Classroom pedagogies, digital literacies and the home school digital divide

Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning (2011) 6(2): 152–161.

Classroom pedagogies, digital literacies and the home-school digital divide ROBYN HENDERSON Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

ABSTRACT As digital technologies continue to permeate aspects of everyday life, contributing to an increasingly multiliterate world, educators are working to include digital technologies into classroom practices.

However, there is evidence that the digital divide between schools and homes continues to widen as more and more technologies become available. This article reports on a small research project that investigated the use of digital technologies in two middle school (young adolescent) classrooms and how the teachers were attempting to bridge the so-called home-school divide. The study explored what the teachers knew about their students’ use of digital technologies and multiliteracies outside of the school context and how the teachers used digital technologies and approached the teaching of multiliteracies within the contexts of their classrooms.

Keyword: digital technology; classroom practice; digital divide; home–school divide; multiliteracies; classroom context

INTRODUCTION

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n today’s world, the proliferation of digital technologies and the accompanying increase in multimodal text forms have resulted in significant social and cultural change. As Anstey and Bull (2006, p. 1) highlighted, change has become ‘the new constant’ as the use of digital technologies has permeated and morphed people’s leisure and work lives (The New London Group 1996; Anstey & Bull 2006). However, the take-up of digital technologies by young people and associated sociocultural changes have received mixed and often polarised reactions, particularly in the media. At one extreme are alarmist views that warn of health issues and a range of social issues including pedophilia and pornography (The Australian 2006; Department of Health and Human Services 2009; Hemphill 2009; The Sydney Morning 152

Herald 2009). At the other extreme are stories of the advantages of engaging in digital technologies, with claims that cognitive functioning, hand-eye co-ordination, eyesight, and employability can all be improved (Squire 2002; Prensky 2006; The Australian 2007; University of Rochester 2007; Yates 2008).

Despite diverse views about the worth and consequences of digital technologies, many have become a taken-for-granted part of life.

Automatic tellers, mobile phones and GPS navigators for cars are some that are widely used. For many young people, however, none of these are ‘new’ technologies, but are simply the technologies used as part of everyday life. Indeed, according to a Futurelab report (Green et al. 2005), ‘by the age of 21 the average person will have spent 15,000 hours in formal education, 20,000 hours

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in front of the TV, and 50,000 hours in front of a computer screen’ (p. 4). These figures, of course, seem to tell only part of the story, as so many young people seem to be captivated by a wide range of digital technologies, many of which represent the convergence of technological devices – mobile and smart phones, iPads, iPods and games consoles, to name just a few.

It has been evident for many years that the proliferation of digital technologies has resulted in an expanding range of textual forms. Many young people – and people who are not so young – use electronic devices that are capable of producing a multiplicity of texts that are different from traditional print texts. As Luke (2007, p. 52) pointed out for example, a mobile phone can ‘function as messaging device, camera, MP3 player, radio, games console, Internet and email portal as well as a phone’. Additionally, it has been recognised that the use of digital technologies involves a range of literacy practices (Gee 2003; Merchant 2007; Steinkuehler 2007). Even though much has been said about the need for teachers to ensure that ‘new’ literacies are included as part of classroom practice (The New London Group 1996; Anstey & Bull 2006), schooling has tended to privilege a narrow range of texts.

There is considerable evidence that the privileging of particular texts results in some students being enfranchised and others disenfranchised within school contexts. The seminal work of Heath (1983) in the US, research in the UK (e.g., Marsh 2003) and research in Australia (e.g., Freebody et al. 1995; Comber & Kamler 2004; Kamler & Comber 2005) have demonstrated that families engage in diverse literacy practices which are not always valorised, or even recognised, in school settings. Yet it is widely understood that students’ success in school literacy learning – defined by Alloway and Gilbert (1998, p. 255) as ‘demonstrated competence in the context of literacy as it is done and evaluated in schools’ – depends on ‘the repertoires of practices and knowledge that they already had from their home and community experiences’ (Comber & Barnett 2003, p. 5).

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Whilst there can be ‘a dissonance between outof-school and schooled literacy practices’ (Marsh 2003, p. 369), it has also been noted that schooling often neglects learning that is occurring outside classrooms (Maddock 2006). Whilst many of today’s youth are able to participate 24/7 ‘in local events half a world away through … connections to online, cabled, wired or wireless media’ (Luke 2007, p. 57), it would seem that schooling does not always draw on the multiliterate strengths that students bring to classrooms. In most cases, schools do not have access to the range of technological devices – or the funds to make such devices available – that many students use in their lives outside of school.

