents were all related to schools and ICT. It would have been remarkable if teachers had been absent. Yet other objects such as ‘Business’ were sometimes absent from the documents. The absence in one document of any reference to an item/object was read in relation to its absence or presence in others. It was in developing an awareness of the relationship between documents that a nuanced reading was possible that gave an insight into the changing context for this policy work. This initial reading of the documents showed that explicit references to ICT generally were high, as were references to the specifics of ICT, hardware and software. Only one document did not specifically reference software this was ‘Fulfilling the Potential: Transforming Teaching and Learning through ICT in Schools’ (DfES, 2003a), however all discussed technology at length. The way they were presented in the documents will be discussed later. Schools, teachers and pupils were also referenced in nearly all the documents. This was not surprising given that these documents were primarily aimed at teachers. But even for these three items there were omissions. Pupils did not appear at all in ‘Fulfilling the Potential: Transforming Teaching and Learning through ICT in Schools’ (DfES 2003b), for example; and overall pupils were only referred to two thirds of the number of times teachers were. The presumed audience for the documents were teachers and therefore the inequality of the number of references may be partly explained by this. However, in terms of how these items/objects were being used to structure the various discourse of the documents the emphasis of teacher over pupil references enabled the discourse to more easily ignore pupil interests. Similarly, the number of times the schools were referenced throughout all nine documents hugely outnumbered the times homes were referenced. Again, in this initial stage I began to place the dominance of institutional voice over domestic voice as a key structural element in the discourse generated across all the documents. Only in one instance in a document called ‘Preparing for the Information Age: A Synopsis Report of the Education Departments Superhighway Initiatives’ (DfEE 1997b) did schools not appear in a document and in that case neither was there a reference to homes. Again this was consistent with the assumption that the documents were assumed to be largely aimed at workers in schools and related professional interest groups rather than parents. ‘Home’ in the context of this reading was positioned as being opposed to school. Home was assumed to have a different set of voices and powers than that of schools. This connected with mention of ‘Parents’ which, even when considered alongside ‘Homes,’ was less of a focus than ‘School/Colleges’ or teachers. This also connected with the way discourses about teachers were distinct from and more prevalent than those about pupils. This suggests that in these texts, pupils are positioned separately from schools. School leadership’s presence in the documents was significantly less than that of pupils. In one of the documents ‘ICT in UK Schools: An Independent Inquiry’ (NCET 1997) leadership was absent and in no document were they talked about more than ‘teachers’. Indeed in several, ‘teachers’ were much more the focus than the leadership. Yet the distinction between school leadership and teachers was not necessarily an obvious one to construct, given that in schools the leadership is mainly composed of senior teachers. In as far as teachers were school leaders, the assumption of difference between school leadership and teachers was at least partly presumptive of other things, such as that a Managerialist culture created a big difference between discourses of teachers outside of management and those within management. However, knowledge of the historical context of these documents (see earlier chapters) suggested that the development of a Managerialist culture was prevalent and relevant in understanding the reasons for making this distinction. In terms of the ‘right to speak’ it was clear that simply counting mentions of a group merely gave a first impression that then needed to be further developed. The fact that technicians were by far the least frequently mentioned item/object in the overall text immediately suggests that this group was a submerged, largely suppressed one. Not only were technical staff mentioned fewer times than any of the other items/objects but they were also overwhelmingly presented in negative terms. In terms of a discourse then this was a group that was absent from the text for much of the time and one that was spoken about negatively. For example in the document ‘Connecting Schools, Networking People’ (Becta 2002) technical staff are seen to be expensive but a resource that is needed. In another document ‘ICT in Schools: The Impact of Government Initiatives Five Years on’ (HMI 2004) technical staff are seen as rarely well used in secondary schools In terms of overall presence, ‘Business’ is not mentioned anywhere near as many times as schools, ICT generally, pupils, schools or ICT hardware. However, when it is mentioned, it has the highest proportion of positive comments of any group for example in the document ‘Transforming the way we Learn: A Vision for the Future of ICT in Schools’ (NGfL, DfES, 2002) the connection between education and ICT is seen to boost industry and commerce (p4) and Businesses claim to be full partners in educational developments (p5). Indeed it is the only item/object to be the focus of having more positive statements than negative ones. Only ‘pupils’ come close to this, having nearly half and half positive to negative ratio. Here is an example of how reading the details rather than the prevalence can help uncover how the discourse is constructing its key messages. On the same principle that suggests that technical staff are not writing these texts, the fact that most statements about Business are positive suggests that Business is a group empowered by and the dominant discourse in the text. 8.3.4 Step G: Different versions of the social world co-existing in the text
8.3.5 Step H: Imaginary authors’ responses to those who contradict
Teaching can be improved: This groups together the following claims: that teachers need to be developed so that the potential of ICT can be realised; that they are holding back the tools, rather than tools holding back them; and that they need to be subservient to the tool (an idea linked to discourse of Information Society) Learning standards can be improved: This discourse is about the claim that Schools are acting as a barrier to home ICT use; ICT learnt at home is not being utilised for ICT at School (an idea linked to discourse of Information Society) Leadership can be improved by ICT: This discourse claims Business and Government are key agents in School ICT Leadership because Business and Government represent ICT in Schools therefore the underperformance of School Leadership effects ICT (an idea linked to discourse of Managerialism) More ICT investment is good: This discourse claims that Schools should invest more and more into ICT and its potential; and that any underinvestment in ICT will hamper ICT (an idea linked to discourse of Knowledge Society) Participation can be improved: This discourse is a claim that Pupils and Teachers need to participate and become more involved in the potential of ICT (an idea linked to discourse of Globalisation) Pupils are disengaged: This discourse is claiming Schools are failing to match the authentic environments of ICT; and as a result pupils are disengaged from the ICT (an idea linked to discourse of Information Society)
The documents analysed do not offer sustained critical discourses that challenge the dominant ones. An explanation may be the way the dominant discourses are able to explain both success and failure of ICT in schools, as discussed above.
Additional steps to Banisters’ CDA To move the discussion further additional steps have been taken. These additional steps reflect the way the reading has been influenced by research in the previous chapters around the policy discourse process and the development of ICT in education as well as the historical basis of an Information Society. So far, this has helped explain some of the dominant ideas in the discourse and shown that other perspectives are being excluded. What these additional steps add here is a further layer of understanding by applying Bell’s axial principles to the policy process discourses and examining the chronological context of the discourses used in the policy process as suggested by Wodak. In order to do this the thesis intends to relate the CDA to Bell’s Axial Principles. Then, the thesis will analyse the text chronologically from document to document to see whether discourses change over the time of the case study. 8.4.1 Applying Bell’s Axial Principles What the CDA found was that the discourse strands in the text all focused on the Axial principle of efficiency, the principle that guides activity on Bell’s techno-economic realm. The three realms in Bell were mapped against the discourses, all of which were about the techno-economic. This was the case even when, on the face of it, the terms were cultural and political. For example, there was a clear political reading of ‘participation’ anticipated when the documents discussed the connection between schools and home use. The notion of the ‘digital divide’ was also something that seemed to address issues of social justice and would therefore be connected to the political realm in Bell’s system. However, the terms were used in the discourse as tools for enabling a more efficient establishment of the economic aims of the Information Society. The terms were co-opted by the axial principle of means/end efficiency into the techno-economic realm, and so were, arguably, no longer forming part of a political discourse. Educational issues are considered as part of the cultural realm in Bell’s system, where the emphasis was on the development of self awareness and growth. It would have been expected, therefore, for ideas around teaching and learning to have been governed by the Axial principle connected to the cultural realm. However, these themes were only discussed within a discourse that related them to the ends of the economic, governed by the principle of efficiency. Continually throughout the documents the terms and themes of the cultural were found to have been co-opted by the techno-economic realm. In none of the documents was the education of young people using ICT related to principles of self awareness and growth. Throughout the dominant discourse was one of making them more efficient in a context of a Global Knowledge Economy in an Information Society. The identified dominant discourse could be seen as part of Bell’s techno-economic Realm, therefore, and the reading had established that this was an overwhelming feature of the text. By applying the CDA to Bell’s theory, what became clear was the way the discourse had managed to overwhelm the other two possible realms. What was especially interesting was to note that although the overt language of the documents seemed to refer to terms and ideas that were not of the techno-economic realm, such as ‘learning’ and ‘participation’, the cultural and political ends of those terms had been totally converted into being means for an economic end. The use of Bell has shown the way the discourse rendered invisible realms that might have been considered vital when discussing a strand of education policy process. Through Bell it was possible to see that economic issues were hidden within co-opted terms from the other two realms, the political and the cultural. For example In the document ‘Transforming The Way We Learn’ (DfES/NGfL 2002) the statement that pupils will be able, once ICT is embedded in schools, to have fun on the internet (p9) looks like a personal fulfilment statement, which is a concern of Bell’s cultural realm. However, it is not being used like that but rather is being used to back up an economic point about the need to have pupils skilled appropriately for the new Global Knowledge Economy. In the same document it is stated that a benefit of the internet is that it gives schools access to ‘cultural treasures’ (p15), but this is discussed in terms of the need for software to be developed and made available to schools. Again, the predominant concern is that of the economies of introducing ICT into schools and the creation of an ICT market around schools. This is a particularly vivid example from the documents of how assumptions about what is meant by ‘cultural treasures’ has been distorted by the discourse: even an explicit reference to culture isn’t about culture but relates to usefulness within an economic frame. Most statements are directly economic in their concerns. So, for example, in the document ‘Preparing for the Information Age’ (DfEE 1997b) there are statements about how ‘commercial providers will provide desirable and necessary openness and inter-operability’ (p37) and a judgment that there are no clear economic advantages to teachers making their own resources (p27). Similarly in the document ‘Transforming the Way We Learn’ (DfES/NGfL 2002) there are comments about the way ICT has considerable vocational relevance for many pupils, (p20) and there are many references to the advantage to Business that a link with schools will bring about. These are clearly statements about economic concerns. Similarly there are many statements that have technological concerns, even though they emerge in the context of discussions about school management and teachers. In the same document, for example, there are statements such as ‘technical complexities of ICT demand much of management’ (p11) and how there was a focus on technological not curriculum matters in schools (p54). The appearance of a non techno-economic discourse is only an illusion and the economic issue remains what the discourse is really about. So in ‘Transforming the Way We Learn’ (DfES/NGfL 2002) the statement that claims that ICT will help teachers support independent learning (p20) on the face of it looks like a cultural claim, directly speaking to educational value. However, as with other such statements that seem like claims of political or cultural value, it is just the dominant discourse co-opting discourses from Bell’s other realms. The policy process generally is operating like this throughout the text, co-opting political and cultural agendas to justify this economic end. 8.4.2 Prevalence of Discourses Over Time Wodak’s approach suggested that texts should be examined over time to place them in an historical context. With these texts, this process allows us to see if discourses developed within the policy process over the ten-year period. There was evidence that the discourses about the transformational powers of ICT that were adopted were adapted to respond to the changing situation. At the beginning of the period, the discourse emphasised the link between the presence of ICT in schools and success. The discourse was able to present the lack of any overwhelmingly successful impact on the primitiveness of the technology, the skills deficit of teachers and failures of school organisation and management structures to support its introduction. As the reforms continued over time greater stress was placed on the success of small scale research projects showing innovations working. This was linked to an emphasis on the potential of the rapidly improving technology and the fact of its increased presence in schools; however, the discourse of the deficit in teacher skills remained throughout this period. Indeed, the increased stress on the need to train and upskill teachers meant that texts which had at first seemed to suggest that ICT alone could and would transform schools was subtly developing. Over the decade the presence of ICT is largely recognised as being successfully established in many schools. The emphasis on getting the ICT into schools is therefore less prevalent in the later texts than the earlier ones. However the discourses don’t change. Instead of now identifying the lack of ICT in schools as being an impediment to producing the knowledge workers required for the Global Information Society of the discourse, the skills deficit of teachers and the disengagement of pupils become more prevalent topics. Later texts suggested that whilst ICT’s powers to transform education were undiminished, teaching needed to be good if ICT was to be able to deliver its promised potential. Despite this slight change in focus, from placing ICTs into schools to the training needs of teachers and the engagement of pupils, the same discourse with a focus on the techno-economic remained. Thus there was a shift from an emphasis on placing ICT into schools to one which made the role of the teacher more explicitly important throughout the decade under examination. The documents made generally fewer statements about the quality of the ICT in schools and more about the teachers using them. The training needs of teachers were first discussed in terms that emphasised their technical inability to use ICT. As the presence of ICT grew, the discourse shifted to an in improving rather than providing users’ skills. Wodak’s approach then did reveal the dynamic nature of the discourses involved in the policy to introduce ICT into English Secondary schools although that dynamic registered relatively modest change. For example, in the document, ‘Preparing for the Information Age’, (DfEE 1997b) teachers are positioned primarily as not being able to use ICT and requiring training. The discourse is that of the techno/economic and, being from 1997, the presence of ICT in schools was not yet fully established. Examples include claims that teachers are not ICT literate (p8–10), have ‘much to learn about ICT’ (p31), need to ‘develop web sites’ (p43) and have the potential to improve their technological aptitude (p44). There are also discussions about the poor level of ICT training for teachers up to that date (p61, 85) and of the need for ICT to somehow be integrated with teaching. Much of the document registers the poor ICT access in schools at the time, relating the teacher deficit to poor ICT facilities. It is the techno-economic discourses identified, but its context in this early document is one where ICTs are not well established in schools. By the time of the ‘Harnessing the Future’ document (DfES 2005) this discourse of deficit remains a key element of what has been identified as the dominant techno-economic discourse, but the context has shifted from one where ICT provision is poor to one where there is now ma much bigger presence of ICT in schools. So the discourse is still about the teachers having the ‘potential to improve’ (p2) and of ICT still looking for ‘good teachers’ (p10) and that teachers ‘need training (p47, 48). But the failings of ICT in terms of accessibility and reliability, plays a much smaller role in the document. The discourse has as its main subject the teachers rather than the technologies themselves, a shift in emphasis that reflects the difference that time has made on what the discourse chooses to discuss. In 1997 the discourse emphasises ICT’s the lack of presence in schools (e.g. by invoking the idea of a ‘Digital divide’, NCET 1997 p10) and argues for the potential benefits to education (NCET 1997 p14) and to society generally by increasing the presence of ICT. This discourse is about emphasising the need for ICT in general, idealised terms, as being an agent of economic transformation. In 2005, the discourse associated with ‘ICT Generally’ remains one of unfulfilled potential, of the unused, potential benefits that ICT promises, but the blame is now not on a weak presence and underdeveloped technology but now the attitude and skills of teachers. Again, this reflects a stable discourse over time but one that is agile in its ability to move its focus without compromising itself. These new discourse strands are more detailed, giving examples of specific educational benefits that ICT can bring about. They are inclusive of broader issues than just the presence and absence of ICT, which was the main focus of the earlier discourse. But the discourses are those found in the literature relating to the Information Society, the Knowledge Economy and Globalisation and the central place of ICTs in this economic vision, as identified in the earlier section. As the things discussed by the discourse change over time, the discourse is able to co-opt topics that might not have been thought to be part of the discourse. So the later discourse can be read as taking for granted the presence of ICT, where this was not the case in the earlier documents. By the time of the later documents, its presence in schools has effectively been naturalised and accepted. The later documents therefore discuss more than just getting the ICT into schools. In Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services (DfES 2005), for example, there are references to ICT’s potential impact on ‘personalised learning’ (p3), ‘motivation’ (p8), ‘flexibility’ (p11), ‘citizenship’ (p18-21) and ‘improving standards’ (p44-49). However, this is just the same discourse. These things are only being discussed in relation to the discourse strands that make up the dominant discourse. They are examples of how the discourse is more honed to different specific targets which were not part of the earlier texts. These look as if political concerns have been incorporated into the policy process, although again, these are co-opted agendas of the desired economic ends. The discourse remains one that discusses ICT generally in schools as a potential good, never a fully realised one, therefore continuing the deficit logic that runs consistently through the many discourses in the document text over the period studied. So even in this late document there are plenty of references to services needing to be improved (p6, 7), of ‘patchy progress’ being made (p12), of use of ICT in schools being still ‘too varied’ (p13). There is even the occasional reference to the unevenness of ICT’s presence (p12), although these are minimal compared to the earliest documents from this sample. This shows that the economic preoccupation that dominates the ICT policy process has remained consistent but that over time there has been a shift in what is the focus of the discourse, reflecting some success in establishing the presence of ICT in schools and a continuing recognition of lack of wholesale impact on schools.
