Beyond workforce preparation: contested visions of ‘twenty-first century’ education reform

ABSTRACT

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent ‘twenty-first century’ future, this article uses the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate two contrasting sociotechnical visions: A Silicon Valley vision that aimed to reduce inequalities in test-based outcomes by disseminating ‘achievement technologies’; and an Oakland vision that aspired to address systemic environmental, economic and educational inequities using ‘civic technologies’. The diversity of these futures, and the distinctive kinds of digital technologies that co-produced these visions, trouble assumptions about ‘technology’ as an unquestioned good and problematize constructions of the ‘twenty-first century’ as an ostensibly shared, democratic future. I conclude by encouraging educational researchers to clarify a politics of the ‘twenty-first century’ and explore how ‘bounded imaginaries’, like those evident in the Oakland case, offer a potentially fruitful basis for reframing global education technology policies.     

Digital competence – an emergent boundary concept for policy and educational research

Digital competence is an evolving concept related to the development of digital technology and the political aims and expectations of citizenship in a knowledge society. It is regarded as a core competence in policy papers; in educational research it is not yet a standardized concept. We suggest that it is a useful boundary concept, which can be used in various contexts. For this study, we analysed 76 educational research articles in which digital competence, described by different terms, was investigated. As a result, we found that digital competence consists of a variety of skills and competences, and its scope is wide, as is its background: from media studies and computer science to library and literacy studies. In the article review, we found a total of 34 terms that had used to describe the digital technology related skills and competences; the most often used terms were digital literacy, new literacies, multiliteracy and media literacy, each with somewhat different focus. We suggest that digital competence is defined as consisting of (1) technical competence, (2) the ability to use digital technologies in a meaningful way for working, studying and in everyday life, (3) the ability to evaluate digital technologies critically, and (4) motivation to participate and commit in the digital culture.     

Assessing twenty‐first century skills through a teacher created video game for high school biology students

As twenty‐first century skills become a greater focus in K‐12 education, an infusion of technology that meets the needs of today’s students is paramount. This study looks at the design and creation of a Multiplayer Educational Gaming Application (MEGA) for high school biology students. The quasi‐experimental, qualitative design assessed the twenty‐first century skills of digital age literacy, inventive thinking, high productivity, and effective communication techniques of the students exposed to a MEGA. Three factors, as they pertained to these skills, emerged from classroom observations. Interaction with the teacher, discussion with peers, and engagement/time‐on‐task while playing the MEGA suggested that students playing an educational video game exhibited all of the projected twenty‐first century skills while being engrossed in the embedded science content.     

Oldknow,Adrian & Knights,Carol ed (2013) Mathematics education with digital technology Bloomsbury (London) isbn 978‐0‐5672‐5028‐5 272 pp £24.99 http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/mathematics‐education‐with‐digital‐technology‐9781441184726/

This book looks at the impact of digital technologies on the teaching and learning of mathematics. The focus is on learning at school and most of the twenty‐nine invited contributions are drawn from England and the US. Mathematics education with digital technology will be of interest to school teachers, teacher‐educators and educational technologists. If it is likely to be relevant to you, I recommend that you borrow a copy for a while. Pete Cannell     

Editorial: e‐Research for education: Applied,methodological and critical perspectives

This special issue brings together a set of contributions that represent and explore the state of the art regarding the development and application of digital technology‐enhanced research approaches in educational research—e‐research for education. Over the recent years, digital technologies have enhanced various aspects of scholarly practices, such as data collection and analysis, research collaboration, and publishing. New technology‐enhanced research approaches have been emerging in a number of educational research domains, such as learning analytics, educational data mining, digital ethnography and educational informatics. Although the potential of digital approaches has been generally acknowledged, many overarching conceptual and methodological questions remain unexplored and under‐theorised. This special issue provides a landmark collection that synthesises some important empirical and methodological advances in this research field, including methodologically innovative case studies and critical analyses of overarching epistemological, methodological and practical issues that inevitably will shape future developments of this research field.     

MULTIMEDIA PEDAGOGY AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

New technologies provide tools to reconstruct education as we begin a new millennium. In particular, multimedia technologies, like CD‐ROMs and Web sites, produce new resources and material for expanding education. In examining the Shoah Project—which documents the experiences of survivors of the Holocaust—we demonstrate how it provides important tools for historical and religious education, as well as making the reality of the Holocaust vivid and compelling in the contemporary moment. In this context we discuss how multimedia can provide an important supplement to multicultural education, bringing the experiences of marginal and oppressed groups to the mainstream. Yet we also argue that effective multimedia education requires historical contextualization, the skills of media literacy, and engaging pedagogical presentation in the classroom to make it effective as a supplement to traditional classroom and print‐based education. We show how educational technologies, such as those produced by the Shoah Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archives, can help reconstruct education for the twenty‐first century.     