Some research has investigated the so-called ‘digital divide’ which has been claimed to exist between the access of different social groups to new technologies and information sources (e.g., Curtin 2001; Mossberger et al. 2003; Clark & Demont-Heinrich 2004). As indicated by a US report (National Telecommunications and Information Administration 1999), ‘minorities, low-income persons, the less educated, and children of single-parent households particularly when they reside in rural areas of central cities’ were groups who were least likely to access the Internet and thus were identified as ‘information poor’. However, some researchers have questioned this conceptualisation of the digital divide, arguing that ‘it would seem that the “digital divide” is more a “home-school divide”’ (Honan 2006, p. 41). According to Merchant (2007, p. 253), the ‘gaps between real-world uses of technology and new technology in the classroom’ are a ‘cause for concern’. There is ‘a growing sense that the divide is actually between the rich literate practices used by young people in their homes and the narrow and restricted practices engaged in by schools and teachers’ (Henderson & Honan 2008, p. 86).

With these issues in mind, this article reports on a small research project that set out to examine the use of digital technologies and the teaching of multiliterate practices in two middle school (young adolescent) classrooms in a regional

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Australian city. The research explored how the teachers were attempting to bridge the so-called home-school divide. In particular, the research investigated what the teachers knew about their students’ use of digital technologies and multiliteracies outside of the school context and how the teachers used digital technologies and approached the teaching of multiliteracies within the contexts of their classrooms.

FRAMING THE RESEARCH The research was framed by The New London Group’s (1996) theorisation of a pedagogy of multiliteracies. The New London Group argued for a move from the ‘formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language’ that have been the focus of traditional literacy pedagogy, towards pedagogy that considers the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of a globalised society and the ‘burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies’ (p. 61). In particular, this theorisation focused on ‘the content (the “what”) and the form (the “how”) of literacy pedagogy’ (p. 63).

In terms of the ‘what’ of literacy pedagogy, The New London Group (1996, p. 73) highlighted the importance of moving beyond language-only conceptions, suggesting a metalanguage ‘based on the concept of “design”’ and emphasising the necessity to consider visual, audio, spatial and gestural as well as linguistic elements of texts. In terms of the ‘how’ of literacy pedagogy, it was argued that: Learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities – interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes – students bring to learning.

Curriculum now needs to mesh with different subjectivities, and with their attendant languages, discourses, and registers, and use these as a resource for learning. (p. 72) Pedagogy for today’s world, then, was conceptualised in terms of ‘a complex integration of four factors’ (The New London Group 1996, p. 83): 154

• situated practice – ‘immersion in a community of learners engaged in authentic versions of … practice’ (p. 84); • overt instruction – ‘active interventions on the part of the teacher and other experts that scaffold learning activities’ (p. 86); • critical framing – helping students ‘frame their growing mastery … in relation to the historical, social, cultural, political, ideological, and value-centred relations of particular systems of knowledge and social practice’ (p. 86); and • transformed practice – ‘transfer in meaningmaking practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites’ (p. 88).

In rethinking literacy pedagogy, The New London Group highlighted the importance of building on students’ experiences and knowledges, working with diversity, and helping students to develop knowledges and skills for the present and for the future. It is in light of their recommendation for pedagogical change that the data from the current research project are considered.

Investigating two middle school classrooms The research was conducted over a period of 2 months in two upper primary school classrooms in schools located in low socioeconomic suburbs of an Australian regional city. As has already been stated, the main purpose of the research was to examine how the teachers used technologies in their classrooms and how they approached the teaching of multiliteracies.

Both schools were located in areas that were identified by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2006) as high unemployment suburbs. The schools’ Annual Reports, available publicly on the Internet (but not identified here in order to ensure the schools’ anonymity), also indicated that long-term unemployment was characteristic of many families with students enrolled at the two schools. The reports also noted other factors that are often linked with low socioeconomic status

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(Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007). These included ‘families with only one natural parent’ (School B) and ‘a moderately high rate of student transience … and a high percentage of single parent families’ (School A). In both schools, a small number of students came from Indigenous families. The two class teachers had many years of teaching experience. They were nominated by the principals of their schools as potential participants in the research because they had an interest in technology and were using it in their classrooms.