The CDA presented in this chapter was used to develop an understanding of the policy discourses at work in the introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools. The contribution of Bell to this CDA has been to show how the economic discourse co-opts other competing discourses. In doing this a new picture emerges of the examined policy process where what might appear to be different, competing values and agendas are in fact all co-opted to economic ends. This contributes to the existing understanding that the techno-economic discourse is dominant in the policy process by showing how this dominance is established. What the thesis has revealed is that economic ends are used to govern the use of all discourses in the documents. The language of political values and the subjects usually supervised by these values (such as ‘personalisation’, ‘participation’, ‘digital divide’, ‘equality’, and so forth) have been used to progress economic, not political, ends. Political values of social justice are not available within the documents even when the language is that of the ‘disenfranchised learner’; here, for example, the key issue is rather the efficiency of a future work force. The vocational need to up-skill and transform is the actual reason for saying that there is a need to bridge the digital divide. Inclusion is about inclusion into the global economy; other values are subordinate to this in the discourse. Similarly, what seem to be key educational ends are really not educational at all, but economic. Developing good teaching and learning, the development of educational software, meeting the training needs of teachers and the learning needs of pupils is all a way to achieve economic ends. The discourse consistently focuses on the lack of teacher skills regarding ICT, which has been described here as a deficit discourse. This has its own logic which helps the economic focus to remain dominant. As explained earlier, the discourse strand of teacher deficit regarding their ICT skills is linked throughout to discourse strands about the Knowledge Economy, the Information Society and Globalisation. Undermining the professional status of teachers through disparaging their knowledge of ICT gives a reason for further training and further discussions about shortcomings of educationalists. In turn this justifies why ICT can’t realise its potential, short-cutting any evidence that might show that ICT isn’t having the desired impact. Statements about professional development and training become exclusively about teaching and learning in relation to ICT as understood in the discourse, thereby displacing and excluding other ends. Statements about schools, management and parents are also about making these fit for economic ends, although they use the language of politics and culture to hide this fact. Although the application of Wodak’s idea of tracking changes over time revealed that there were changes in emphasis in the use of discourses across this period, the dominance of the techno-economic discourse remains in place. In the later documents there is little to show that the values of the cultural realm and of education in particular are guiding the reform process. The focus tends to be on the requirement of upskilling teachers rather than establishing the presence of ICT, but despite this change of explicit focus the economic agenda remains stable and dominant. The increasing emphasis in later documents on the training needs of teachers can be seen as part of an attempt to make sure the failure of ICT to bring about promised transformations is blamed on the attitude and abilities of teachers. What sustains the continuing and increasing investment in ICT in education is the focus on the economic ends the discourse references throughout. Sustaining this investment is the creation of a massive market based around the equipping of schools and the training of teachers to use the tools. Claims about educational values are in this way removed from the policy process even though the language of those values is co-opted. The CDA has therefore done more than merely confirm the existence of a techno-reform discourse that has economic ends. It has shown how this discourse has maintained its position of dominance, by using the language, concerns and values of other realms. Political and cultural values are removed by being made to work for economic ends. It is sometimes possible to see explicit statements that seem to be about cultural values segue into what they are really about. So in ‘Transforming the Way we Learn’ (DfES/NGfL 2002) there is a statement about how ICT can make ‘pupils creative and proud’ but which continues in terms of how they will be ‘skilled up for the Knowledge Economy’ (p10). More often the explicit economic end is discretely hidden, however, so that all that is on show are references that in other contexts would be about cultural or political ends. The chapter has presented the results of a CDA. Largely based on an approach developed Banister, it added further steps to incorporate a reading of the text through the lens of Bell’s tripartite theory of separate realms and their Axial Principles. As a result of the CDA it has been possible to start to answer RQ3: What concepts can be used to explain the influence of the policies? Are these Educational concepts? If not, does this make a difference? The concepts that shape these policies are economic. They are not educational. This analysis has shown that, at least within this case, the economic agenda of the educational reform process is using the language of culture and politics as co-opted vehicles for its agenda. Use of Wodak’s chronological analysis has shown that documents produced latterly are focused more on developing teachers than establishing ICT in schools, but this shift of emphasis is used to maintain the dominance of the techno/economic discourse; it does not undermine it. The next chapter presents the findings from the document analysis for the second case study (2006-2010).
CHAPTER 9:RESULTS OF THE 2nd POLICY ANALYSIS
As with the first case study, the chapter comprises the findings from the two-part research approach. Part 1a presents the key actors, and part 1b presents the documents selected. Part 2a will present the results of the CDA and part 2b will present the additional two steps undertaken to identify absences and tensions between cultural realms and over time. By applying CDA to current policy documents used by teachers in the introduction of ICT into their Secondary Schools the thesis contrasts recent policy work with that of the preceding decade. This part of the research follows the steps constituting the CDA specified in the methodology chapter, chapter 6. The research continues to take a case study approach. The case study focuses on whether there is continuity or change since the previous study. Once the chapter has presented the results of each step it will conclude with a discussion of findings. In doing this the chapter continues to answer RQ3: What concepts can be used to explain the influence of the policies? Are these Educational concepts? If not, does this make a difference?
9.2.1 Data GatheringPart 1a: Key Actors Selection Part 1a of the research approach used the same informants as the first policy analysis, to enable the key actors to nominate documents for analysis so they are the same as those used in the first case study (see Table 7.1. Chapter 7). This enabled a comparison.
Part 1b: Document Sample Selection The nominated documents were reviewed with references to the criteria described in Chapter 7 section 7.5.1 (Table 7.2: Reference Criteria for the Selection of Documents).
9.2.2 Data Analysis
9.3.1 Actors The key actors were the same sample of people used in the first case study as this allowed consistency between the two case studies. 9.3.2 Documents Selected Part 1b of the research approach was to establish the list of documents to be analysed. All documents that were nominated by the key actors can be found in Appendix II. Below are the documents selected according to the criteria described above. Table 9.1: Short Listed Educational ICT Documents Included in this Research
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Having establishing a list of documents to analyse, Part 2a began by following the procedure established in Chapter 7, section 7.5, table 7.3. 9.4.1 Step A: Description of text The texts are six Educational ICT documents aimed at English Secondary Schools. The texts were analysed together as a single text as in the first case study. This does not mean that contrasts between the different texts were not considered; the texts were treated as if they were different chapters of a single book, rather than different books. There were contrasts but they were read as contributing to an overall picture. The texts were produced by only three agencies this time, Becta, NCSL and Ofsted. These organisations were all official government agencies. Immediately it struck me that there was less variety in what the actors presented for this second case study. This indicated a possible narrowing of focus as if the actors were being much more specific in what they wanted to achieve through the policy and more specific in the kind of interests they had around ICT and schools.
These four steps were completed together. The items and objects that were picked up by an initial reading of the 6 documents selected for the analysis are listed below: Teachers 1 Pupils 2 School leadership – Head/Leadership/Governors 3 Parents 4 Schools/Colleges 9 ICT Generally 12 Government 7 Business 6 The list is reduced compared to the first case study. From the start this suggests a shift has happened. Given that the documents are aimed at secondary school staff involved in ICT the first six objects/people are unsurprising. However, the lack of reference in any of them to the role of technicians is something that reflects the change in emphasis and perhaps recognition that by the time these documents were produced the presence of ICT had largely been established in the schools. Teachers are presented as needing support and further development if ICT is to have the impact in schools it is presented as having outside of school. Typical of this approach is the comment, ‘Teachers and lecturers will need support and development to make the most of this agenda’ (ACSL 2009, p5), where after a list of the potential uses of ICT in schools (e.g. peer review, breaking down the boundaries between formal and informal learning, respect for ICT, assessment) teachers are then introduced. The texts emphasise the large number of potential uses in order to mobilize the idea that teachers will need support and also emphasise the idea that it is unlikely that teachers will ever be fully conversant with all these potential functionalities of ICTs. In the Ofsted document teachers were discussed in terms of their ‘deficiencies’ (Ofsted 2009, p20) and ‘common weaknesses…’ (Ofsted 2009, p21), such as poor use of ICT for assessment (Ofsted 2009, p29); when the context was positive the emphasis tended to be about the good provision of resources that were then used ‘generally’ well by teachers. An exception to this is the use of exemplars of good practice, as on page 35 where a single school is taken as providing a rare example of success: ‘A few of the schools visited had made ‘using ICT’ the centre piece of their curriculum development work – with striking outcomes, as in this example’ (Ofsted 2009, p 35). What follows is a block of highlighted text, which presents the case study. It is immediately followed, however, by what can be read as a disclaimer, ‘… however… the picture this survey establishes is one of patchy provision and inconsistent progress’ (Ofsted 2009, p35). Similarly, the role of ICT coordinators is discussed in terms of the inexperience of teachers and the schools failing to allocate sufficient time for these teachers to assure quality of provision and organise moderation of assessment (Ofsted 2009, p16). Positive case studies emphasised how few such cases there were and how there needed to be better support for teachers in this area. Teachers were criticized for teaching software packages rather than transferable skills (Oftsed 2009, p4), for over-directing students (Ofsted 2009, p31), being restricted in their access to ICT (Ofsted 2009, p22), and for the restricted success of ICT due to only individual teachers being enthusiastic and interested in ICT rather than there being an institutional coordination of ICT use (Ofsted 2009, p17). In the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) document where teachers might have been expected to be mentioned the term ‘educators’ was instead used. The term ‘teaching staff’ is used only once and there is no reference to teachers in the document. In the guide to the ICT Mark document the term ‘teacher’ is totally absent. This is significant to the extent that the connotations of ‘teacher’ are different from those of ‘educator’. A single example in the document is how pupils are discussed in order to show ICT’s role in reengaging disaffected pupils and of the sharing learning aims and progress with pupils. Personalised learning and assessment are the two headings under which pupils are explicitly referred to in the document ‘Making the Most of your Investment IN ICT’ (Becta 2007, p11-12). The link between pupils and ‘an environment fit for the 21st century’ is made explicitly in the BSF document (Becta 2007, p2). Interestingly there is no mention of pupils in the safeguarding document (Becta 2010). Pupils were also briefly mentioned in relation to the encouragement they received in using a range of ICT devices. However, pupils tend to be excluded voices. They are poorly taught and so pupils are used as part of a failing teaching discourse. They are constructed in terms of standards embedded in a managerialist approach to management and leadership of schools and resources. They are also discussed in relation to the economic context. The UK economy is described as requiring workers who are appropriately skilled and knowledgeable. Pupils are also recognized as having learned ICT skills and knowledge informally. However, this recognition is used to highlight the need for better teaching, the need to develop better systems of connectivity with these informal spaces and practices with a view to control these pupils and exploit them. Unexploited and unexploitable informal use of ICT is construed as being a waste, offending the managerialist emphasis of discussions of efficiency and maximizing returns on resources. School leadership/governors were discussed in the documents in terms of their role in coordinating whole school use of ICT. The documents gave them a leading role, which was still thought to be unrealized in many schools. One of the documents addresses itself to school leadership. Parents were discussed in terms of schools not doing enough to forge communication with parents. The role of tracking, monitoring and communicating pupil progress to parents was a focus, as was the role ICT played in raising the parent’s esteem for the school. The role of parent engagement and visioning was also mentioned. Schools are constructions of capital, best value, purchasing, investment, provision and partnership arrangements with ICT development. Schools are also constructed as part of a discourse of the future. This construction associates schools with the idea of renewal over periods of time. They are also discussed in terms of their relationship to their investment in ICT. ICT is discussed as enhancing schools. Schools are represented as having successfully established an overwhelming presence of ICT. Schools are full of ICT and this is presented as of benefit to schools whilst at the same time bringing with it difficulties and challenges that are still to be faced. These challenges involve the limited use that the proliferation of ICTs in schools is put to. In particular schools are represented as not using ICT to communicate to parents, to enhance teaching and learning nor to assess pupils’ progress. Despite this, another strand of the discourse revolves around schools being removed from the need to manage the technical side of ICT so that they can focus on its application to improve teaching and learning. So although there is a stress in the documents selected in the case study towards managing investment, getting value for money and so forth, and a stress on the school leadership to ensure that this occurs, there is also a tacit recognition that expertise in the technical aspect of ICT provision, as opposed to its application as a teaching and learning resource, is at the very least and at worst a ‘burden’ on schools (e.g. Becta 2006b, p2). This emphasis is discussed further in relation to the role of government. ‘ICT’ is, as has been suggested above, discussed as an established presence, both in schools and society generally. Emphasis is placed on the business opportunities afforded by this. This is presented in terms of competitive edge, of the need to ensure that investment in ICT continues in order to maintain competitive advantage. Emphasis is placed on the idea of permanent change, of continual renewal and upgrading in order to remain competitive. The commercial imperatives are emphasised when current and future trends are explicitly discussed. General ICT is therefore connected with governmental ideas of ensuring the success of the UK’s economy, an idea supplemented by statistics about wealth ‘… The digital economy accounts for around 8 per cent of national wealth…’ (Becta 2006b, p2), about competitiveness; ‘… digital technology has helped the UK close the productivity gap on its leading European competitors’ (Becta 2006b, p2), about the threat of competition, ‘… France, the USA and a host of Asian countries will provide fierce competition’ (Becta 2006b, p2), about the financial need to continually modernize and upgrade networks, about sustaining the UK economy’s ability to sustain creative industry and about ensuring that access to digital services is available to all in order to sustain the UKs strong position. In schools ICT is linked to this agenda and so the priorities set for schools are those claimed for society generally. ICT is seen as an established presence in Secondary schools, and concerns are about the way it is not being used enough rather than obstacles to its introduction. ICT is a large presence now in terms of teaching and learning, but is underused as a resource for communication with parents and assessment. Some technologies pupils use at home and in informal social space, specifically ‘everyday Web 2.0 expertise...’ (Becta 2006b, p3), are not present in schools and throughout discussions there is a sense that schools are not fostering the economic imperative of ICT expertise. As mentioned in the discussion about pupils, the idea given is that informal uses of ICT are not being exploited enough. This is framed in ways that ensure that this deficit is one that can be construed as a failure to ensure ‘value for money’. Alongside this is a concern for the safety aspect of ICT. ‘Duty of care’ issues have arisen and are discussed in terms of the established presence of ICT in schools and society generally. The attachment of risks to ICT use is positioned as being an area of crucial importance to those managing schools. Users of ICT are empowered to protect themselves but there is an implicit understanding that a school will be held responsible for any safeguarding issue. Institutions are expected to have procedures in place to manage safe guarding issues. ICT is presented as a potential danger to all at such a level that safeguarding procedures have to be put in place, even though at the same time it is also seen as bringing enormous benefits. The approach is couched in the language of managerialism, where checklists for action are presented along with sites for further information and support. ICT generally is being presented as a complex of still underdeveloped, underused potential as well as a source of some risk within a context of managerialism and economic competitiveness. Linked to this was discussion of software developed to help schools manage this risk. The link is thus made between the issue and a new area for increased technological innovation. ICT is being constructed as causing risks which then new ICT is being asked to resolve. As identified earlier, the issue of ICT’s value for money is a key area of discussion. The context is given as that of enormous investment and specifies that the value for money is that schools and the country are getting a return on this investment. In the Ofsted document this is explicitly stated: ‘governing bodies are expected to apply the four principles of best value in ensuring the school and the country gets value for money from this significant investment’ (Ofsted 2009, p33). ICT is therefore placed in a context where the concern of ‘financial procedures,’ the ‘principle of competition’, discussion of auditing and procurement then lead to discussions of how schools manage and choose the specific ICT required. Strategies and visions relating to ICT in schools were being recommended that focus on these complex issues. A connection was made between managers and leaders developing their strategies and visions in relation to the effective evaluation of implementation and impact. However, it was not spelled out what this actually meant beyond the claim that fully costed ICT development led to good quality teaching and learning in ICT. In particular the claim was made that success criteria in policy documentation could be fully costed, which made explicit the link between value for money and ICT educational outputs (e.g. Ofsted 2009, p39). There was also some acknowledgement that ICT generally referred to more than just computers, and the creative use of digital technologies’ potential was presented as a sample of good practice. A typical example of this is where in the Ofsted document we read: ‘In secondary schools, students made the best use of ICT in communicating their ideas and presenting their work. Access to a wider range of software applications is now better; for example, students were increasingly using ICT for manipulating digital media, composing music and reviewing their performances in dance, drama and physical education. Where achievement was good, students were independent and creative, using ICT naturally to support their learning. They appreciated the importance of design, layout and the function of tools in analysing information and modeling real-world scenarios’ (e.g. Ofsted 2009, p18). There was also discussion of explicit qualifications and courses for learning ICT, and a link between these courses in the pre-16 KS4 stage with the uptake of computing courses. There was also some discussion of a gender divide where girls were identified as lagging behind boys in interest, achievement and uptake in specific ICT courses. Poor results generally at KS4 and in 6th form courses were cited as a factor possibly deterring girls. This discussion was connected to vocational pathways after secondary education was completed and the whole discussion of the purpose of ICT courses in secondary schools referred to career opportunities throughout. Government is explicitly mentioned in relation to the Secondary National Strategies, which was a programme designed to raise standards in Secondary schools and which included the use of ICT to do so. It was also explicitly mentioned as licensing ‘e-skills UK’, a not for profit employer led organisation. The aim of this organisation was, ‘…to ensure that the UK has the skills it needs to compete in the global economy’ (Ofsted 2009, p39). It was also identified explicitly in relation to the requirement of schools to ensure that they produced an appropriately skilled workforce. The connection was made between the assessment of ICT and the economic well being of the young people in school. In doing so the dropping of the ‘communications’ element, so ICT became IT again in this context, seems more significant when considered in the light of earlier comments. These identified the communicative element of ICT as being increasingly significant in successful uses of ICT in schools. So we read: ‘Getting assessment right is vital if standards in ICT are to improve. It is estimated that 77% of the workforce now use information technology (IT) in their job and the demand for such skills is likely to continue to increase. Schools must equip young people with the 21st century skills necessary to ensure their employability’ (Ofsted 2009, p30). Earlier these achievements involved the use of creative media and Web 2.0 applications. When discussing the success of vocational courses at KS4 in recruiting girls, communication skills are highlighted as being an important factor in this success and are therefore constructed as gendered: ‘The heavy emphasis on tasks based on using ICT for communicating and presenting, aspects which are assessed entirely through coursework, has been an important factor in recruiting them’ (Ofsted 2009, p32) However, post 16 courses are discussed as being less attractive than the KS4 courses because they are thought to be less credible than competing courses as noted by the Ofsted Report. Further, there was a passage which suggested that the skills used by students out of school, such as making their own videos, was not vital to the economic well being of the UK, whereas manipulating data and programming taught in courses were. Criticism of vocational qualifications was in terms of them limiting the achievements of higher-achieving students rather than being vocational (e.g. Ofsted 2009, p32). Government is explicitly associated with extending the use of ICT in homes and business, in investing in school buildings and ICT, in developing large scale public/private partnerships and in removing the management of the technology from schools themselves and placing it in the hands of private partnership from the business community. Throughout the Becta documents the government voice emphasises the need for ‘value for money’ and there is a subtle haziness about how criteria for success in implementation of ICT is tangled up with the economic imperative of this principle. The government voice is one of assurance that links innovation with effectiveness without making clear what this implies (e.g. Becta 2007, p2). This may be a function of Becta’s difficult role of being a part of the government voice for promoting ICT in schools whilst also conducting research into the impact of ICT in Secondary schools and finding that its impact is less than overwhelmingly positive, as discussed earlier in the thesis. When discussing the features of an ICT infrastructure that schools should develop for learners, educators and administrators the government voice prefigures the findings of research with the overarching requirement that ICT provision is to achieve value for money. The emphasis on the economic imperative settles over the rest of the content in the documents, constraining understanding of what is meant by innovation and indeed by teaching and learning by tethering these to some idea of economic audit requiring tight financial management. Connected to this is the very clear message that government is leading and directing the policy of putting ICT into schools. In particular the government is presented as the central agency directing the financial input into the initiative. Again, the government’s rationale is also directed towards the global rather than local impact where the survival of the UK’s competitive lead over international rivals is continually stressed. Throughout, the motivation is one of ensuring that schools are given the resources that will enable the UK to compete and by giving itself the responsibility of bankrolling the work the issue of responsible fiscal activity has also become foregrounded. ‘Value for money’ and ‘how to get the most out of your investment’ are key elements of the discourse and seem to reflect a Treasury rather than a DFE concern. Within the case study the government voice is dominant. It stresses the economic auditing that is required and offers reminders that innovations must be always aware of cost constraints and value for money, which in turn tends to become the context for any discussion of innovation in terms of teaching and learning. There is a continual stress on innovation and the revolutionary transformation of society that ICT promises to fulfil. This is linked directly throughout to the economic imperative of having a competitive skilled workforce fit for the twenty-first century. So there is enthusiastic discussion of Web 2.0 and social software, of context aware computing such as iPhone and Google’s latitude service, of pervasive computing where computing stops being a desktop experience but rather becomes ubiquitous through identification, location, sensors or wireless technologies, for example. Combined with schools, these suggest teachers and learners begin to work in different ways, where learning is more about knowledge generation than knowledge receptivity. Yet the government voice that speaks most places financial accounting and issues of value for money before detailed discussions of what the transformations offered to schools might look like. By contextualizing the revolutionary impact of ICT in such a way, the whole discussion is governed by the economic imperative of creating a workforce fit for the twenty-first century. The Global economy is discussed in such a way that other countries are mentioned only as reminders that they are a threat to the UK and that only through continual focus on using ICT in schools will the UK be able to sustain any economic success. This governmental voice drowns out all other possible voices. The government voice drowns out the other speakers in the text except, of course, the business voice, which becomes attached to the government one in ways that make separating out the voices very difficult. Yet occasionally there are moments in the text where there is clear sight of the business voice, in particular at the end of the Becta 2007 document where a list of 47 ‘framework suppliers’ is presented, along with contact web-addresses and details about the service focus of each business. This is a clear a picture of the ‘public-private’ partnership ideology and rhetoric that forms much of the discourse. Business tends to be presented as a place schools may go in order to get support, guidance and even off-load the burden of having to manage some of the technical and financial elements of the ICT initiative. Business is often presented by the government voice as a helpful and ever-present expert that will ensure, if invited in, that the ICT initiative works. Business then becomes part of an elaborate part of the discourse narrative that presents ICT as a challenge, as technically and fiscally difficult, and potentially risky to end-users as well if not properly implemented. Throughout ICT is constructed as a potential distraction from teaching and learning activity if schools try and make decisions alone. The Business community is presented as a necessary helping hand in this complex and threatening environment. Of course, the threat is not over-played; it wouldn’t do to scare schools away from trying to achieve successful implementation of ICT and so the potential benefits are still an essential part of this narrative, but business is nevertheless there as a support partner in this process. As such, business has no direct speaking role in the discourse except as this. This is the primary way business is spoken about. Indeed in presenting themselves there is an attempt to present a very human, individual face to each business, so that the web-addresses given are in the majority of cases addresses of individuals whose names are part of the address. This makes the presented face of the business friendly and welcoming, a matter of contacting ‘Simon Platt’ ‘David Sutton’, ‘Eugene O’Connor’, ‘Jennifer Gordon’ and so on, rather than just the help desk or education team of a corporate identity (Becta 2007, p20). There is in this a suggestion that schools are PC rather than Apple Mac users in that Apple are not personalised in this way. There is no named representative for Apple Mac users. Whether or not this is the reason for Apple’s lack of a named representative, there is undoubtedly an avoidance of corporate business identity being pushed in this discourse. This reinforces the idea that business is being presented as being a friendly partner with schools, a sharer of resources to help solve problems and maximise efficiency rather than major business partners with profit margins to extend. All this however is in the context of the discourse of value for money already noted. The ICT market is carefully presented through the agency of government as sharing the same goals and aspirations of the schools themselves. In turn, schools are invited, as we have noted earlier, to identify themselves with the motivations and objectives of business. Any potential conflict of vales and objectives is largely absent as the discourse of the text merges the school with business values and objectives. 9.4.4 Step G: Different versions of the social world co-existing in the text The text presents a social world of school leadership being talked to by a government partner. The use of the word ‘partner’ is disingenuous as used in the text as there is a definite social hierarchy assumed in this world. The government voice is one directing the school leadership and although the language is one of advice and non-statutory obligation, which reflects the idea that there is a partnership of equals, the text is one that requires school leaders enact what the government voice requests. It is an oddly curtailed and narrowly focused social world that these cohabit, one which encompasses funding issues at both the institutional level of funding ICT projects going into schools, but also one that shadows the assumed social reality of those schools, which is assumed to be one of ensuring the standards required for economic well-being of the UK generally. Yet this relationship co-exists with other social realities, which are acknowledged and sometimes even discussed but in terms of the text are less foregrounded. The home is a social presence that is acknowledged as being a huge potential resource for ICT use in schools. The home is seen as a place of untapped ICT skills and knowledge, a site of ICT activities and resources that schools have been slow to tap in to. The world of the home is narrowly defined in the text, one where ICT is an expanding field but mysterious. Young people and parents engage in ICT activity but are largely uncontrolled. Reporting to parents is often raised in this context and the way it is presented suggests that there is discomfort in the idea of uncontrolled social spaces with powerful, unknown ICT usage taking place. The economic imperative being in the foreground throughout, this unease about homes being out of control suggests a worry or even suppressed hope that perhaps a way of using ICT that benefits the economic imperative (value for money, vocational relevance and so on) lies within these unmapped, anarchic territories. When discussed in the text this is done in an urgent tone, stressing the need of schools to begin networking alliances with these places as quickly as possible. Schools are presented as social worlds that are regulated and audited and that ICT requires this more than ever. Schools are presented almost totally in terms of a managerialist paradigm where terms like ‘good standard’, ‘effective’, ‘efficient’, ‘Impact of their investment’, ‘evidence gathered to support accreditation’, ‘self-evaluation framework’, ‘thresholds’, ‘assessment’, exhaust the social world of the school. School leaders are identified as the key group in these organisations, which are discussed as organisations, alongside Local Authority and Business partners and government agencies to imply that they’re of the same kind. Learners are identified as those who are needing protection and who must receive twenty-first century learning but their presence is completely disengaged from the central concerns of the text where schools are conceived as policy running, reviewing, auditing and inspecting organisations playing a significant role in a challenging, threateningly competitive economic global context. Learners tend to be rather shadowy configurations in this larger plot. Teachers are also rather ‘bit part’ players in the text, having the role of rather unfortunate messengers between worlds, the world of the school and its managerialist requirements and the homes of learners and their untapped and uncontrolled ICT expertise. Teachers tend to be characterised as occupying a social space in between these two other spaces, moving between them with the purpose of ensuring that the directives from the school leadership are fulfilled and introducing the informally learnt skills and knowledge of learners from outside school into the formal learning zones of the teacher space of the school. This suggests that the world of the classroom and of teaching practice is largely absent. Some are recognised as having implemented the requirements of the managerialist led social world and also engaged with the resources generated by learners outside the formal learning social space of the school, but these are exceptional individuals. In the text there are case studies, which are used as testimonies of excellence from this group used to exhort others to follow their example. Throughout the text however is a continual reminder that the teacher space in the school is one that rarely accomplishes this feat. A globalised economic space is largely a vaguely defined but huge presence in the text. This is a space that includes the world of economic nations but specifies only some of them. It is a space that is characterised in terms of its threatening relationship with the UK. It is a space characterised by its potential ability to beat the UK in competitive economic enterprise. This view of globalised economic space is not defined but the text insists that this is a genuine and all pervasive threat. It is a threat that is understood well by the government and that from its unique vantage point it is able to see that this looming social space is only ignored by complacency that hasn’t grasped the nature of the imminent peril posed by this phenomenon. Throughout there is a decidedly non-negotiable message being delivered and it underpins the text as a whole. This economic space then is a potential hostile space in which the UK finds itself and that there is no option but to compete within it. This is the world that is used then to define twenty-first century learning. This social space is one that has notable characteristics according to the text. It is forever changing. It is crucially fuelled by education and technology. It is entrepreneurial, competitive and oddly carved up in to nationalistic blocks. Yet the national blocks are not obvious; throughout the text refers to the UK and the schools of the UK, even though the audiences addressed by the texts are English. This social space is also one of technological innovation, where ICT is seen as the defining technology bringing about enormous change at many. Homes, business and governments are being transformed by the technological innovations that, as with all things in this space, are sites of change and transformation. It is a dynamic futuristic zone of information saturated economic progressiveness and development. Schools are defined in terms of this presence and their massive investment in ICT infrastructures is presented as embodying the connection between schools and this social space. Another large social space that is a ubiquitous presence throughout the text is a virtual social space of on-line supervisory and supportive sites. These are registered at the end of each document and serve to expand the social spaces made visible in the main body of each document. These social spaces are identified only as web-addresses sometimes introduced with brief descriptions of the function of these sites (e.g. ‘Information from Becta’ followed by the Becta safeguarding site address). What these addresses signal is the existence of a further social space that expands the imminent one, suggesting that the apparent boundedness of the current social space addressed by the text is an illusion. It is spoken about to suggest the existence of a “walled garden”, closed and defined by the specified, and so appropriate, sites. It mimics the actuality of the virtual reality of ICT by signalling the emergent virtual social space that the new initiative is introducing and attempting to manage. By producing a social space that is like a “walled garden” the potential of the virtual world being ungoverned and unmanageable is avoided. The carefully limited number of virtual sites contrasts with the unknowably huge and continually exponentially growing number proliferating the World Wide Web which are carefully not talked about. There is no message containing information about a social space far too anarchic and vast to be managed by such procedures. The discourse emphasise the need to control and manage and govern. 