Ethnocentrism and Higher Art Education: Lingering Legacies,Imperative Nondualities

Art education in the USA has made great progress toward greater inclusiveness and is generally a force against resurgent fascism. Nevertheless, higher art education theory is dominated by Euro‐Western philosophical legacies, encumbered by dualism, which impede art education’s emancipative democratising potential. Recent debate about the uselessness of aesthetics illustrate this ethnocentrism. This article analyses the ethnocentrism that lingers in the postmodern legacies that undergird the debate; then shows how engagement with nondualist philosophies, predominantly non‐Euro‐Western, can make a profound difference to art education theory and practice. They are imperative to comprehending hybridity promoting global citizenship, resisting fascism and advancing global equity.     

On disruption and integration: two views of digital media technologies in K-12 schools

In this review essay, Earl Aguilera compares two recent contributions to the growing body of literature on technology in education, Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation and Antero Garcia’s Good Reception, to examine the conceptual and practical contributions of each text, along with points of divergence through which readers might glean additional insights. Sims and Garcia both address efforts rooted in a growing area of work around integrating digital media technologies into K-12 schools, but present contrasting perspectives and differing notions of technological disruption and integration. While Sims’ ethnographic work on the “school for digital kids” is rich in conceptual tools that help readers understand what he calls cycles of disruptive fixation that have occurred throughout the history of public education in the United States, Garcia’s embedded perspectives as high school teacher provide practical guidance for integrating new media technologies with responsive and critical pedagogical practices. Taken together, these texts highlight both the promises and the pitfalls of integrating new media technologies into existing models and contexts of education often labeled as outmoded for life and work in the 21st century.     

Critical Perspectives on Colonisation of the Art Curriculum in Korea

This article examines some characteristics of art education in Korea. It takes the form of a historical overview using a postcolonial lens. The findings were that the predominant Western aesthetic concepts and theories as central culture embodied in Korean art education as local culture are: (i) ideas of art as self‐expression developed in Europe and the USA between the 1920s and 1950s; (ii) the concept of art in daily living in the USA in the 1930s; (iii) design elements and principles by Arthur Wesley Dow in the USA in the 1920s; (iv) Bauhaus design theory in Europe in the 1920s; and (v) the appreciation of nature beauty by John Ruskin in the late nineteenth century in England. These educational ideas have been influential on policy‐making in Korean art education, and therefore new concepts are integrated with these elements for curriculum changes. In this way, the characteristic of the colonised Korean art curriculum is so hybrid that it is difficult to understand the concepts and the practical implications of the various policies for art teaching. Consequently, it has not served the issues of cultural diversity and pluralism that are so problematic in twenty‐first century Korean society.     

新媒体时代艺术教育的挑战与创新

艺术的创作和传播与媒体发展紧密相连。新媒体的发展和普及改变了人们的生活方式,推动人类进入一个前所未有的数字时代,艺术的创作方式和存在形式也因此改变,艺术与非艺术的界限正在消失,艺术有了更丰富的内涵。"新媒体艺术学院"、"数字媒体艺术"、"媒体创意"等专业院校大量涌现,伴随着数字艺术的蓬勃发展,艺术教育面对前所未有的挑战。艺术教育工作者需要结合新媒体艺术的特点,从课程设计、创新教育、团队协作等方面进行探索。     

从彼此颉颃抗衡到相互借鉴发展——对工具论与本质论的评价及二者对中国美术教育发展的现实意义

自上世纪以来,艺术教育的冲突一直表现为工具论和本质论两大派别之间的冲突。工具论强调美术教育的教育价值,通过美术创作促进儿童健全发展;重视创作过程,忽视创作效果;主张顺应儿童自然本性发展。本质论强调科目中心,主张以严谨的美术课程,实现美术的自身价值,美术能力不是自然发展的结果,而是学习和教育的结果。在新时期,本质论与工具论的互相通融借鉴会更好地促进美术教育的良性发展。     

An Autoethnographical Study of Culture,Power, Identity and Art Education in Post‐Colonial South Korea

This article reflects my experiences of learning art in the 1970s and 1980s and my teaching career in school art education in twenty‐first century South Korea. This autobiographical reflection shows how I have struggled with my identity as an art teacher in the post‐colonial context of Western influences on Korean society since World War II. There has been greater tension and a greater struggle for different values, practices and identities when new values and practices have been introduced into the particular socio‐cultural context of South Korea. My struggles with particular kinds of pedagogic identity valued within the rapidly changing political, economic and cultural context of Western influences on Korean art education demonstrate the hidden structural mechanism of the relationship between culture, power and identity in the post‐colonial world of globalisation. This study as an autoethnographical research provides critical insights into how identities are produced by pedagogic discourses and practices of art education that are constructed through the specific systems of practice and language which transmit and regulate such identities and values.     