The research data were collected over a period of one school term, with the researcher visiting each school on a weekly basis. As a participant observer in the classroom, the researcher drew on a range of ethnographic techniques to collect data. These included classroom observations, field notes, informal discussions with students, and semi-structured interviews with the teachers and the students. During the classroom observations, the researcher collected data about the use of technologies and the teachers’ pedagogical approaches.

Both classes had approximately 25 students.

The classroom contexts One class (in School A) was a Year 6 class and the students were approximately 11 years of age. The classroom was a single teaching space with four computers on desks at the back of the room. A withdrawal room which was located beside the classroom contained 22 computers and the class used these on a regular basis. During data collection, the students were preparing a PowerPoint presentation about ‘Me’. This was part of a unit that integrated the key learning areas of Technology, English and the Study of Society and the Environment, and the students had to prepare PowerPoint presentations which would be presented to their teacher and class, as well as to younger classes in the school. The task’s specific requirements were that hyperlinks, different sized fonts, word art and photographs would be included. The teacher encouraged the students to include information about the Years 1 and 2 students they were mentoring as part of a whole Volume 6, Issue 2, August 2011

school reading program, as the PowerPoint presentations would be shown to a wider audience, including some of the school’s younger classes.

The other class, located in a different school (School B), was a multi-age class, with the students ranging in age from 10 to 12 years. The class was housed in a large double teaching space, which had four computers set up in a back corner of the classroom. A small room next door to the classroom housed 12 computers, which were used by the class and were also accessed by other classes. During the time that data were being collected, the class’s only focus on digital technologies was in relation to a Mathematics investigation into the number of ‘letter slots’ on vinyl pencil cases. For this investigation, the students were collecting data about the number of letters in the names of students in their class and as well as across the school. The teacher wanted the students to learn how to use the Microsoft Excel program as part of this investigation. To enable this to happen, the students were divided into three groups and each group received a weekly half-hour focused lesson in the computer room next to the classroom. This lesson was taught by a teacher-aide who was regarded as being a ‘computer expert’ within the school.

The analysis and discussion that follow draw on the data that were collected in the two classrooms over one school term. During that time, computers were the only digital technologies that were used, even though one class had access to digital cameras. From the data, three important issues have been identified: perceived barriers to teaching and using digital technologies in the classroom; ways in which school usage of technologies differed from the students’ reported usage at home; and the teachers’ understandings about students’ use of digital technologies in outsideof-school contexts.

PERCEIVED BARRIERS TO USING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AT SCHOOL Both teachers identified perceived barriers in the school or the classroom that constrained their attempts to work with computers and other digital

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technologies. The teacher in School B bemoaned the limited resources within her school and the age of the school’s computing equipment. She explained that ‘the computers that are in our room are the ‘98 version so they are really old and just not up to doing some of those things [that are now expected].’ Despite professional development in the use of technologies, she found that ‘I haven’t been able to use it at school because we just haven’t had the stuff to do it on … we haven’t had the software and technology side with that hardware to go into it’. Despite wanting to ‘do more’ of using computers in her classroom, she felt constrained by her inexperience with middle school classes (she had previously been an early childhood teacher) and the way she was ‘feeling my way through’.

In contrast, the teacher in School A used computers on a regular basis and had access to digital cameras. However, she explained that a lack of time and competing demands were barriers in her classroom: ‘I haven’t let them loose with cameras …

I’m flat out with the English and Maths that I have to do these days with all the interruptions that there are. You are flat out getting a decent amount of time’. She was also concerned that the students were ‘particularly slow’ doing tasks on the computers and ‘they definitely need typing skills too as I’d say there are only two in the whole class that don’t use the one-finger method’. When asked about the students’ access to digital technologies outside the school context, the teacher explained that it was ‘probably not a lot’, even though ‘I do know that a few of them have X-Boxes and PlayStations and a lot of them spend a lot of time on those’.

Nevertheless, in interviews the students reported having access to digital technologies outside of school. Indeed, every student in both classrooms reported having at least one games console; more than half said that they had a television in their bedroom; many had a DVD or video player connected to their television, and 84 per cent had at least one computer in their home (see Henderson & Honan 2008). Whilst it was evident that the extent of students’ access to computers and the age and reliability of their 156

home computers varied, almost all of the students talked about the opportunities they had to access a computer at either a relative or friend’s house or through their membership of a local library. For some students, the library option was seen as the ‘cheapest’ and was therefore utilised regularly.