9.4.5 Step H: Imaginary authors’ responses to those who contradict Challenge: An opposing voice to this text would point to the exclusion of many other values and concerns of secondary school education in the text. The idea of an ungovernable, uncontrollable virtual reality is where contradiction might begin in terms of this discourse. It would suggest that the actual educational uses of ICT presented by this official discourse are too vague and thin to really inspire confidence that the author really knew how ICT was specifically going to enhance the educational outputs of these schools. The level of generality was too great to be of guidance and there was a sense that the author was waiting for innovation to emerge from the ubiquitous presence of ICT in schools in ways that are unpredictable and unknowable until they actually happened. This criticism is that the investment in ICT has been based on a faith and hope agenda. It has presented ICT as a defining new presence in society and therefore has been assumed to be required in schools in a way requiring massive investment. It links with the criticism that ICT is misunderstood by the initiative, that ICTs development, like other important technological innovation in the past, is not predictable. A greater historical awareness of technological enthusiasm and schools might have led to more circumspection. Just as the revolutionary claims made for radio, television, video recorders and so forth have led to more modest impacts than early adopters suggested in schools, there are doubts that ICT is any different in terms of the specific ways it can transform schools. Response to challenge: The imaginary author of the text is likely to respond that CT is a genuinely different kind of technological innovation from those cited in the past. The parallel between ICT and television, for example, is just not sustainable. ICT is genuinely revolutionising society and the way people now live and work. The innovations of ICT are better compared to that of the invention of printing and the book. It is a hugely transformational technology with world historical implications. This imagined author might add that how exactly ICT and education are to develop together is difficult to predict because innovation is almost by definition unknowable in advance. Yet the decision to invest and then set up systems of constraint and control to ensure that the investment is able to sustain the infrastructures is not a negotiable option. The focus on fiscal good management relating to ICT investment is vital and there is no surprise that it takes precedent over all other concerns. Nor is it surprising that as ICT becomes ubiquitous then revenge effects, those negate unforeseen effects of any policy innovation, also emerge (e.g. Cuban 2000). Safeguarding then becomes an issue only once the presence of ICT is established and the issue is given the profile it is in the text because of the success in establishing ICT in schools and society generally. It is an indication of the success of the policy. The emphasis on the vocational aspect of secondary school is also something that is fully acknowledged in the text and is inevitable once the concern with the economic challenges of Globalisation and the Information Society are factored into the context in which schools operate. Perhaps one answer to the vagueness of the specific uses of ICT and education in the text is that just the presence of ICT infrastructures is enough to ensure learners are familiar with the opportunities offered by ICT. Perhaps, ironically, the focus on aspects of ICT in schools that are not specifying how the ICT is to be used educationally enables schools freedom to experiment and innovate without over centralised control mechanisms from the central government. Rather than read the managerialism of the text as a constraint on realising educational values, perhaps they should be understood as a way of releasing schools from the burden of managing technologies and focusing instead on educational practices concerning teaching and learning. Guidance in how to properly use ICT for teaching and learning would ironically be exactly the approach that would ensure innovation is stifled. 9.4.6 Step I: Contrasts between discourses The analysis provides evidence that there are contrasts between ways of speaking about the different elements of the discourse. Teachers are talked about as needing more training because they are not fully realizing the potential of the ICT resources. In this case study they are often linked with pupils in terms of their failures to utilise the full range of ICTs available. This contrasts with the way pupils are discussed. They are positioned as having untapped ICT knowledge and skills that schools are failing to recognize. Their informal learning, often spoken about as taking place at home, is something that is used to criticise not just teachers but schools generally. Reporting and assessment on pupil achievement is linked to this deficit model. Leadership and management of schools is spoken of differently from just the teachers in general. Leadership and management are given leading roles in the successful implementation of ICT and this constructs a very hierarchical view of how policy implementation is positioned. It is this group that is spoken about as needing to recognize the roe of business in helping ensure the successful use of ICT and the crucial concerns of safeguarding and value for money are addressed to this group. The discourse of leadership is therefore linked closely to that of business and both are in turn closely associated with that of government. The hierarchical nature of this approach is clear: whereby pupils, teachers and the home are largely spoken about in terms of having things done to them (e.g. receive new CPD, be better assessed) these three discourses are spoken about as having a proactive role. Yet there are also criticisms of the failure of leadership of management and learning in schools; there is strong emphasis on the need for this group to rely on business expertise to ensure that the ICT is successfully used and maintained in schools. The focus on procurement and value for money is used to signal a deficit in most schools’ ability to manage these issues. In this respect there is a continuity between the way teachers are spoken about and the way school leadership and management are too. By insisting on the need for agencies outside of school to ensure the successful management of ICT the discourse subtly undermines this group. ICT is spoken about as carrying a threat to schools. Evidence for this was a significant addition to the way ICT was spoken about in this case study compared to the first. The risks that ICT carried were about value for money and safeguarding children. Yet ICT was also spoken about as being the solution to risks. This contrasts with the way teachers, for example, are talked about. Talk about ICT omits any blame, refuses to talk in any way about the fact that it is ICT that in itself has brought new threats into schools. This circular way of speaking about ICT ensured that ICT was spoken about as something that was still inescapable and necessary to schools, but in terms that were less about its potential for transformation and more about its capacity to problem-solve. This was particularly the case when ICT’s safeguarding risk was being spoken about. Contrasted with other elements in the analysis, such as teachers, the potential for criticizing ICT for carrying these identifiable risks was not spoken about as being a fault of ICT. The potential blame for introducing such risks was omitted from any discourse of ICT. Instead it was displaced and became spoken of as a potential deficit of teachers and school leadership and management. Once positioned like that, ICT is discussed as being the solution to the potential failure of school leadership and teachers to manage the threats. This contrasting application of risk and responsibility found in the way these different groups were talked about results in ICT being criticism-proof. 9.4.7 J: Points where ways of speaking overlap There are overlaps between these discourses. The wholly positive way of talking about ICT is largely comparable to the way in which both government and business are discussed. Government is spoken about as endorsing the ICT policies and there is no criticism at all about the way government has acted in relation to the ICT policies. Business too is spoken about as having a wholly benign role to play. Where there is identified a perceived failure of partnership building between business and schools this is spoken about as being no failure of business. There is some overlap between the way schools, teachers and pupils are spoken about too. They tend to be spoken about as problems for ICT, business and government. So, for example, it is the failure in expertise on the teacher’s behalf that holds back the development of ICT use to its full potential in formal educational settings. All the groups are spoken about in terms of a broadly managerialist approach. Efficiency is a key value that is applied to all the groups. It is largely in terms of the way each is talked about as being efficient or not that hierarchy can be perceived. This overlapping approach helps account for the way the home and pupil’s informal use of ICT are talked about as being inefficiently utilised, understood and exploited. It is when the home and non-school based ICT use is talked about in this way that the dominance of this techno-economic approach is highlighted and seems particularly limiting. 9.4.8 Step K: Comparisons with other text to assess how these ways of speaking address different audiences Larry Cuban speaks differently about these different elements and in so doing highlights the different presumed audiences being addressed by these texts (Cuban 2000). Cuban is writing in the USA and is concerned to speak about schools, for example, as having cultures that resist innovations based upon claims of technology. This contrasts deeply with the way schools are discussed in the case study where schools are talked about as having to adapt and change in order to become more efficient in what they do. A different audience may well be one that understands a different narrative or one that sees future possibilities differently. These audiences, not addressed by the text as it is, need not be assumed to be different groups. Teachers and school leaders, policy makers and consultants may well presume a different narrative, one that perhaps requires a different way of talking about teacher and learner use and understanding of ICT in schools, ways which might talk about political and cultural values as well as techno-economic ones. Cuban’s text talks differently about Globalisation, economic competition, and the stress on vocational objectives for schools and the prime role of ICT in schools than they are talked about in our case study. Examining ICT being introduced into schools in the USA Cuban is writing to an audience of academics, teachers, school leaders, policy makers and consultants and speaks of the USA’s ICT policy in a way that disputes the claims of the kind of narrative developed in the text of this case study. The discourse of techno-economic priority is one that he holds up to challenge. In wring like this of schools and ICT policy he constructs an audience permitted to question key assumptions in the case study. He therefore constructs a very different kind of audience from the one the case study text has created. Teachers are not talked about in terms of deficiencies that need to be addressed by further training, as is the case in the case study, but are instead talked about as experts in schools and education capable and enacting critical, often negative, engagement with ICT policies. They are talked about by Cuban as resisting the techno-reform agenda of what he labels ‘techno-enthusiasts’ or ‘techno-reformers.’ Similarly, he talks about schools as laces with a developed culture capable of resisting any attempt to impose change via technology. He talks about schools as having long histories. He talks about ICT as being merely the latest of a series of presumed technological innovations that would alter schools and education. Unlike the case study, ICT is therefore talked about in an historical context, as are schools. Cuban’s text historically contextualises what in the case study is presented as a-historical. Cuban’s text therefore includes elements, such as historical context, that are omitted from the case study. In speaking in this way of its various subjects it gives permission to the audience to question and doubt and in so doing constructs an audience that is no longer one reading for certainty and affirmation but rather one that may well be destabilised in its ideas about the issue, and more cautious about what in practice it may do. Cuban deliberately constructs an audience sceptical about the claims of the dominant discourse found in our case study. 9.4.9 Step L: Terminology to label the discussion As in the first case study, many of these ways of talking are consistent with discourses that have already been identified in the course of the thesis. References to techno-economic issues, Globalisation, knowledge economy, information society, Managerialism and so forth have already been explained. What is new to the discussion is more direct terminology relating to fiscal audit such as ‘value for money’ and ‘investment’ issues. These are labels for a direct cost accountancy focus in the text, which has been revealed as being very prominent. The fifteen discourses of the previous case study are all also present to some extent in this case study. However a further three discourses have been identified as playing a prominent role in this second case study. None are missing from the first case study although the foregrounding of the three new ones has the effect of placing the others more into the background. The development is not trivial but adds little more to the initial evidence that an overall techno-economic discourse dominates. Here is a list of the fifteen discourses of the previous case study which are also identified in this case study.
The further three discourses that have been identified are:
9.4.10 Step M: Where and when these discourses developed As in the first case study the thesis has in earlier chapters looked in detail as to where the discourses have been developed. Chapter 2 looked at the contrasting views of educational purpose justifying Secondary schools in England. In this the contrast between two views of education was introduced as a useful way of organising thinking about this issue. Schools were either justified in terms of vocational, ‘market based’ objectives or else as non-vocational, ‘monastic’ objectives. This educational disagreement about educational value and purpose was established in that chapter. Chapter 3 looked at the history of government policy and funding connecting it to the New Labour ideology that linked notions of an Information Society and Knowledge Economy to Globalisation and the role of ICT, an ideology that has its roots in an earlier Conservative government largely connected with Mrs Thatcher. In the current case study this ideological history is firmly entrenched and presented as a ‘received wisdom’ that brooks no challenge, a hegemonic context guiding the discourse and its narrative. Specific examples of this would be the adoption of managerialism within schools and the linking of a knowledge economy to schooling. Chapter 4 further developed this understanding by looking at the role of policy and the development of a general policy discourse. The current case study can be read in the light of the chapter’s understanding of policy to encompass more than merely policy documents to be an attempt to constrain and control policy in schools through target interventions with school leadership groups and individuals charged with developing the policy. This Chapter 6 linked the ideology with a historically earlier discussion about Post-Industrialism and a sociological theory of Daniel Bell. From here arose the discourses that linked schools and learning to an Information society, that talked about the future in terms of technological innovation and made technology central to the way modernity was spoken about. All these discussions indicate where and when these discourses found in the text developed. 9.4.11 Step N: Description of how they have operated to naturalise the things they refer to The case study’s text naturalises its references through carefully presenting things as facts by not admitting doubt and by closing down debate. The text is careful to exclude elements that might disrupt the careful narrative follow that such a naturalised factual account requires. It works through clearly signalled routes so that its audience is able to easily determine a coherent and closed structure. Elements that might cause incoherence, disfigure the smooth progress of the story, introduce inexplicable or contrary facts are therefore not included in the selection. Additionally, it adds to the sense of reality and activity by arranging its elements as data, reporting them as the outcome of rigorous research and objective, bias free observation and scrutiny. The use of fine-grained detail also adds to the impression of truth being presented, of there being a level of detail that confirms the reality being presented. There are, as we have seen in previous chapters, several accounts of the policy putting ICT into English Secondary schools that differ enormously from that of the official view, including different views about the portrayal of the economic context, which is so crucial to this case study text. These contrary views are excluded and an ‘official‘ line is repeated throughout the documents making up the text in order to increase the coherence of the text and make the other voices not merely ‘voices off’, unheard and silenced, but also largely unthinkable, as being contrary to the realistic world view being naturalised by this text. A key element in the organisation of the text is the way it ensures that there is a story that can be easily followed by an audience. The simplification of elements to fit this need for ‘followability’, so that ICT is unquestioningly a ‘revolutionary technology’, that ICT skills are an ‘absolute requirement for economic viability’ and so forth, also contributes to the naturalisation of the discourse. Different elements become fused through their roles in the overarching narrative so that it becomes difficult not to think of them all hanging together in a coherent bundle. By tangling each element together the discourse makes it difficult to see how one could remove any element without destroying the overall coherence. In this way the discourse creates a sense of naturalness, of everything fitting together neatly like a hand in a glove. An example of this is in the way ICT is talked about as being a solution to the risk of safeguarding children. This is an easily followable point because the way it is talked about omits to say that the risk is one brought into schools by ICT. If this had been included in the way this was spoken about then there would have been a possible conflict of attitudes being presented towards ICT. The story of ICT would be saying that it was both a risk and a solution. By refusing to say that ICT is what causes the safeguarding risk a non-conflicted and followable story is constructed. Another example of this idea is the ‘vocational’ strand that runs through the discourse. It is so closely aligned with the view about the economic need of the UK in the context of Globalisation, as understood in the text, that to question its place would be to threaten to de-stabilise the cluster of elements it is rooted in. The narrative makes a clear and followable coherence by telling the story of how Global economics requires ICT skills, which in turn requires all schools to teach ICT skills and therefore invest heavily in ICT. To have an alternative educational objective intrude to counter the vocational with a non-vocational educational purpose would threaten the closed and well-formed narrative. It would open up the narrative to different elements that wouldn’t so easily point to the conclusion justifying massive and ongoing investment in ICT, which the text’s narrative requires. The point about different educational objectives cannot be argued within the text however, because the very mention of an alternative view would threaten to dissolve the hegemonic stamp and naturalised status of the narrative itself. So it is excluded completely, and the narrative on offer becomes official, natural and obvious. The different voices help to naturalise the discourses too. So, for example, the voice of the government is an official voice that suggests authority and legitimacy and responsibility. The voice throughout is assertive and presents a tone that invites confidence. By frequently referring to legitimising research to support assertions the voice is able to transmit a point of view as if it is a received wisdom, rationally justified, evidence based and co-opting academia. This way of speaking is concerned with narration, giving the official story of the transformational impact of ICT in Secondary schools. As such it speaks in a way that uses the resources of a realistic narrative. It excludes vivid and fanciful language, giving the impression that the narration is historical, factual and as such trustworthy and reliable. The voice achieves this effect of being factual by sometimes reverting to report mode. Organising its subject matter in such a way, it gives the assurance of an official report. The language remains objective in its register, removing any subjectivity in its speech and thus avoiding any thought that what is being said is in any way merely someone’s opinion or impression. Throughout the text the vernacular is absent from the text, except in a minor case of quoted comments from various individuals. These individuals are usually school representatives whose quoted comments are placed strategically about the text to endorse the salient points being discussed. In this manner, the official and authoritative objective voice of the text is given the seal of approval from speakers outside the realm of officialdom, giving the dominant voice even greater authority to speak and continue to speak. And of course in so doing it is given greater authority to insist on being listened to. However, this voice is often joined by a more urgent way of speaking using a different register and tone. This is a register that requires immediate action. There are terms like ‘it is important that you…’ used in order to communicate a sense of expectancy and urgency that is immediate and requires attention in an immediate future, if not the present. This is an advisory voice that evolves into an instructional voice, even one that utters commands. This is not a way of speaking that is reflecting on a situation, nor is one authorised to narrate. Nor is it asking for endorsements from outside. This is speaking in order to bring about actions in the face of impending threat. These tend to be in terms of economic threats which, presented as objective reality, are not negotiable or ignorable (such as ‘value for money’ or Globalisation), or in terms of safeguarding threats. This way of speaking is still the voice of control and authority. It insists that it has answers and that if procedures are put in place and the steps outlined are followed then all will be well. It is a way of speaking that at one and the same time provokes anxiety and relief because it intrudes with a threat but also offers guarantees of problem eradication. This combination of speaking, one voice narrating a factual, objective story that makes what might seem unsettling and unmanageable, such as the idea of continual change, technological innovation and so on, comprehensible and therefore reassuring, alongside another voice urging immediate awareness of the impending dangers and threats that the situation described and reported potentially holds which simultaneously reassures through rigorous and stepped instructional guidance ensures that the dominant ways of speaking reinforce the idea that the speakers can be believed (they are objective) and also that they are entitled to unchallenged status. By speaking like this the impression is created that everything that needs addressing in the situation is being addressed, that the narration and the solutions are in this sense exhaustive. The issue becomes normative: other issues and concerns ought not to be considered. 