培养负责任的数字公民——国际数字公民教育政策文本的多维比较

数字公民教育受到国际组织和各国的关注。国际数字公民教育政策文本的比较分析对于公民教育政策制定具有重要意义。通过体系架构、总体目标、发布机构与起草人员、内容比较四个维度,分析国际上七个具有代表性和影响力的数字公民教育政策文本,结果发现,当前国际数字公民教育政策文本呈现出教育主体多元、教育内容动态更新、教育目标鲜明、政策制定多方协同的特征。     

有效发挥现代教育技术在美术教学中的运用

在教育教学中多媒体网络技术运用十分广泛,成为当今教育发展水平的显著标志。多媒体投影电视系统、多媒体电子白板、多媒体计算机网络、微课等高新技术媒体在教育教学中发挥的作用越来越大。没有现代多媒体网络技术的参与,就谈不上现代教育技术。把计算机技术和现代教学方法相结合顺应时代发展,让它走进了我们的美术课堂,为小学美术教育开辟一片新天地。     

Towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education

In this article, we attempt to define and explore a concept of ‘radical digital citizenship’ and its implications for digital education. We argue that the ‘digital’ and its attendant technologies are constituted by on-going materialist struggles for equality and justice in the Global South and North which are erased in the dominant literature and debates in digital education. We assert the need for politically informed understandings of the digital, technology and citizenship and for a ‘radical digital citizenship’ in which critical social relations with technology are made visible and emancipatory technological practices for social justice are developed.     

Rethinking Education through Contemporary Art

This article is part of a broader investigation exploring how contemporary art allows us to think about the process that underpins our teaching and learning in order to change it. We are tutors in initial teacher education and we teach, learn and communicate through contemporary art for a pedagogical module. In the following article we will show how teaching, learning and communicating through contemporary art helps future teachers to be aware of their educational models. Art encounters generate new learning and teaching experiences by allowing students and teachers to make various rhizomatic wanderings. The rhizomatic wanderings are diverse with the content and the form depending on the personal experience. The article concludes that the more rhizomatic wanderings future teachers make, the more they will be able to rethink the process of teaching and learning in order to attend to the diverse situations of classrooms of the twenty‐first century.     

Professional ecologies shaping technology adoption in early childhood education with multilingual children

Strategic deployment of the digital world in educational ecosystems inhabited by multilingual children (4–6 years old), their teachers and their families is evolving in some communities. This study reveals the “actors” and communities that mediate the extent and the nature of engagement with new media in contexts of early childhood education, including evidence of partnership with teachers. Teachers and parents were found to be the “keystone species,” with the teacher the most influential mediator for young multilingual children. Empirical research into the interacting learning ecologies of young children in six early childhood centres and five associated schools is based on interviews with teachers and families plus photographs of the linguistic landscapes in these physical and digital ecosystems. Fragmented multiple perspectives on the education of young children and technology adoption are brought together with Davis’ Arena Framework of change with digital technologies in education. One early childhood education centre is mapped in a global arena to expose the co-evolution of education with technology that occurs in all levels, local through global. This clarifies the need for co-construction of policy and practice in these ecosystems so that that emergent bilinguals can have a better start in the digital world.     

Educational Reform in Russia and the USA: where are the troops?

To determine the level of support that differing concepts of educational reform had among the actual practitioners of public education in the former Soviet Union and the USA, a sample of teachers was surveyed to measure the value they placed on divergent educational goal statements as well as their respective philosophical orientations. This study found that US teachers were most committed to educational goals related to basic skills development and critical thinking and least supportive of goals related to creativity and enculturation; Russian teachers on the other hand were most supportive of interpersonal understanding and human relations, moral and ethical well‐being, and critical thinking, and least supportive of the goal related to citizenship and civic responsibility. With regard to educational philosophical orientation, US teachers were divided between maintaining order and stability, developing individual interests and abilities, and improving society. Russian teachers were more united in their belief that the purpose of education is to develop individual interests and abilities, with a significant minority selecting the ‘transforming society’ orientation.     

论现代教育技术在《高等数学》教学中的作用

21世纪信息化、数字化技术的不断发展,不仅对社会、政治、经济、人民生活产生了巨大的影响,同时对教育也产生了深远的影响。随着现代教育媒体的迅速发展,计算机多媒体课堂教学模式正融入教学过程中,并成为现代教育不可缺少的一种教学手段。把先进的教育思想、现代教育技术融合于教学过程中为教学服务,提高教学水平,培养学生的实践能力和创新能力,是我们的首要任务。因此,就现代教育技术在《高等数学》教学中的作用作了一些肤浅的探讨。     

2019年高教版《地平线报告》的解读与启示

2019高等教育版《地平线报告》于2019年4月在美国高等教育信息化协会的官网上发布。该报告采用德尔菲法,预测了2019—2023年间影响全球高等教育变革的6大趋势、制约高等教育领域技术应用的6大挑战和推动教育变革的6项技术。6大趋势包括重新思考高等院校运行模式、模块化和分解式学位、推进文化创新、学习测量广受关注、重新设计学习空间和混合学习设计等;6大挑战包括提高数字流畅度、教学设计专家和数字化学习体验需求不断增长、教育与教育技术策略不断发展、成就鸿沟、推进数字化公平和对教学实践的再思考;而6项技术包括移动学习、分析技术、混合现实、人工智能、区块链等。报告内容丰富,对教育技术发展具有很强的参考价值和指导作用。通过解读该报告,分析其预测趋势对我国高等教育的影响,以期为我国高等教育的发展提供参考。