USING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL It became evident in the data collected that the purpose and usefulness of computers, according to the teachers and the students, was a moot point.

The teachers regarded computers as a digital technology that students needed to learn in order to ensure successful future lives. The students, however, indicated that computers were one option among many in their current lives outside school and that they chose to use technologies according to the purpose they wanted to achieve. Electronic games were identified by students as their most popular form of entertainment, but they could choose where to play those games, whether on a games console, a computer or even a mobile phone.

Computer games were also available in the classroom. However, they were all ‘educational’ games and their use was limited to particular times. The teachers talked about allowing students to play computer games before school (School B), at lunch times during wet weather (School A), and when students were ‘early finishers’ of other school work (School A). In this sense, the use of computers was seen as a reward for those who completed tasks earlier than the rest of the class.

As will be discussed further in the next section of this article, neither teacher regarded the students’ out-of-school playing of electronic games as contributing towards their education at school.

The students talked about using the computer programs that were used at school, including Microsoft Word and Excel, for a range of home practices. In the class at School B, two students talked about their home experiences with Microsoft Excel. One student used the program to keep track of his pocket money and small gifts of money from his grandfather, while the other

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student explained that her father played darts and that he used Excel to keep records for his team.

Several of the students discussed how they used Microsoft Word for a range of activities at home, including homework, to ‘type like stories and stuff ’, to make Christmas cards, and to ‘put up notices like when our dog ran away’.

Throughout the interviews with the two teachers there was a sense that digital technologies were seen as a separate component of the curriculum, rather than being integral to learning as specified by the curriculum. The teachers’ focus was generally on computers as a tool for achieving particular purposes. The teacher at School A, for example, explained that ‘We use them a lot; we use them for group work, to publish their stories.

Basically it’s Word and PowerPoint’. Additionally, it was apparent that the teachers focused heavily on teaching students how to use the technology or a particular computer program, rather than teaching about aspects of literacy that were relevant to the use of the technology. However, despite this similarity, the two teachers organised learning opportunities for students in quite different ways.

The teacher in School B used an ‘expert’ teacheraide to provide focused learning episodes for students on a weekly basis. The teacher-aide used a direct teaching approach which targeted the specific Excel-related skills that the teacher wanted the students to learn. These included setting up an Excel file, entering data, adding columns, constructing graphs, and copying graphs and pasting them into a Word document. The teacher-aide began each lesson by explaining to the students what they were going to do, writing a list of steps on to the whiteboard that was in the room, then asking students to follow the steps. While the students worked individually at their computers, the teacher-aide provided verbal instructions to the whole group. These provided specific directions that the students were expected to follow. For example, ‘Go to edit and copy. Minimise your spreadsheet. Open up a Word document and edit and paste’.

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the step-by-step approach at a pace determined by the teacher-aide. It was almost impossible for students to ask a question or to talk to other students, as the teacher-aide’s instructions moved at a quick pace. If a student did ask a question, then the whole group had to stop and wait for the teacher-aide to solve whatever the current problem was.

These focused lessons were conducted using an Initiate–Respond–Evaluate format (Cazden 2001), with the teacher-aide asking questions, the students answering, and the teacher-aide evaluating their responses. For example: Teacher-aide: What is a box called?

Student: A cell.

Teacher-aide: Yes, that’s right.

The teacher-aide’s words and actions made it quite clear to students that they were expected to follow her directions and therefore complete each activity in a particular way and in a particular time frame. During these lessons, the group of students was physically isolated from their teacher and classroom because they were working in the room next door to the classroom. Thus activities using computers also seemed to be separate from ‘regular’ classroom activities.

In the classroom at School A, lessons were conducted in a very different way. The teacher used focused teaching episodes to model the tasks that she required the students to learn and used a data projector to display the computer screen on to the wall at the front of the classroom. At different times, she modelled how to insert pictures and photographs, how to select a design for the backgrounds of PowerPoint slides, and how to add sound files to a PowerPoint presentation. Each of these activities was accompanied by a verbal explanation of ‘how’ to do the task. Following these modelling episodes, the students had to experiment and practise with their own PowerPoint slides, using the computers in the withdrawal room that was next door to the classroom.