9.4.12 Step O: The discourses’ roles in reproducing institutions The discourses in the text collude to reproduce institutions modelled on business. The school itself finds itself re-described in terms of a cost-accountancy, fiscal auditing model of managing ICT. The managerialism of the discourse is identifiable throughout in terms of the focus on fiscal review and audit, of standardised reporting of standards, of the requirement of self-review using a standardised, government-owned process and the idea of formally identified procedures to ensure safeguarding. These in turn reproduce the central government’s own institutional procedures of organisation in the schools they are addressing, reshaping schools as institutions in the image of the government. This accounts for the absence of business from the discourse in terms separate from that of government. Government and business are therefore reproduced in the discourse as sharing identical values and objectives. The institution of government is completely conceived in this discourse in terms of its business responsibilities. The UK is presented as a player in a Global economic context that is crudely about competing national markets (which itself is presented as what ‘Globalisation’ is rather than a particular theory amongst many) and the government is its Board of Directors. ‘Home’ is also reproduced in the discourse in terms of its potential activities and knowledge that might contribute to the economic well-being. They are sites of potential ICT excellence, where the skills and knowledge learnt there might be tapped for future use, an economic resource that schools, among other institutions, need to be alert to and begin to use. This is new. Where previous ways of speaking about home might have given home additional and different values and contributions to schools, this new way suggests no such divergence. 9.4.13 Step P: Ways in which discourses subvert institutions The dominance of the discourse of economic need subverts institutions by omitting alternative conceptions of those institutions. In particular the school, government and home are the institutions that the discourse subvert. As has already been suggested, the very core objective of a school, the reason for having schools, is subverted by the omission of a core and central debate within the historical development of the English Secondary School. By excluding a powerful alternative vision of educational purpose from the whole discourse relating to the introduction of ICT into these schools, the institution of the school becomes subverted. Legitimate reasons for organising schools in certain ways often are derived from such legitimations. By excluding these reasons and by making the exclusion look natural, the discourse undermines and subverts assumptions and ways of doing things in schools. By talking about schools like this the discourse erodes potential resistance to the hegemonic assumption that it presents. Institutional investment in ideas that threaten to destabilise the discourse is assumed to be less likely if leadership of institutions become acclimatised to the hegemonic assumptions of the discourse. The not so subtle use of anxiety and threat involved in the discourse help to secure acceptance of the discourse and so erode norms that are not included in it. So, for example, the fear of safeguarding issues that arise as ICT becomes an established presence in the schools is used to consolidate even greater use of ICT in schools rather than provoke discussion about whether ICT should be abandoned. The subversion of the institution is then deeper when the ICT learning is given such prominence, even without any detail as to what, exactly, that means. The discourse often conflates use of ICT for administration purposes with educational uses, which in practice avoids the requirement of the discourse having to answer what is meant by ICT in schools in detail. The discourse can assert that administrators, teachers and learners all benefit from having ICT in their schools without really clarifying the nature and scope of the benefits. But the subversion of the school institution is not so much in the lack of detail about the benefits as it is with excluding alternative visions of how schools may be organised and useful for. Giving ICT its link with the UK economy and giving it such a prominent status effectively excludes other discourses. An example would be that of a non-vocational, monastic social space. This in turn subverts the institution of schools, which, in England, have been institutions capable of disagreement between opposing visions. Homes as institutions are also subverted by this discourse, being exclusively configured as underdeveloped sites of informal learning of ICT that could potential bring benefits to the economic well being of the UK. The idea of home as a site of economic usefulness to the exclusion of any other purpose again subverts the institutional meaning of ‘home’. Again, the discourse does not argue against other discourses of home, such as it being a site for nurturing and well being, but rather excludes such discourses. In so doing it attempts to naturalise the meaning it gives to home and make less natural any opposing views. The subversiveness is developed in terms that emphasise the excellent progress being made in introducing ICT to the home where, as in the case of the institution of the school, the government is given credit for ensuring that the presence of ICT is now largely established (even if not yet complete). The conflation of the good news of the governmental success story and therefore the good news about the condition of the home and school in terms of the presence of ICT within both institutions ensures that the hegemonic discourse is associated with success. Although the success is the government’s, according to the discourse, it also allows wiggle room so that both schools and homes can also be understood as being successful where what they are and what they are achieving conforms to the hegemonic discourse regarding ICT. By omitting any other success criteria for homes this succeeds in making this god news whilst at the same time subverting other possible success criteria for ‘homes’. 9.4.14 Step Q: Who would benefit and who would be disadvantaged by the discourses By stabilising the rationale for continued investment in ICT in schools the discourse gives those with a vested interest in this. Therefore the ICT market and business community supplying the ICT and ICT services benefits hugely. Linking ICT investment within a capital spending building programme also ensures that benefits follow to the building industry. By linking ICT investment with other investment opportunities the ICT strategy is opened up to a wider engagement with the business community than just the ICT market. The claim of the discourse to be providing relevant vocational training and skills for the UK economy also suggests that industry and business communities will benefit through the provision of an employable workforce. The discourse also places stress on the role of school leadership, especially in terms of the need for fiscal management and for a managerialist approach to school leadership. This stress is one that largely excludes all other members of the school community, although by acknowledging the need for consultation and basing decisions on good practice there is a suggestion that other groups might play a role in the development of ICT in schools. However, the emphasis, coupled with directives and practical aids that require whole school decision-making, ensures that leaders with whole school responsibility are given enhanced status and importance. This especially the case for those with understanding and responsibility for value for money procurement issues. This reconstructs the role of school leadership forcing them into new and narrower behaviour. There is also the stress placed on the need for advice to ensure that such matters as value for money are properly managed and administered. This suggests an advantage for advisors and consultants, who may be central or local government personnel or seconded into such a role by central or local government. Disadvantaged by this discourse are those individuals and institutions that may not have such a fiscal focus or whose knowledge, skills and interests are excluded from the discourse. This may include teachers who have good knowledge of their subject specialism, for example, but whose knowledge of ICT and its application to their subject is less secure. ICT generalists, who may have technical knowledge of ICT but not be so secure in their subject specialism may well be advantaged in such a context where leadership is emphasising the need for ICT knowledge as a priority. ICT technicians may be advantaged by this. Given that a large part of the discourse relates to the procurement of ICT infrastructure and links it with safeguarding, it is possible that this might prove a burden to teachers. The way that the ICT policy is talked about advantages those people who are the post holders of institutions with responsibilities for those areas foregrounded in the discourse. So, for example, budget holders are potentially in positions of influence. Those in posts of responsibility for managing safeguarding also. Disadvantaged may be those with responsibility for non-vocational teaching and learning and ICT because of the omission of their area of influence from the discourse. The way that the organisational issues are talked about in managerialist terms will also clearly advantage those who are in positions of control and who want to maximise this throughout their sphere of influence. Professionals who require and prefer autonomy, so that they are able to use personal judgment, are disadvantaged by this discourse. Given that at Secondary schools are largely made up of discrete subject departments which historically have each tended to have different cultures, it may be that some subject areas may feel more advantaged and disadvantaged than others. Similarly these schools each have different overall cultures. A school used to high levels of autonomy will be disadvantaged by the discourse whilst another with high levels of managerialist control already in place may not be. This last point leads on to a more general observation which is that the discourse introduces homogeneity to school culture. Any attempt to preserve the diversity of different cultures for schools in the Secondary system may be disadvantaged by having this one way of talking about ICT policy. Diversity of cultures in schools is threatened by having a single way of talking about ICT policy dominant in all of them, given that ICT policy is positioned as having a transformational effect on all aspects of schooling. In so doing, the discourse attempts to establish hegemonic status for ideas which have historically been just part of a broader range of ideas. The discourse takes a definite and specific approach to what it thinks schools are for and in so doing attempts to dis-empower alternative points of view. Ideas and practices connected to the idea that schools have important non-vocational rationales are therefore likely to be disadvantaged in respect to how far this discourse establishes itself. This relates back to the point made earlier: people working in ways that contest the ICT discourse are likely to be disadvantaged. For example, art and drama teachers tend to develop cultures that value autonomous approaches to teaching and learning and would therefore find the way ICT was being talked about disadvantageous. It is a discourse that also, ironically, requires scrutiny and control throughout, elements that can be stifling to innovation. Although not necessarily the case, the heavily weighted top-down managerialism may well disadvantage the innovative use of ICT in schools, an irony already noted earlier. The focus on safeguarding also introduces an element that may well disadvantage risk takers who wish to widen the participation in ICT led learning. Bringing such an issue to the foreground threatens to stifle innovation and introduce risk-averse practices to schools. The safeguarding issue was seen as an unforeseen (or at least, previously unacknowledged) consequence of introducing ICT into schools, and supervising the issue may introduce risk averse practices as an unforeseen consequence of this strategy. 9.4.15 Step R: Supporting and discrediting these ways of talking What has been described is largely a univocal approach about each of the objects speaking in the text. Schools are largely managerialist processes generating vocational expertise for the UK economy. Leadership and management are the key group speaking and been spoken to in these schools. Potential groups who may disrupt the discourse of schools, administrative and teaching staff and pupils, are largely hidden and silenced. When discussed it is in terms of occasional good practice but largely in terms of how progress is still required. This is supported by claiming ‘good practice’ is the exception not the rule. This tight organisation of the discourse supports the naturalness of this way of speaking about schools, and helps provide an impression of normality and acceptability. To discredit this approach would require listening to opposing views from critical literature and from excluded groups. Opinions questioning the vocational purpose of schools, coupled with a different understanding of economic realities and Globalisation and Post-Industrialism, would all disrupt and to a large degree discredit any attempt to present the discourse as uncontentious. It would also be damaging if contrary ways of talking about the nature and role of ICT were visible. Similarly with the voice of ICT generally, the government, the home, teachers, pupils and parents, all of these are forced by the discourse to exclude non-economic, non-managerial elements. All of them are spoken about in terms of the preoccupation of value for money within a context of the UKs economic need in relation to the need for a workforce having a twentieth century skill base, which is in this discourse predominantly to do with being able to use ICT well. That school leadership is given an huge explicit and implicit role in the discourse, being by far the group that speaks and is spoken to most of all in the text, results in the fact that the other discourses are less prominent and tend to serve the purpose of merely consolidating the overall thrust of the discourse as a whole. Attempts to discredit these ways of talking have been largely about discrediting the assumptions on which this is all about. Because these assumptions are techno-economic these attempts have mainly been in those area. Economic assumptions about Globalisation, about the nature of the economic reality, about post-industrialism and the future have been subjected to intense scrutiny in attempts to remove the assumptions driving the discourse. Kumar, for example, is an example of this approach. Woolgar and Grint have been equally strenuous is their attempts to undermine the assumptions about technology, as has Cuban’s essential critical work. Ball has similarly written critically of the assumptions governing managerialism. Yet there is little evidence that this has succeeded. Ironically, perhaps by focusing on techno-economic assumptions the critics have merely succeeded in fixing techno-economic assumptions as the only relevant assumptions. 9.4.16 Step S: Linking the discourses The effects of linking the discourses has been to present a unified vision within the ICT policy. It has constructed an ICT policy discourse in such a way that government, business and ICT are indissolvably linked together with a common purpose and vision. The link between government and government is one of a unified economic purpose, and is spoken of throughout as having a shared view on economic realities, visions of the future, visions of schooling and so on. Schooling is linked to the same discourse with the effect that schools are seen as extensions of government and business purpose. The effect of this unified way of talking on schools is to produce a managerialist driven organisation whose objectives are wholley determined by the discourse. ICT is spoken about in terms of being the powerful technology that will bring about the efficiencies that this way of talking requires. The linking up of the discourses serves also to omit different ways of talking, for instance about schools and about ICT. And in turn this linking of discourses not only serves to omit other ways of talking but also has the effect of omitting the speakers of alternative discourses from the policy. So pupils, teachers and homes are either omitted or permitted only when talked about using the dominant discourse. An apparent consistency is presented through the looking up of the different discourses. This constructs an apparently self-contained, rational and non-contradictory way of speaking about schooling and ICT which are taken as rhetorical signs of objectivity and legitimacy. 9.4.17 Step T: Reproducing or challenging dominant conceptions The discourses found in the ICT policy reforms examined are reproduced and challenged beyond the narrow confines of the thesis’s focus. So homes, young people, public servants like teachers and public service such as teaching are all now being reconstructed through these discourses. So as mentioned earlier, the idea of ‘home’ as being a contributor to economic growth reproduces the same way of speaking and so reconstructs home in terms of the techno-economic. This is a clear case of how this way of speaking is a radically different one to alternative conceptions of ‘home’ that historically prevailed before, where for example they might have been talked about as a site of nurturing and the development of well-being and self-fulfilment, or as a site of privacy beyond the purview of economics or politics. This way of talking can be seen as extending into areas way beyond schooling and education and is something the thesis noted in the chapter looking at Ball’s policy sociology. There the dominant way of talking was being applied in areas of housing, transport, policing and government, in fact was being reproduced in all areas of public sector service. By taking this broader perspective the way of speaking about ICT in schools can be seen as being part of a larger phenomenon, one of the increased scope and influence of this way of talking. Schools as shops, pupils as customers or consumers of education, education as a commodity value, this way of talking which is dominant is also reproduced in non-educational areas. So we can see that reproduction requires that the same narrative drive be presented using similar materials. Wherever managerialism, understanding purpose and rationale in terms of a version of economic Globalisation, but also focusing on the need for good fiscal management, where the principle of value for money becomes a dominant value, the precarious place of the UK in terms of competition from foreigners, the need for re-skilling people so that they are fit for a version of the twenty-first century, the predominance of ICT as the defining technology of the present and the future, adopting ideas of an Information Society and Knowledge Economy to support all this, all these elements presented together to the exclusion of alternatives then the discourses are reproduced. Challenge is found where this way of talking can be curtailed and where alternative or different elements are introduced.
