ICT-enhanced education systems: policy-makers’ visions and tensions

Between 1999 and 2004 three extensive international research projects investigated the relationships between ICT and student learning within education systems: the SITES M2 study carried out by the International Institute for Educational Planning on behalf of UNESCO (Pelgrum and Law 2003); the OECD/CERI’s ICT and Quality of Learning study (Venezky 2004); and the EU-sponsored THINK and NOW studies of Technology in Education (focusing on policy and practice respectively) carried out for the European SchoolNet (Scrimshaw 2002; Wood 2002, 2003). In the previous section, case studies from the ﬁ rst two of these were discussed as examples of transformed pedagogies and learning in Finland, Norway and Chile. The broad socio-cultural framework I am using to understand innovation suggests that these examples of successful innovatory practice in classrooms will have been enabled by changes in regulatory structures at the policy level. So, in this ﬁ nal section

I want to place these examples in the context of the analysis of visions and tensions relating to national policies for ICT in education contained in the Think Report, and end with some recommendations for governments taken from the conclusions of the UNESCO research.

The Think Report (Wood 2002) was developed from a series of in-depth interviews with key members of educational ministries and agencies from six European countries: Denmark, France, Holland, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. From these, Wood developed four scenarios for change which provided contrasting visions of the future development of education and the role to be played within education by ICT.

A later report, Think Again (Wood 2003), incorporates the responses from a second round of in-depth interviews, but for my purposes here the scenarios in their original form, together with eight ‘axes of tension’ identiﬁ ed from the original interviews, provides a useful framework of ‘ideal types’ stripped of some of the clutter of minutiae from the evidence without losing the complexity of the issues. The scenarios can be summarised as:

• Scenario 1, in which ICT is ﬁ tted to the existing regulatory frameworks of curriculum and assessment and used to augment and strengthen centralised control.

• Scenario 2, in which policy-makers acknowledge that the impact of ICT is complex and uncertain, and relax state controls to enable ‘a research and development role for teachers and schools’.

• Scenario 3, in which schools use ICT to re-focus the curriculum on learning how to learn and responsible citizenship, and become ‘key nodes in new communities’.

• Scenario 4, in which failures in policy (in)actions undermine attempts to innovate with ICT, and there is ‘melt down’.

(See the slightly more detailed summary in Wood 2003, p. 2.)

26 Understanding innovation While it is easy to see in scenario 1 how the ‘rather robust and enduring’ nature

of institutionalised social practices, noted by Cole and Engeström (op. cit.), serve to prevent the mediating impact of ICT from being available to students and teachers, scenarios 2 and 3 are more subtle and less well differentiated, though scenario 2 focuses more strongly on changes in the role of the teacher and scenario 3 more on changes in the role of the student. Scenario 4 is perhaps best seen as echoing Voogt and Pelgrum’s (2005) reminder to policy-makers that they have a responsibility to reform structures without which change at the classroom level will be impossible.

Wood’s eight axes of tension relate strongly to the evidence that has already emerged from other studies discussed in this chapter. First, innovation with ICT is ‘stifl ed’ by failure to reform curriculum; second, innovation with ICT is inhibited without the support of the whole community; third, innovation fails because assessment tools and practices ‘do not support the achievement of new objectives’. Hence, the examples of transformed pedagogies and learning come from schools that see themselves as part of the larger community (e.g. researchers, policy-makers, local education offi cers or the community locally) and have freedom to teach a student-centred curriculum, but in almost all cases they experience tensions between new ways of teaching with ICT and their national assessment regimes. Wood’s fourth axis of tension, that innovative uses of ICT will increase the gap between high and low school achievement, emerges in a rather different form in the example studies: these are all well-equipped schools that focus on enabling students to use ICT to learn in new ways, but by their very success they demonstrate what is lost for students whose schools do not have these levels of ICT. Wood points next to tensions surrounding the roles of teachers and learners, the extent to which they are encouraged to be autonomous and given freedom, or at the other extreme expected to conform to a prescriptive curriculum and teaching methods: teachers can be expected to perform as technicians or respected as professionals; students can be cast in the role of consumers or respected as ‘an asset to the local and wider communities’. When the curriculum and assessment methods are not obtrusive ‘learners and schools become “time rich” ’ (Wood, op. cit., p. 10) and are able to contribute actively to the community as in the case of Bigum’s Knowledge Producing Schools. The seventh axis of tension that emerged from Wood’s interviews with policy-makers was their sense that ‘the burden of maintaining high quality of ICT provision exceeds available public funding’ and this will remain a key concern for all countries that constrains the possibilities for innovation. His eighth axis of tension involves the diffi cult choices that have to be made in relation to students’ use of the Internet, between protecting them from perceived dangers of pornography and paedophiles and giving them free access to ‘the information society’. It is particularly interesting that in Wood’s scenario 3, where students are given more autonomy and schools work closely with parents and the local community, the focus shifts away from protection (and censorship) to seeing these issues as part of ‘the moral, legal and economic dimensions of ICT [that] will be an integral part of the intellectual concerns of learners, schools and the local community’ (ibid., p. 12).

Voogt and Pelgrum (2005) provide evidence from the SITES M2 case studies that ICT can be used transformatively if curriculum speciﬁ cations and assessment procedures are changed to allow innovative pedagogies to develop. Positive outcomes

Insights from socio-cultural theory 27 of using ICT shown by the case studies include: for students, increased motivation

and self-esteem, easy and rapid acquisition of ICT skills through using them to fulﬁ l

a need, improved collaborative skills and the ability to take greater responsibility for their own learning; and for teachers the development of new pedagogical skills and ICT skills (ibid., pp. 171–2). Undertaking case studies was a new departure for IEEP, which has a long tradition of carrying out comparative international studies on the basis of standardised tests, and the intention was to collect objective data on learning gains for students in case study schools, in addition to qualitative data. Such data were generally only available, however, as measurements of traditional learning gains, and case study schools and their researchers were clear that the experience of using ICT had brought about new kinds of learning that were not captured by these tests. There were also very few studies which demonstrated the use of ICT for new approaches to assessment, suggesting that teachers and schools had very little freedom of manoeuvre in all matters relating to assessment (Voogt and Pelgrum 2005, pp. 171–2). Voogt and Pelgrum conclude their article by pointing directly to the constraints placed on teachers’ ability to take advantage of the mediating power of ICT, to change curriculum and pedagogy, by the national curriculum and examination requirements of their countries. This has obvious and serious implications for governments, they say:

If it is indeed true that countries around the world have to move to drastic curricular changes, then governments should provide more room for such change, which implies that curriculum and examination requirements need to

be reviewed and probably adapted. (Voogt and Pelgrum 2005, pp. 173–4)

ICT-enhanced education systems: policy-makers’ visions and tensions