Repositioning teacher agency in the discourse of educational change: a study of the early socialization of networked technologies in Melbourne schools
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Rom Harré concerned with human agency and Michel Foucault with power relations argue that discourse is of central importance in our understanding of social behaviour's shaping of our social world.Foucault, in analysing the nature and role of discourse, in order to clarify both his method for examining discourse and the nature of discourse itself, ascribed an autonomous role to discourse in the development of contemporary systems of power.After Foucault, we are told that power is embodied in discourse which encodes institutional knowledge.We know what that means and how it works.But do we?Harré, offering an alternative realist ontology of conversation, asks of Foucault's ontology reifying discourse, how could discourse possibly have a causal effect, and how could this be reconciled with the causal roles of individual human agents or subjects?The context of this study was the discursive practice of teacher enthusiasts involved in the earliest introduction of networked information and communications technology in their schools in the early 1990s.The study encompasses and relates emergent social structures or educational possibilities, the actual or agential acts and actions of the subject teachers and their psychological positioning in everyday discourses in their schools.This study does not seek to substantiate the theoretical work of Foucault or Harré; rather it seeks to reimagine teacher agency and to reclaim change in teaching embodied and embedded in the process of teacher's everyday doings and sayings in the early socialization/institutionalization of networked and mobile communications technology in schools.This study asks how the social order in schools at the time was transformed and maintained.Central to this investigation of the early socialization of these technologies is the question: How can the social agency of teachers, who introduced the new technologies in their schools, be understood and researched?In this study the site-based ontology's of teachers as change agents, the interdependence of structure and agency the motives of self-improvement and institutional transformation are explored.This work requires a re-imagination of teacher agency and the reclamation of change in social research in education.This is a social, cultural-historical, instrumental psychological study of the positioning of teacher technology-enthusiasts in their own story lines in their ordinary language accounts of the introduction of new information and communications technologies in their schools.An ethogenic perspective was employed in framing the analysis and interpretation of the dialogical and dialectic tensions between institutional and constitutive orders in teaching.These tensions associated with the choices that teacher technology-enthusiasts were forced to make and
Author: Robert Malcolm Roe
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2276091017