Additional steps to Banisters’ CDA As in the previous case study, methodology developed for this thesis adds two further steps to Bannister’s stepped approach. The first will mobilise Bell’s theory of axial principles and separate realms. The second additional step will be to apply Wodak’s perspective, which would examine how the discourse might have changed through time. 9.5.1 Applying Bell’s Axial Principles It is at this point that a key insight of the present thesis can be applied. Bell’s scheme, proposed that everything in society could be understood in one of three different categories, the techno-economic, the political and the cultural. I concluded that Bell’s system was of direct relevance to understanding English Secondary schooling, because English Secondary schools were historically bound up in an ideological dispute about what they were for which largely mirrored Bell’s scheme. Applying Bell to the discourse of ICT policy in Secondary schools deepens understanding of the discourse in terms of the particular arguments about the purpose of English Secondary schools. Bell’s Techno-Economic and Cultural realms capture the exhaustive binary opposition proposed by Oakeshott respectively, where the former represents the ‘Market’ conception of educational purpose and the latter the ‘Monastic’. Bell’s tripartite schema a further that both monastic or market schooling will also be independent on the political forces developing in the modern state setting, which is acceptance of some ideas and principles such as inclusion, equality, merit and so on. The discourse examined in this case study is clearly one that is dominated by principles of efficiency. Applying Bell’s framework to this shows that it is a discourse rooted in the techno-economic, thoroughly embedding a managerialist process in the heart of everything, seeking to maximise outputs from inputs in every sphere and ignoring and silencing principles of the polity and cultural realms throughout. The immense presence of the value for money agenda couples with the systematic audit machinery it introduces, both in terms of the required proposal to ‘self review’ the use of ICT using the official Becta self review framework, the ‘ICT Quality Mark’ process, but also in its sustained review and audit mechanisms and use of standardised reporting and data to support future efficiency. Its use of school leadership and management is completely organised and presented in terms of the managerialist idiom focused on the objective of maximising efficiency of return on investment. This is important in showing these discourses are economic not political. For example, the language of efficiency runs through the text, where benefits are understood in terms of ‘…better value through aggregation and consistent terms and conditions’ (Becta 2007, p17), a statement repeating almost verbatim a statement on page 4 of the same document, where ‘…more targeted support…’ will use ‘…better access to up-to-date performance data and pupil targets’ (Becta 2007, p12), where ‘improvement’, ‘better’ and ‘ increased’ become the key words in the discourses’ drive of the axial principle of Bell’s techno-economic realm, efficiency. What has been labelled ‘managerialism’ is the only organisational process of the discourse. The establishment of measureable, quantifiable targets and accompanying mechanisms for ensuring maximum efficiency is the subject matter of the discourse. It is important to note that by applying Bell the procedure highlights absences that otherwise might be missed. Schools are spoken of in terms of a discourse of efficiently organising resources to maximise output, all outputs are quantified in ways that allow for measurability and scoring. In this way the discourse exemplifies the need for quantification of all elements to enable comparability. With such elements in place, efficiency is something that can be given the gloss of objectivity and fact rather than merely subjectivity. However, the very idea that everything in the discourse can be subjected to some kind of comparability and that judgments can be made, somehow, in terms of enabling the greatest efficiency, is all the realm requires to be firmly included in Bell’s techno-economic realm. Throughout there is the insistence that the market suppliers ‘…understand the needs of schools’ (Becta 2007, p17). The techno-economic realm is therefore imagined as being the same realm in which schools, school leaders, teachers and so forth are actually also found. Bell’s ‘cultural realm’ sheds light on what the alternative voice might be, and how much is lost by this policy discourse of ICT in English schools. The ideals of self-fulfilment, and of principles that cluster round this value, are removed. Even where there are references to student enjoyment and personal development, which signals that the discourse of the techno-economic has not managed to remove all remnants of other realms, it is important to note just how marginal the language of the cultural realm has become. Applying Bell shows the subversion of issues in the discourse by showing how they are relocated from one realm of Bell’s framework to another. So, for example, where references to the cultural realm are found they are placed within an overwhelmingly techno-economic context. What this does is acclimatise the audience to interpreting even cultural discourses in terms of the techno-economic. Discussion of effective teaching, which might be expected to begin discussion about learner enjoyment and personal development, quickly turns away from engagement with such issues and instead becomes a rather muddled discussion of the need for better systems of accountability and assessment of teaching and learning, which immediately turns the discussion into one of managerialist process rather than one interested in self fulfilment and expansion of being, and about the efficient use of ICT, involving asking how far ‘…the four principles of best value (challenge, compare, consult and competition) have been applied’ (Ofsted 2009, p5). Discussion of pupil achievement in terms of levels has been naturalised to this techno-economic discourse. The failure of any references to cultural realm values except cursory references to the motivational impact of ICT on learners, that are then used to discuss teacher failings and the requirement of better ICT investment, suggests that the discourse is unable to accommodate the other realm at all. The point of Bell’s approach was that Bell thought that the techno-economic realm, though important in the development of post-industrial society, what he labelled the ‘Information Society’, as discussed in the earlier chapter on Bell, was not the whole of society. Applied to education a similar point is being made. The discourse of the techno-economic realm is overwhelmingly present to the extent that the discourse of the other realms is largely missing. What this shows is that the development of ICT into schools has become one completely dominated by techno-economic principles. In so doing Bell’s schema shows that crucial dimensions of the cultural and the political have largely disappeared from the discourse of education and English Secondary school education in particular. In effect Bell’s scheme shows how education has become part of the techno-economic realm and that the policy to place ICT into schools has been a major factor in this development. The unique status of computing, now understood as ICT, has been attached to a specific realm of discourse in a way that has made other realms largely silenced. Prevalence of Discourses Over Time The documents that make up the text of this second case study appeared in the years 2005 to 2010. They therefore represent a development of the discourse studied in the first case study, allowing us to register the prevalence of the discourses over time. The different context however has brought into consideration new elements and different points of emphasis. This new study takes place at a time when ICT’s presence seems established in the English school system. This is indicated by the way the documents are not so much about the potential benefits of ICT and the need to invest but a shift to discussions about what to do with the investment already made, in particular avoiding risks associated with ICT. The idea of ICT being associated with risks was not a concern in the first case study, which indicates how the discourses developed over time, changing the focus of the introduction of ICT from one of unlimited potential to one of risk. The economic imperative is developed over time in this way; in the earlier phase it was exclusively to do with vocational education in the context of Global economics and the requirements of anew kind of schooling for the Knowledge Economy and Information Society of the twenty-first century. To this has been added the economics of the ICT systems themselves as they impinge on the economics of running schools. This new, more localised economic concern adds to the overall dominance of the techno-economic presence in schools and education.
This second CDA has confirmed that the dominance of the techno-economic principles in English Secondary school ICT policy has continued. The coherence of the discourse has increased by talking about the maintenance of ICT in schools using the same discourse as that which established its presence. It is noted that by 2006 ICT had become a large presence In English Secondary schools. As we have seen in earlier chapters, by 2006 the huge investment in the policy centrally had ensured that ICT had become, in the words of the Ofsted document, ‘ubiquitous.’ The focus of the discourse is therefore about managing the established presence. The case study provides evidence that the discourse is not constructing ICT policy for introducing ICT into schools but is dominant after ICT is introduced into schools. In this case study management of the presence of ICT is therefore the concern of the discourse rather than the establishment of its presence. The same way of talking about schools, schools management, teachers, pupils and homes continues. Government and business’s symbiotic relationship constructed by this way of talking is also shown to have been continued. The application of Bell to the CDA has provided evidence enables the missing domains, those the discourse of the Cultural Realm and the discourse of the Political respectively, continue to be omitted from the policy discourse as it continues. New discourses of ‘value for money’ and ‘safeguarding’ are introduced to those familiar from the first CDA of the thesis. These elements are new to the overall policy discourse but are talked about in the same way as everything else is as being constructions of the techno-economic realm. Subjects found in the first case study remain as presences although are less foregrounded these two new discourses. The CDA has shown that schools are constructed in terms of managerialist concerns and the maximisation of efficiencies. This links evidence about the respective roles of individuals within schools. School leadership and management are talked about as managers of a shop or a business, where opportunities for cost efficiencies and risk management are foregrounded. Pupils are constructed as not being fully exploited, as customers might be in a business setting. Teachers are constructed in terms of needing further training in ICT to deliver the potentialities offered by the technology. School ICT is constructed as having enormous potential that is not being fully exploited but this familiar way of talking about it is joined by the additional concern of its risks and costs. These are talked about in terms of the way schools need to manage the concerns. In this way the CDA has shown how ICT is constructed in such a way that it provides self-sustaining reasons for its centrality to the discourse. If it is a risk, because it is expensive and brings extra safeguarding threats into schools, it is also a resource for minimising these risks through on-line support systems, software. The business double-entry business model that managerialist management models use and which is the dominant way of talking about the management of any systems is also one which ensures that any threat that ICT may be said to carry is not used as an opportunity to criticise the ICT policy. The CDA has therefore shown that there is no change in the way ICT is talked about as a necessary and unquestionable. In this its hegemonic status throughout this period is confirmed. The application of Bell’s schema throws light on the cultural and political discourses that are excluded by this dominance of the techno-economic. The expansion of the ICT infrastructures into society generally could have been talked about in terms of political or cultural terms but are wholly discussed in terms of the expansion of business opportunities for exchange. It is the submergence of Bell’s cultural realm that is perhaps most interesting when you consider that this is an educational discourse. The absence of notions directed to ‘self fulfilment’ is a clear signal that these documents are not accommodating different ideas about the purpose of education but is very definitely constrained within the narrow confines of the techno-economic. Through applying Bell’s framework there is a clear sense that the educational discourse is overwhelmingly directed to efficiency. Its overt principle is that of efficiency. Where the idea of education as an investment may have had metaphorical resonances in other discourses more open to cultural and political principles, in this discourse the notion of ‘investment’ is given a literal economic reading. Throughout the focus on value is in terms of value for money rather than self-fulfilment and/or equality. It remains a controlling dimension to the whole discourse. The CDA provides overwhelming evidence that a discourse has been constructed that only talks about the economic requirement for the schools. The CDA has shown that a once familiar ongoing debate about education’s objectives, one that gives the cultural realm an important role, is now absent. The case study shows that the policy guiding the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools is ignoring the political and cultural values. The narrative of the discourse recognises that despite the enormous investment there was still no easily identified success on the same scale as the investment. It is possible to infer from this that the focus on the fiscal is a distracting tactic. The emphasis on the official, standardising language of control mechanisms and measurement avoids the challenge that values from the other realms might raise. The cursory acknowledgement of the motivational power of ICT threatens to lead the discourse into considerations that are best understood in terms of the axial principle of ‘self-fulfilment’ rather than efficiency, but the discourse curtails this swiftly, switching the subject matter from pleasure to standards which then introduces extended discussion about the management of necessary measurement and control mechanisms. The case study has shown that between 2006 and 2010 the particular individuals in the case study in charge of introducing ICT into schools were being exposed to a discourse that was exclusively techno-economic. This has answered two research questions, one as to whether there really is a dominance of the techno-economic principles in the educational discourse regarding ICT in English secondary Schools, and two, whether the techno-economic realm, governed by the principle of efficiency, dominates the educational discourse at the expense of cultural and political principles. It also gave evidence for answering a further question about the purpose of education and whether the policies introducing ICT into English Secondary schools had an impact on ideas about the objectives of schooling. The case study suggests that the discourse used is one that is overwhelmingly committed to an idea of schools being for vocational ends. In terms of the Oakeshottian metaphors, it is a discourse of the market rather than the monastery. In that it is a discourse that closes down not only the cultural realm’s influence but also the political realm too, the case study gives evidence that political values related to democratic principles are also excluded. The chapter has presented the results of a second CDA examining a text from a later period than the first study. Its methodology has been identical with that of the first study, being largely based on an approach developed out of Foucault by Banister but also drawing on other theorists such as Wodak and Bell. It has concluded that the discourse examined is exclusively techno-economic. Political and cultural values are excluded from the educational discourse studied. This has in turn been connected to the Oakeshottian discussion about the competing objectives of schooling in England, which presents educational as being for either vocational purpose or for non-vocational, self-fulfilment purposes. The discourse of the case study is concluded to be exclusively concerned with legitimising schooling in terms of the vocational objective. In the next chapter, the thesis will review its purpose and summarising outcomes of the five research questions. This final chapter will outline the main contributions of the research, discusses its limitations, summarise possible areas for further research and finally outlines the implications for educational policy and practice.
CHAPTER 10:CONCLUSION
This chapter concludes the thesis by reviewing its purpose and summarising the outcomes of the five research questions. The chapter outlines the main contributions, discusses its limitations, summarises possible areas for further research and finally outlines the implications for educational policy and practice. 10.1.1 Reviewing the Purpose of the Thesis Firstly, I intended to rethink approaches to ICT provision in English Secondary schools. The huge financial investment and the centrality of ICT in educational policy formation presented ICT as a very significant factor in this sector of schooling, in particular during the New Labour period spanning 1997 through to 2010. I examined the way these policies have conceptualised ICT in this context. In so doing the thesis examined how these policies constructed the educational purpose of this sector and how it constructed ICT in the schools. It examined the way the New Labour policies drew on ideas from outside of education and schooling to justify and contextualise their positioning of ICT as a central feature of their school reforms. The thesis asked what role this construction of ICT was being given in that reform agenda and how much this construction was due to Ideological reasons that drew on general considerations rather than just educational ones. The thesis was therefore interested in finding out whether the policies introducing ICT were driven by a broader agenda than merely education and how far and in what ways the policies changed previous educational values and purpose. The thesis therefore examines previous ways of understanding educational purpose in the English Secondary school sector. It also examines policy sociological considerations. From so doing the thesis’s second purpose emerges: to make clear that considerations of educational purpose and the formation of policies are hugely contested areas. However, when surveying the existing literature about the specific policies of ICT, there seemed to be an assumption about ICT and its importance that was shared by both supporters of the policies and those challenging them in various ways. The assumption was that there was a technological and economic superstructure that explained everything, and that ICT’s importance was premised on this assumption. My second purpose was therefore to suggest that this assumption was largely ideological and that there might be alternatives. By introducing a sociological perspective of Daniel Bell and applying it to this specific area of interest, I intended this thesis to find out whether it might suggest alternatives and by doing this see if the framework was productive. Finally, I wanted to find out what techno-enthusiasts expected ICT to achieve and whether these expectations had been achieved. I also wanted to find out whether and to what extent ICT was being used as a symbol for something else, linking it to visions of the future, modernity and progress.
