Integrating art and technology: An action research case study in a high school in the United States of America, 2001
Year: 2002
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study was inspired by James Tarrant’s (1989) extension of John \nDewey’s (1916) understanding of democracy and education. Democracy as we \ndream it has yet to be invented and can only be realized as a process, as the \nexperience of being an equal among equals. It is a moral imperative, in a Kantian \nsense, for educators to assert their conversational mutuality with students as \nparticipants in re-creating democratic process. \nThe purpose of the study was to explore a much-cited barrier to \ntechnology innovation in schools: teacher resistance to technology. Focal \nparticipants were teachers, staff, artists, and parents of art students who worked or \nvolunteered in a Fine Arts Academy within a public high school. I found that \nteacher resistance to technology was a phenomenon amenable to influence \nthrough conversation, care, collaboration, and connectivity. \nTwo new concepts emerged as a result of this study: polarity thinking and \nemotional scaffolding. Polarity thinking is a perceptual schematization in which \nconcepts are understood to be antagonistic. Certain effects of polarity thinking can \ndelay self-actualization, collaboration, innovation, and change. Emotional \nscaffolding extends the horizon of Lev Vygotsky's (1934) concept of the Zone of \nProximal Development (ZPD) to include Nel Noddings’ (1981) concept of the \nethic of care in education. Emotional scaffolding supports learners creatively as \nwell as critically. \nI recommed that change agents adopt a definition of cognition that values \nthe role emotional intelligence plays in learning, and be willing to participate \nemotionally as well as cognitively, ethically as well as rationally. I suggest that \ncurriculum theorists interested in technology integration in the schools recognize \nthe importance of celebration and identify joyful, caring ways to share \ninformation, skills, and resources with specific schools and individual teachers; to \ninfluence the social ecology of education towards connectivities that support \ngroup and individual self-actualization.
Author: Temi Ann Rose
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2126110867