An agenda for research to promote radical change

An agenda for research to promote radical change

Natriello ends his analysis of the unintended failures of ICTs to have any impact on schooling with a challenge to sociologists of education. It is not enough, he contends, to say as Attewell does, ‘We must wait to see whether “Let them have Pentiums” is

122 Challenges of policy and practice more practical than “Let them eat cake”.’ Rather, he argues, ‘Sociologists of education

can play a signifi cant role in designing the educational institutions of the digital age. Failure to engage at this defi ning juncture may appropriately lead to forfeiture of the right to criticize in the future’ (Natriello, op. cit., pp. 263–4).

In the UK and the USA there are currently a number of signifi cant initiatives aimed at radically changing aspects of schooling. These range from radical designs for new school buildings, to innovative deployment of mobile ICTs for use both at home and at school, and experimental formations of curriculum and pedagogy. They are all still considerably constrained by the technologies of national/state curricula, high-stakes testing and traditional pedagogies, but many are supported by funding from commercial partners who bring with them none of the assumptions embedded in the culture of schooling. The dissatisfaction with the education system which is leading increasing numbers of parents in both the USA and the UK to remove their children from school and educate them at home, drawing on the services of Internet-based providers of educational materials, is a strong signal of the imperative for change. Educational researchers should draw upon the tools of sociology and use their sociological imagination to play a leadership role in scenario building to assist policy-makers in the transformation of the education system.

Part IV

Research methods for ICT in education

I now turn to the process of research – its methods and methodological foundations – to explore the role that researchers can play in supporting the process of innovation.

I have been strongly infl uenced by working at the start of my career at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia, and over the last eight years at Manchester Metropolitan University with four colleagues who share that background. This has shaped my work as a researcher in two ways: fi rst, in showing me that high-quality research is dependent upon continuous investigation into research methods, exploring new approaches to the collection and analysis of data to suit them as closely as possible to the focus of study; and second in giving me a high regard for carrying out evaluations of innovative programmes, since it is through evaluation work that researchers have the best opportunity of making an informed, responsible contribution to civil society (Wildavsky 1993). Methods for both research and evaluation studies, rather than being procedures to be implemented in any kind of routine manner, are contingent on context and dependent on deeper methodological considerations of the nature of knowledge and the nature of being. These epistemological and ontological underpinnings are grounded in a researcher’s values, but develop over time with knowledge and experience. Hence in the three papers presented here, the infl uence of my reading in cultural psychology and activity theory can be seen to extend and deepen my practices as a researcher over time. Chapter 8, fi rst presented at a conference in 1998, does not draw on these theories but they fi gure prominently in Chapters 9 and 10.

All three chapters are about ways of contributing research knowledge to policy formation. Two are position papers and fairly wide-ranging: Chapter 8 presents a model of ‘supportive evaluation’ developed especially for working with innovatory ICT initiatives, Chapter 9 reviews how methods for researching knowledge construction and the process of coming to know need to draw on theories from both cultural psychology and philosophy, especially when ICT is a component of the learning context. Chapter 10 exemplifi es the socio-cultural method in a presentation of an image-based, hand-drawn concept mapping method used to research children’s mental models of ICT in their world.

Policy-makers are impatient of research knowledge, especially when it focuses too heavily on ‘discovering the unintended consequences of purposive, political action’ (Lauder et al. 2004, p. 11), for as Johnson (2004, p. 25) points out ‘when they know

124 Research methods for ICT in education there is a problem, inaction is rarely an option for policy-makers, particularly for

politicians’. Policy-makers operate within a politicised arena in which the time-frame is too short to allow the long-term planning and preparation needed to give ‘ownership’ of change to all participants (Fullan 1982). In these chapters I begin to explore the possibilities for a new kind of relationship between research and policy-formation, in which researchers build scenarios for future development on the basis of knowledge generated from evaluation of recent and current initiatives. The vision is for a new kind of research in which analysis of the drivers of ‘unintended consequences’ of current initiatives generates explanatory theories that could be useful in planning new, more successful initiatives.