The findings of the research, derived from the five research questions outlined in chapter 1, are synthesised in this section. I examined the purpose of English Secondary Schooling. I analysed the ICT policy introducing ICT into English Secondary schools and how these relate to schools’ broader purpose, looking at what happens to education when ICT is introduced into English Secondary schools. I further investigated how policy influences this process, in particular looking at what the policies have been and how they were formed, how these policies are expected to influence practice and identifying what concepts are used to explain the influence of the policies. I also wanted to discover if these were Educational concepts, and if they weren’t, how this made a difference. 10.2.1 The Purpose of English Secondary Schooling (RQ1) The thesis has shown how the history of educational purpose has been largely structured around a prevailing conflict of discourses, in particular discourses of vocational and anti-vocational educational purpose (Oakeshott’s market Vs monastery idea) within a political context of democratic civil society. Inevitably this description is schematic but I have argued that it captures the contours of the English education system. The thesis has therefore taken this binary division as a useful way of organising educational purpose in terms of it being vocational or non-vocational. The metaphors of schools as markets or monasteries were taken as labels for this. The thesis has provided an outline of the historical context of this division and made a case for saying that the conflict between these opposing ideals is ingrained in the history of secondary schooling in England. It was through understanding the contrast and contest between these two visions of educational purpose that ideas about the curriculum being taught in these schools, the organisational structures of these schools, of examinations systems and issues of class, gender and so forth were interpreted. This work formed a key contextual frame for understanding subsequent chapters. The distinction functions as a Weberian Ideal Type, a constructed binary division into which everything is categorised as being either as one or the other. However, it is also a division understood as being part of a historical debate taking place within the development of schooling in England, the opposing values generating familiar debates about the role of the vocational and non-vocational purposes English Secondary schools. Because of this, it is identified as a crucial distinction informing English Secondary schooling, as opposed to Secondary schooling generally. The thesis is therefore not saying that educational necessarily has to be conceived in terms of this binary opposition but rather that historically it is an opposition that has been enacted in England and is therefore a credible way of understanding educational purpose in the present context. The thesis has linked it with the historical development of the educational curriculum in England to a Puritan tradition as described by White (White 2006). It has linked it to a political disagreement about education that has been important in the recent history of English Secondary school education since the Thatcherite Conservative government of the late 1980s and continuing with the New Labour administration from 1997 until 2010. It has importantly linked it with a political debate, connected with educational theorist and philosopher Dewey, about what the democratic context of modern education requires the purpose of education to be. This has led the thesis to identify ideas of autonomy and self realization as important aspects of educational purpose that have often been discussed as being explicitly opposed to ideas of educational purpose understood purely in terms of the vocational. The thesis has presented reasons for thinking then that this is an important aspect of the context for the introduction of ICT into schools. It has been presented as a site of a continuing debate and argument. Rather than being a neutral ground of settled, hegemonic agreement, educational purpose in England has historically been a highly contested site. The thesis has suggested that all these considerations are highly important in contributing to understanding the impact of ICT in English Secondary schools. 10.2.2 The Relationship between ICT Policy Introducing ICT into English Secondary Schools and Schools’ Broader Purpose (RQ2) The thesis has examined the policy introducing ICT into this educational sector. I have used Ball’s policy sociology and applied it to key policies of the period of interest. I have also examined key secondary about ICT educational policy. Ball and other key writers have made clear the impact of these reforms on transforming the nature of pubic service in general and education in particular. There is considerable agreement in this literature that a new policy discourse has been mobilised for the purpose of public sector reform in England. The idea of discourse is highlighted in this approach to understanding the work of policy in a sector like education for the simple reason that, as Fairclough says, “Much of the action of government is language” (Fairclough 2007, p157). In this case this discourse uses the language of efficient business transaction, managerialism, cost efficiency, privatization, business, competition and Globalisation. Applied to education, this has changed educational discourse from one of ‘service’ to one of ‘economics’. What is important for my thesis, and one thing that sets it apart from other educational technology work, is its critical perspective. Norm Friesen makes a distinction between different kinds of research perspectives and feels that the critical emancipatory perspective is neglected. My research falls into that gap. In the literature of key writers such as Selwyn and Woolgar, for instance, this discourse is not related to the historical context of educational purpose for Secondary schools in England that my thesis has presented as being highly contested. This has important consequences for subsequent attempts to understand and critique the ICT policy as introduced into the sector. One of these consequences is that ICT is constructed as having a necessary connection with the techno-economic discourse that has developed under the government administrations since the late 1980’s in England. When related to the contested purposes of education the ICT policy discourse is not a neutral construction. The thesis argues that assumptions embedded in the discourse take one side of the debate about educational purpose. Seen from the position of the historical argument between vocational and anti-vocational educational purpose, the ICT policy is part of a discourse that is wholly vocational in purpose. By relating the purpose of the ICT policy to the debate about educational purpose generally the thesis shows that ignoring anti-vocational ideals ignores a historically important alternative construct of the educational context. It gives hegemonic status to the constructed bias of the policy discourse. The thesis has shown that alternatives to the actual policy discourse for ICT are required so that the constructed reality of that discourse can be challenged. In other words, my thesis is making an important contribution to expanding the range of possible critiques of the ICT policy being examined. My thesis also contributes to sharpening the account of ICT’s place within the dominant discourse. It relates the place of ICT to influential sociological constructions of modernity, in particular ideas about ‘Post-Modernity’ that even if they have little traction in sociology have been important in policy construction. It has also shown that the assumption of a techno-economic infrastructure underlying and explaining the whole of society, including education, is historically conditioned by assumptions of Marx and Liberal economics and that alternative assumptions should be explored. The use of Daniel Bell’s resistance to the idea of the economic infrastructure that he developed when producing his version of post-industrialism, the Information Society, is used in the thesis to show how the thesis is producing an alternative theoretical understanding of the educational ICT policy discourse. The idea of a tripartite infrastructure of techno/economic, political and cultural realms with their distinct axial principles organising their development has been used to interpret the educational discourse in order to challenge the hegemonic perspective in the ICT policies that assumed the techno-economic realm was exhaustive. An implication of this has been to produce an analysis of the educational ICT policy discourse that can discuss the historical context of the educational debate about contested purpose in terms of the different contested realms. This is original to the thesis. It argues that the ICT policy discourse, and in fact the general policy discourse of the period being addressed in the thesis, has been placed wholly in terms of one of three distinct realms. By doing so it shows that the techno-economic is neither exhaustive of all possible educational or political understanding nor should it be assumed to be hierarchically of prime importance. Bell’s thesis about ‘cultural contradictions’ argues that the three realms are not arranged in any hierarchical order but are equally important. The thesis has shown that by making new assumptions about the educational policy discourse ICT policy is not the inevitable consequence of realities about England’s techno-economic need and the purpose of its Secondary schooling. It is linked to historical discussions about contested educational purpose. It is also liked to the reform agendas of government administrations during the period studied, The importance of a contestable theory of post-industrialism and the role of ICT in that vision and its interconnected features is foregrounded. It is that that makes up the dominant discourse, and a bias towards one side of a two-sided debate about educational purpose in this sector. Finally, the thesis has focused itself on a very particular aspect of schooling and education, that of English Secondary schooling and ICT policy. In doing this it contests generalized ideas about educational ICT. By highlighting the particularity of English schooling and its purpose, implications of that particular history for ICT being introduced into those schools have been drawn. However, the specificity of that history requires that other sectors and National identities will need to be treated according to their particular contexts. The thesis is therefore arguing that assumptions about the impact of ICT on schooling can’t be made in isolation form the particular contexts into which it is introduced. The thesis therefore largely undermines any presupposed idea that technology can be said to be potentially beneficial without understanding the system it is going to be used in and being clear about its purpose. 10.2.3 Consequences of the Introduction of ICT into English Secondary Schools (RQ3) The thesis has examined in detail the policies introducing ICT into English Secondary schools and discovered that the policies were part of much broader general public sector policy reform agenda that was begun by the UK government administrations of the late eighties onwards. The period of this policy reform from 1997 onwards under the New Labour government was where the ICT policies in schools became very prevalent. The thesis has shown both the enormous number of policies designed to introduce ICT into English Secondary schools and the enormous financial expense of this process. The general policy reform agenda of the New Labour administration introduced the techno-economic discourse that policy sociologists such as Ball have identified as defining these reforms (Ball 2008). Schools were generally converted into institutions conceived in techno-economic terms. The thesis adds to this generally understood point by showing how the ICT policy was an illustrative part of this overall discourse. An implication of this for the thesis is that the introduction of ICT into English Secondary schools was not driven just by educational reasons but was the result of an attitude towards ICT that meant it was seen as potentially powerful in any area of the discourse. The discourse in sectors other than education and schooling, such as health, were similarly introducing ICT. However, the thesis identifies some elements of the discourse that specifically implicates education and schools. Ideas linking the economic reality of current modernity to a ‘knowledge society’ and an ‘information society’ were part of the explicit reasoning used in policy justification. The thesis shows that these ideas evolved from new conceptions of economic social reality, in particular with the contested ideas of post-industrialism. Schools, being places of learning, information and knowledge, were therefore sites of intrinsic interest for policies that placed ICT as the defining technology of a hegemonic techno-economic discourse. In Chapter three the thesis examined the actual policies and showed how schools were transformed from schools without a large ICT presence to schools that largely were ICT rich. The analysis of two case studies in chapters 8 and 9 traced this shift in terms of the policies at first being attempts to establish ICT in the schools and then being about managing the implications of successfully establishing ICT’s presence. The case studies established that the emphasis of the policy discourse subtly moved from presenting ICT in terms of its unlimited positive potential framed by economic concepts (discussed in the next section below) to one where ICT was a risk that required careful management. Schools’ discourse around ICT transformed from one of unlimited optimism to one about offsetting potential threats. Schools were initially sites where ICT was continually used to mobilise ideas of the vocational purpose of education. Policies introducing ICT into schools at the beginning of the New Labour administration in 1997 through to 2005 were largely optimistic about the transformational power of ICT. My thesis found no evidence that any transformation that may have happened was recognised or valued. The application of Bell’s thesis of the three distinct realms was applied to the case study, something that was not done before my thesis. In so doing the documents produced by teachers and practitioners of ICT in Secondary English schools from this period, which were the documents that constituted ‘policy’ to them, were shown to be dominated by the techno-economic discourse. The suppression of the other realms, the political and the cultural, indicated that the introduction of ICT into schools at least in part was to do with the establishment of this discourse. Schools were introducing ICT and adopting a discourse that largely ignored other powerful discourses Bell identified as the political and the cultural. Bell’s tripartite construct helped to show this. Critical discourse analysis can be argued to be good at revealing what’s there, even if hidden. It may be argued that it is less good at showing what is absent. Bell’s model draws attention to what is absent. By using an approach that separated them out as distinct and potentially contradictory discourses, the thesis was able to connect the current policy discourse with the educational debate about purpose. Schools were adopting a view of educational purpose that was vocational and the ICT policy of this period was identifiable as helping construct this perspective. The vagueness of the actual purpose of ICT itself was also something that suggested that the ICT policy was using ICT almost as a symbol of the economic discourse and that there was no evidence in the policies as they developed of exactly what ICT was so good for in the context of education that it justified such enormous amounts of money being spent on establishing it there. The second case study in chapter nine showed how the first phase of optimism about ICT’s transformational potential that had been found between 1995 to 2005 was joined by a new sense of pessimism. ICT in this phase were more concerned with the risks that ICT brought to schools. Schools were conceived as business organisations that had to manage the risks that ICT brought to them. This was not something that had been part of the case study of the policy’s earlier phase. The risks were financial, conceived of in terms of ‘value for money,’ and also about personal well-being, conceived of in terms of ‘safeguarding.’ The thesis therefore found that the ICT policy under scrutiny shifted over time. This second case study reflected the reality that ICT was by 2005 a large presence in Secondary schools. There was no longer a need to foreground justifications for having ICT because it was by 2005 ‘ubiquitous.’ The new interest in risk management and awareness therefore reflected the new context, which was largely about managing the successful establishment of ICT’s presence to maintain its techno-economic discourse. The thesis therefore shows that education largely becomes defined and conceived of in terms of the techno-economic discourse that ICT policy uses. Schools have become places where this discourse has been introduced as if it is a neutral discourse about ICT and education. This has been possible because the contested values of educational purpose have not been presented in the discourse. Instead, one set of values, those of the techno-economic, have been used to suppress alternatives. ICT policy has been used as a way of presenting the values associated with vocational purpose as the only values relevant to education and schooling in he English Secondary Sector. The unique application of Bell’s theory of Axial Principles to the discourse has enabled me to critique this situation. It represents the situation in a way that doesn’t assume that some kind of techno-economic discourse exhausts all options for thinking about educational purpose. The analysis allows for a counter argument that isn’t about an alternative economic purpose for these schools, but one that raises the possibility of perhaps cultural or political purpose, completely separate from any economic conception, as alternatives. 10.2.4 How Policy Influences the Process (RQ4)10.2.4.1 The Policies The ICT policies examined were those in the period between 1995 and 2010. Although secondary literature assumes that some policy documents are more important than others my study did not select its documents to reflect such a presupposition. I explain policy formation and selection in the following sections. 10.2.4.2 How these Policies were formed The thesis has examined the process of policy formation and has been influenced by the work of Ball and his ‘policy sociology’. Ball’s approach makes very clear that policy making and implementation is a process that involves not just the government officials and researchers, ministers and civil servants who are engaged in thinking up policy but is equally about the interaction of the ideas of practitioners such as teachers and school leaders and other individuals who have roles in implementing the policies. For this reason the thesis has engaged in cases studies that have been shaped by groups of practitioners and teachers working in the English Secondary school sector who have specific responsibilities for implementing ICT policies. It has taken seriously what documents they have taken as being the policy and been able to examine how the policies have been used, formed and been influential. 10.2.4.3 The influences of these Policies on Practice As already noted, the thesis has found that the techno-economic discourse has been established in the settings studied through the ICT policy. The policy is the dominant discourse for both education and for ICT. Schools are largely conceived in terms of the discourse of the techno-economic and alternatives are largely omitted. Educational values are completely dominated by this discourse and the Secondary sector school in England is reproduced in terms of the discourse. The concepts used in the discourse are discussed below. The thesis has found that ICT in education policy has been totally associated with the discourse. The thesis therefore has found that ICT’s role in these schools has been defined completely by the general reform policy discourse of the period studied. ICT, unlike other subjects, was largely a new subject that only became introduced as a subject in schools in this wave of policy making. The phenomenon of policy ‘hyperactivity’ that characterises much of the way policies were produced at this time, characterised by a constant bombardment of new policies ensuring that the notion of continual change prevailed, meant that ICT has been a very high profile feature of the reform agenda and one that has largely had the role of impressing on schools the idea of newness and the future that were part of what underpinned the discourse. The thesis found that the continuous reference to ICT in policies ensured that the dominant discourse was established and supported by a defining technology everyone, both in and out of schools, was encouraged to believe was what the future modernity was all about. By examining the history of technology in schools by writers such as Cuban (Cuban 1996) this thesis suggests that such claims are consistent with claims made for earlier technological innovation, are largely unfounded and therefore these claims are open to critical challenge. 10.2.5 The Concepts used to Explain the Influence of the Policies (RQ5)10.2.5.1 How do these Concepts make a Difference The thesis has shown that concepts influencing policies are not all educational. A contribution of the thesis has been to show the influence of the concept of post-industrialism on educational discourse of this period. Although many sociologists largely dismiss the term as being too general and vague to be of sociological interest as a tool of analysis, work by Kumar and Webster have shown that it has been a concept that writers and thinkers about modernity have attached significance to. So its value here is not as an analytic tool but as a category of discourse that is opened to critique. Another contribution of this thesis is to revisit an aspect of the idea of post-industrialism of Daniel Bell, which presented a three-realm theory of Axial principles. The thesis also shows how preoccupations with the idea of a Global economic reality has been important to the policy discourse that is now predominant in Secondary school education. The thesis traces how this concept has fed into the discourse and has been used in a specific way to emphasise the idea of economic threat that Globalisation brings. The thesis recognizes that the concept is one that is contested and constructed in various ways but how it is used in the discourse emphasises ICT’s role in this new economic reality, emphasises the role of knowledge and information, and emphasises therefore a link between Gobalisation and the need for an education that skills workers for this new world. It therefore provides a vehicle for the idea of educational purpose being solely vocational, linking everything to the job market. It also emphasises competition between countries as a threatening feature, where the requirement to become skilled up for the twenty-first century is presented as largely a matter of survival. Globalisation is therefore presented as a competitive, cutthroat economic enterprise where foreigners are threats and failure to innovate to achieve the necessary transformations of this new world will result in dire consequences. Schools are placed at the heart of this in education policy. ICT, as the defining technology of this situation, is conceived in terms of breaking down time and space barriers to markets in ways that were previously unimaginable. The policy pushing ICT into education is therefore one mobilising conceptions of schools as requiring updating to survive and positioning ICT as what it means to be updated. ICT policy in education is therefore conceived in terms that make it more than just an educational policy. It is the educational policy. The thesis has argued that the ICT policy discourse introduces concepts of market economics, of producers and consumers. Self-interest, and a shift to Lyotard’s idea of performativity. Lyotard defines performativity as the best "possible input-output equation" (Lyotard 1984, p46). These concepts have suppressed other concepts such as ‘service’ thought of in terms of a ‘professional-ethical’ regime, of the ‘social and community’ understood as referring to interests that are alternatives to those of individual well being. Business competitiveness is prevalent and the thesis provides evidence of the absence of concepts such as collaboration and support for others. The thesis has also pointed to the fact that the ICT policy has also been linked to the concept of the future. It has been part of the ‘continual reform’ policy process that the New Labour administrations have used. This suggests that continual reform is in itself part of the policy. The future, being something always new, requires this concept of itself as continually renewing. As I wrote in Chapter 4, this also emphasises the ‘communicative texture’ of the processes involved, where the language of the New Labour ideology is continually present as new policy. The thesis has therefore argued that ICT in secondary English schools is a construction of a general policy discourse that is techno-economic. The use of Bell’s tripartite theory of axial principles has provided evidence that alternative realms to the techno-economic, namely the cultural and the political, are absent from the dominant policy discourse. The thesis has provided evidence that the New Labour administration of 1997 to 2010 has been largely responsible for this whilst conceding that certain elements of policy discourse were introduced earlier than this by a Conservative administration beginning in the late 1980s. It has shown that although ICT has been present in schools before the New Labour period it has been much more central to educational reform policies during this time. The thesis provides evidence that the construction of ICT in the policy discourse has enabled it to have a symbolic significance for the discourse as a whole. The thesis provides evidence of the hegemonic status of this discourse. The historical context of this ICT reform is also used to provide evidence that the ICT policies have not been constructed in such a way as to include all the various constructions of educational purpose that were present before the policy reforms. In particular the ICT policy reform discourse provides evidence for a construction of education that excludes non-vocational, non-economic educational objectives.
