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The Broad Aim of this Strand:
To develop an approach, description and means for understanding the relationship
between various levels of policy design and implementation, and the management of
administrative contexts and conditions for ICT as a tool for learning in education
settings
The Specific Aims:
- to investigate the relationship between schools' management of ICT and LEA and national
policies;
- to identify the role of key actors in developing the school ICT policy, with a
particular focus on the role of the ICT co-ordinator;
- to investigate how the physical organisation of ICT in schools and the management and
provision of software impacts on student and teacher access and learning;
- to investigate the role of teachers' knowledge and teachers' actions in school change
and educational reform in creating and sustaining ICT rich settings;
- to identify which institutional practices, (including parent/ community links) support
or hinder, effective learning and innovative practice.
Background in 2001
ICT is increasingly considered essential in bringing every school into the 21st Century
and 'bringing the information age alive' for children. Moreover, schools are being urged
to prepare students with new and 'multiple 'literacies that will be needed in today's
changing technologically-rich leisure and work environments (QCA, 1999; New London, 1996).
Coupled with these 'information society' justifications has been the close aligning of
educational ICT with the future economic effectiveness of the country the educational use
of ICT is being portrayed as a means of 'priming' Britain's workforce for the demands of
the global economy. In response to these rationales, the introduction of the National
Curriculum in 1988 signalled a new phase in the UK government's commitment to making IT an
integral part of education by placing basic IT skills at the heart of the curriculum'
(Dearing, 1993, p28). Commitment to the newly named 'Information and
Communications Technology' (ICT) was reaffirmed through the 'National Grid for
Learning' initiative (DfEE, 1997).
Levels of Policy Focus and their Management
This strand was concerned to provide a better understanding of the wider global,
national and sub-national policy settings and contexts that are involved in shaping the
introduction of technology into local education settings, such as schools and colleges.
Critical to this are sets of assumptions around the role that technology should play in
learning, and how this is linked to economic and social discourses of the 'information
society', 'digital revolution' and 'competitive economy'. The project was interested in a
range of levels of policy articulation and implementation, from the global to the local
including how teachers and subject departments take, transform, resist or ignore these
policy initiatives.
Although the central focus for this project was learning with ICT, we also
interrogated the public and popular discourses that surround the use of computers both in
the home and the schools as these discourses may strongly impact upon teachers', students'
and schools' attitudes to and expectations of ICT use.
At an institutional level, the integration of computing into education must be
understood from the perspective of schools as organisations and the extent to which these
organisational forms enable or limit new forms of learning/teaching. Research must thus
examine the constituent elements of schools as organisational cultures. Factors in this
include the schools' formation and use of internal ICT policies and specific goals; the
management structures including the 'key actors' within the school organisation
responsible for developing use of ICT such as Head of Departments, senior management teams
and ICT co-ordinators; and the physical and temporal distribution of ICT across the
institution including arrangements for access. We looked at the development of ICT
in relation to the nature of the schools links with the community and particularly with
the parent community. It was also be important to study key change agents (Fullan, 1991)
and the barriers to change in order to understand the conditions for successful
implementation of innovations such as ICT.
Methodology
In this strand we used a mixed methodology -of qualitative and quantitative
approaches-to describe and analyse the wider policy framework and how these were taken up
in local sites, as well as localized policy initiatives and their articulation within
local settings. This meant an approach which sought to understand ICT policy and its
management from the point of view of those social actors who give particular meaning to
these frameworks. At the same time, we used techniques that tried to ascertain the
extent to which we are able to determine patterns in social experiences and social events.
Methods
A Teacher Questionnaire (TQ) was developed and administered to all of the
10 study sites. This was completed by all teachers within the sites, or those with
teaching and other administrative responsibilities. The purpose of this TQ was to
provide site level data able to be differentiated by subject department/area of
specialization. We were also able to locate those teachers in the design experiments
against those within the population of teachers as a whole. This TQ was
re-administered in 2003 to map changes taking place.
The team worked on developing site profiles over the period from April to
June, 2002. These broad descriptions were generated on the basis of interviews with key
individuals within each site, documents, statistics, reports and so forth. An audit of the
technology profile of the site was collected and analysed.
Interviews were conducted with key actors involved in policy initiatives from the
global (e.g. OECD), national (e.g. BECTA, DFES, Technology Colleges Trust), regional (
LEAS) to the local levels (local initiatives). These
were linked to document analyses.
We gathered ICT documents from departments and schools and also from LEAs, and
national and supranational agencies. We developed the use of computer text
concordancing software as a tool for identifying and tracking salient patterns, features
and focuses across the documentary data set.
References
Dearing, R. (1993) The National Curriculum and its Assessment. London, Schools
Examinations and Assessment Council
DfEE (1997) Connecting the Learning Society National Grid for Learning,
Consultation Paper, London, Stationary Office.
Fullan, M. & Stiegelbauer, S. (1991) The New Meaning of Educational Change,
London Cassell.
QCA (1999) The National Curriculum, Key Stages 1,2,3 & 4, DfEE & QCA
The New London Group (1996) A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, Harvard
Educational Review, Vol 66, No. 1
Project Team
Susan Robertson
Tim Shortis
Graduate School of Education University of Bristol 35 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1JA
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