Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemPrensky's digital immigrants: the life of Science and English teachers with digital learning technologies in a progressive school( 2008)Computer based technologies are widely presented as the dominant cultural artefact of our time and a key to the reinvention of teaching and learning in schools. To explain the slower than expected uptake of new technologies in schools and to locate the teacher in this issue, Prensky (2001) coined the term "Digital Immigrant". The phrase has since had wide currency amongst Information Technology consultants and educational managers. This ethnogenic study examines the umwelt of Prensky's "Digital Immigrants" in the English and Science Departments within Southern School, a well established, innovative, liberal progressive school, in outer Melbourne. In their conversations over three years with the author (Director of Curriculum with broad responsibilities for the quality of the curriculum and teaching in the school) the teachers present narrative accounts of the transformation of their pedagogical reasoning in the normative space of teaching with the new learning technologies. The accounts of the social and cultural meaning they construct for themselves and the ways in which their identity and agency as educators have been informed by Harr�'s "Positioning Theory". This is the key analytical tool used in locating each teacher in their own storylines. In these everyday conversations they offer accounts of the local moral order of the school at a particular period of time as it is transformed by new technologies. Foucault's "Technologies of Self' offers a secondary account of the way they transform themselves. The fine grained analysis of their agential positioning and modes of self governance offers an alternative image to Prensky's "Digital Immigrant." This study, and others like it, makes a contribution to New Institutional Theory that seeks to monitor and forcibly delimit the paths that self cultivation takes. Teacher self cultivation is both the conscious production of the self and the transformation of the communal conditions of future self-production. It is shown here dealing with the hard choices and potentially irredeemable losses of liberal education.