10.3.1 Contributions to Policy The main contribution of this thesis is to research about educational policy, and educational ICT policy in particular. The ICT policy has been analysed and has been found to be a particular and highly visible and well-funded part of the New labour education policy reform discourse, which in turn is a particular case of what Ball has called a ‘general policy reform discourse’ (Ball 2008). The analysis has been a contribution to the education debates that have in the past been formed around the contrast between the monastery conceptions of schooling and the market conceptions of schooling. The inclusion of Bell has enriched the number of discourses available to discuss educational reforms of the future. The two realms of the cultural and political which are absent from the dominant reform policy discourse are potentially immensely rich and fertile for education and schooling. So the findings of this thesis clearly indicate that any educational policy that restricts itself to a single discourse excludes two major realms. This limits the reach of the discourse. It omits other discourses that in the past have been important. It is expected that future work in these areas will take this analysis further by examining how an ICT policy discourse constructed with all three of Bell’s Axial principles included might be represented. The findings of this research also help develop a theoretical framework that supports the findings of other critics of the techno-reform agenda, such as Larry Cuban in America, who have been subjected to the criticism that their work is under theorised. The framework involves applying Bell’s three realms which both exposes what is omitted and is productive of additional discourses. This provides a framework that does not replace the dominant techno-economic discourse but rather is one that restricts its range of influence and allows the inclusion of the political and cultural axial principles their equal place. The link between a particular historical discussion of educational value and the ICT policy discourse through the use of Bell’s Axial principles has the potential to introduce other values to ICT policy construction, such as those used in the debate about educational and school purpose characterised by educationalists such as Oakeshott and Pring. The thesis links to theories like those of Woolgar and Grint which attempt to reconceive ICT as something more like a text to be read. Their theories are potentially closer to axial values found in Bell’s cultural realm than in the techno-economic. Their approach to change in ICT is much more like the idea of deepening understanding than in the techno-economic idea of replacing something with something else more efficient.
This section discusses the limitations of the methods and theory employed by the research. 10.4.1 Practical Limitations There were a variety of practical limitations on the research. The first limitation was the time period of the research. The research only covered a short period, from 1997 to the present. However, this period has been considered a key period for the introduction of ICT into this educational sector by many key commentators (e.g. Selwyn 2008). The second limitation was the breadth of the documents selected. However, the selection was that of a cases study sample of key practitioners introducing ICT into Secondary schools during the period analysed. The limited breadth therefore was taken as these individuals’ construction of the policy. The third limitation was the specific choices made. The teachers and practitioners invited to take part in the case studies had to be people who would comply with the requests for information and also would have to be people I could easily contact and explain the project to. This wasn’t always easy. Constraints of working in school environments, the difficulty of arranging ways of contacting them, constraints on how much time they were prepared to spend working on the project for me were all limitations. It was also not easy to think of ways of getting the kind of responses that would be useful to my research. In order to overcome these limitations I restricted myself to working with a limited number of Secondary schools in North London. I was able to use my professional access to these contexts to contact potential practitioners and teachers involved in implementing, developing and forming the ICT policies in their schools. 10.4.2 Analytical Limitations The scale of the case studies was small and this restricts the generalisability of their findings. The analysis was applied to a very distinct and small group, which was limited to a specific geography, time and number of people. The analysis of the case studies did however follow a recognized CDA procedure developed by Bannister. The analysis is also limited in that it only examined the written messages of the documents submitted for analysis rather than a multi-modal DA which would include for analysis the whole text, including pictures, lexicographical features and so forth. Although this is a limitation to the analysis I think that had further analysis been done focusing on such elements the original findings recorded in this thesis would have been strengthened rather than changed. The limits of CDA are also analytical limits of the thesis. Theorists who reject discourse analysis would therefore not be convinced by the analysis here presented. Similarly, the use of Bell’s Axial principle theory is likely to be rejected by any theorist convinced that an holistic economic infrastructure is required for understanding social realities. However, although outside the brief of the current thesis, I think the productivity of the approach vindicates its use. Even trenchant critics like Kumar acknowledge that there is power in Bell’s approach. The thesis has provided evidence that the application of Bell’s ideas has resulted in a richer understanding of the ICT policy being examined in the thesis than had the dominant alternatives been applied.
The thesis was limited geographically to studying ICT policy in a single national region. It was limited also by the number of participants in the case studies and they too were limited in terms of their location. Further research could widen the case studies by increasing the number of participants, broadening the geographical reach of the research, even extending it to look at different National policies. In doing this latter research a comparison between different National policies could be undertaken which would begin to show how ICT in education is affected by the national assumptions of educational values generally and those specifically directed towards ICT and its potential use in schools. Future research could investigate how different National educational policies position and construct ICT. This might also offer scope for future investigation into how different national educational systems approach education and ICT. There would also be the possibility of further research investigating the history of technology and education, as found in for example the work of Tyak and Cuban (1995) in the USA, which might specifically investigate whether resistance to technologically driven changes to schooling are related to the different Axial principles of Bell’s competing realms. Further to this, the thesis conducted its research over a particular period and coincided with the end of the New Labour administration that was so intimately connected with the policy. Further research might be conducted into how the policy is developed under a new government administration. This would test whether the new Conservative and Liberal Alliance administration retains the discourse or not. This would also further the research that is already in the thesis whereby the changes of the policy discourse over time are analysed. This is something that could be periodically returned to. The thesis also invites further use of the methodological application of Bell with CDA to understand the construction of social reality, in fields of education that are not necessarily to do with ICT and education. The thesis has shown that ICT has been positioned in terms of a techno-economic discourse of education. The question remains for further research what an ICT policy might be like in an educational discourse of politics or culture.
It has shown that the current ICT policies in English Secondary schools have been about resolving a dispute about educational values and the purpose of schools by erasing one side of the dispute. An exclusive discourse of ICT as vocational purpose for schools has been constructed. The discourse has been shown to be using concepts and assumptions about economic reality, modernity and the future that erase independent political or cultural perspectives. Its voices are the voices of business and the technocratic manager, its axial principle is efficiency and its conception of reality is refracted through a very specific and narrow prism of globalised, market orientated, individualized and competitive economics. For the development of educational policy and practice that is capable of embracing a broader field, one that includes axial principles derived from democracy and self-fulfilment, the thesis provides evidence that there are omitted alternative discourses available. The thesis has not found that alternative realms should be used to replace the techno-economic realm; rather, they should be developed alongside the techno-economic. The study also suggests that ICT itself might gain from being discussed in terms of principles other than the axial principle of the techno-economic realm. Rather than co-opting terms from other realms by giving them meanings that are legitimate only in the techno-economic, the study suggests that ‘cultural contradictions’ will be acceptable and developments in political or cultural realms will not be translatable into the techno-economic. The findings therefore suggest that the dominance of techno-economic approaches to both ICT and education are poorly justified and limiting. The findings also suggest that in any education system reformers need to be aware of the system’s historical formations in order to better understand the constraints and possibilities of that system. The findings provide evidence for non-economic factors to be considered when trying to implement a policy for improving education. This is a contribution of the thesis. The thesis also raises serious consideration of how and how credibly the current dominance of the techno-economic discourse in education, and the massive investment in ICT in the educational system, is justified. The findings offer an original argument for questioning the policy: it does nothing to disagree with the idea of ICT being a defining technology linked in serious ways to new economic realities and so forth (even though it remains open as to whether the actual details are as the discourse presents them) but gives reasons for thinking that educational purpose is not exhaustively part of the techno-economic realm. Bell suggests that that some of education can be constructed from within the techno-economic realm, but not all of it. The reason for investing in educational ICT as presently conceived is justified only to the extent that vocational outcomes are important. The findings also provide evidence of how the policies submerge and efface competing voices, including those of pupils, teachers and parents, whilst giving prominence to the voice of business, managers and governments. This suggests a democratic deficit at the heart of policy making in education. The findings also find that the removal of a professional-service model of education, replaced by a managerialist consumerist model, is linked to this democratic deficit. The thesis therefore provides evidence for thinking that a correction of these deficits will require engaging the excluded realms in future policy making. Implications for designers of future ICT and education policies need to accept that increased educational policies for self-fulfilment and democracy may well hinder efficiencies and that they should therefore do something different to fix this. Conceiving schools as culturally fulfilling rather than efficiency maximizing institutions is an option. Similarly, conceiving schools as politically good institutions may again conflict with requirements of efficiency and cultural development. Policy designers may be able to assume that these contradictions are parts of social reality rather than mistakes that need to be eradicated.
The thesis has examined the policies introducing ICT into English Secondary schools in order to produce evidence of what the dominant policy discourse is missing. The thesis has contributed to the literature critiquing this domain by showing that the construction of ICT in English Secondary schools is a techno-economic one that omits cultural and political discourses. It has provided a new conceptualization of issues arising from these policies. Its novelty rests in the application of Bell’s thesis of Axial principles to the discourse of educational reform policy discourse. It also has engaged with Ball’s idea of policy sociology by using a research methodology that has a case study sample of teachers and practitioners involved in the introduction of ICT into schools in the period analysed providing what they take as being the ICT policy as the material to be analysed. The thesis has analysed policy through the period of the New Labour administration. Two case studies have been undertaken providing evidence of the character of the discourse that is being used by the policy. It has provided evidence of how the policy has changed over time, moving from an early phase of optimism that focused on extolling the transformational potential of ICT in schools to a later phase where the risks associated with the successful establishment of ICT’s presence in schools were the main focus. It has also related ICT policy to the educational purpose of schools in the English Secondary sector and shown that these are important in understanding the way reform policy interacts with previous discourses and the concepts embedded in them. In particular the ICT policy discourse has been constructed in such a way as to omit discourses of non-vocational value from educational purpose. The thesis has therefore been able to show shortcomings of the policy, in particular the way it has closed down historically important understandings of schooling. These contributions will be useful for guiding future research into ICT policies in schools. The thesis will be of interest for any researcher and practitioner of ICT in schools and for anyone interested in English secondary school policy. It will also be interesting to policy sociologists. The application of Bell to the CDA will provide a model for future research. The conclusion of the thesis is written at the end of the period of the New Labour administration whose policies have been so central to the focus of the work. The intense investment and support this government has given to the policies expanding ICT into English Secondary schools makes the demise of the administration especially interesting. If phase one of the introduction of ICT into this sector began with the Conservative administration of Mrs. Thatcher, the New Labour administration marks a convenient demarcation of its second phase. What will be interesting will be what that government’s demise will mean for the policy. Whether the new administration will continue with the existing policy direction or not will test the hegemonic status of the discourse.
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APPENDIX I:NOMINATED DOCUMENTS – 1st CASE STUDY
Educational ICT Policy Documents Included in this Research | |
Year | Title of Document |
| 1997 | Preparing for the Information Age: Synoptic Report of the Education Department’s Superhighways Initiative |
| 1997 | Information and Communications Technology in UK School: An Independent Inquiry – NCET Information Directorate |
| 1997 | Connecting the Learning Society: National Grid for Learning: The Government’s Consultation Paper, DfEE |
| 2002 | Connecting Schools, Networking People: ICT Practice, Planning and Procurement for the National Grid for Learning, Becta |
| 2002 | Transforming the way we Learn: A Vision for the Future of ICT in Schools, NGfL, DfES |
| 2002 | ImaCT2: Learning at Home and School: Case Studies, Becta, DfES |
| 2003 | ICT and Attainment: A Review of the Research Literature, Becta, DfES |
| 2003 | Secondary Schools – ICT and Standards: An Analysis of national Data from Ofsted and QCA, Becta |
| 2003 | Fulfilling the Potential: Transforming Teaching and Learning through ICT in Schools, DfES |
| 2004 | ICT in Schools: The Impact of Government Initiatives Five Years on, HMI – Ofsted |
| 2005 | Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services, DfES |
| 2005 | The Becta Review 2005: Evidence on the Progress of ICT in Education, Becta |
| 2005 | Connecting the UK: The Digital Strategy, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Department of Trade and Industry |
| 2006 | Learning, Teaching and Managing with ICT: Funding Guidance for Schools and Local Authorities, - 2006 – 2007, DfES |
| 2006 | Transformational Government – Delivering the DfES Strategy, DfES |
APPENDIX II:NOMINATED DOCUMENTS – 2nd CASE STUDY
Educational ICT Policy Documents Included in this Research | |
Year | Title of Document |
| 2004 | Using ICT in schools: Addressing Teacher Workload Issues – PwC & DfES |
| 2006 | Making the most of your Investment in ICT - Becta |
| 2007 | ICT and Building Schools for the Future: An Essential Guide - Becta |
| 2008 | ICT Mark. A Guide for School Leaders - Becta |
| 2008 | ICT in Primary and Secondary Schools - Ofsted |
| 2009 | The Impact of ICT - Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) |
| 2009 | The Importance of ICT. Information and Communication Technology in Primary and Secondary Schools, 2005/2008 - Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) |
| 2009 | Harnessing Technology Funding 2009-10 - Becta |
| 2010 | Safeguarding in a Digital World. Guidance for Curriculum Managers, Teachers and Training Staff - Becta |
| 2010 | Safeguarding in a Digital World. An Overview for Learning Providers - Becta |