Once in the withdrawal room, the students were able to move around the room and to discuss

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their activities with other students. It was clear that some students were regarded as having expertise in particular areas and that their assistance was welcomed by other students. The teacher promoted this collaborative problem-solving, encouraging students to ‘show them how to do it’ and ‘not to do it for them’. It was not unusual to hear conversations amongst students like this one: Student 1: I think I’m ready for those hyperlinks but I don’t know how to do those.

Student 2: I’ll show you how to do it. I learnt the other day.

The teacher explained that it was important for the students to seek help, then to ‘go and put it into practice a few times’. She expressed concern that ‘kids more often than not these days are used to being hand fed and not having to work things out’, so she tried to encourage problemsolving within her classroom through opportunities for collaborative situated practice.

Teachers’ understandings of students’ home practices Both teachers had talked with their students about their home use of digital technologies. In School B, a school-wide survey had been conducted the previous year and the teacher involved in the current research based quite a few of her assumptions about students on the results of that survey.

This was particularly evident when she talked about home practices relating to computers: ‘The majority of them said they use computers to play games and not for any other use’. It appears that the teacher’s understandings from this survey – that home computer usage was mostly linked to games – informed her planning for all students to receive extensive focused ‘teaching’ about how to use the types of programs, including Microsoft Excel, that were required at school.

Although she said that she knew ‘probably not a lot’ about the digital technologies that students used at home, she expressed concern that many of them seemed to live in homes with more than one television and that digital technologies like mobile 158

telephones were regarded as ‘a little bit trendy’. In particular, she explained that some of the girls in her class ‘seem to want to show off that they’ve got their mobile phone and that they can text’. However, she also indicated that she recognised that the students had some expertise in digital technologies beyond her own – ‘I know that they can do things I can’t’ – but my observations of classroom activities suggested that this expertise was regarded as quite different from the types of expertise that she thought students should learn at school.

This perceived divide between the use of digital technologies at home and at school was also evident in the interview with the teacher at School A. Although she recognised that students would probably say that the use of computers was ‘fun stuff at home and all work at school’, she seemed cognisant of the wide range of digital technologies that her students used at home. She questioned, however, the logic of low-income parents who bought ‘every electronic thing known to man’, including ‘the Wii one where you can actually do the physical boxing and attach the things to yourself ’. Even though the teacher was aware of the students’ use of digital technologies outside the classroom, expertise with mobile telephones and games consoles was not seen as relevant to the classroom context. Similar findings have been reported in other research (e.g., Honan 2008).

However, as was demonstrated in the previous section of this article, the students’ expertise with computers was utilised within the classroom at School A. Following the teacher’s modelling of aspects of PowerPoint, interactions between students were encouraged as they were immersed in using the technology to develop their presentations.

This situated practice (The New London Group 1996) allowed the students to trial some features of PowerPoint, and those who were novices could call on more expert students to share their knowledge.

CONCLUSION Even though the current research was a small study of only two middle school classrooms, it provided considerable food for thought in

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relation to the teaching of multiliteracies and the use of technologies. What was particularly apparent was the diversity demonstrated by the two teachers in the ways they considered and conducted this teaching. In School B, the teacher had identified technological skills that she regarded as important for students to learn. She designed a Mathematics investigation that would require students to learn those skills and then to apply them to the task at hand. In Gee’s (2005) terms, this meant that students developed competence in the use of technologies – through overt instruction in the relevant technological skills (The New London Group 1996) – before using these skills to ‘perform’. In School A, the teacher engaged the students in the task of preparing a PowerPoint presentation and the students developed competence as they were ‘performing’ the task. In this situation, the students were immersed in situated practice, which allowed them to practise the task in a supportive environment before demonstrating their transformed practice to the teacher and their class mates (The New London Group 1996).

In comparing this aspect of the teachers’ pedagogies, the purpose is not to rate one approach against another. Rather, it is to make sense of the different ways that teachers incorporate digital technologies into their classroom practices and to consider how they attempt to bridge the so-called home-school divide. As the data demonstrated, the teachers’ approaches to technologies were founded in their understandings and assumptions about their students’ knowledges and experiences and were constrained by the limitations of the hardware and software available at their schools. This seemed to result in two quite different approaches – one that focused on skill development and the other that favoured student interactions in a problem-solving environment. Yet, in both classrooms, it appeared that the students’ learning of the technical skills related to computer use received more attention than the teaching of the relevant multiliteracies.

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taken. Similar findings have been reported in other research studies (e.g. Honan 2008).

In relation to the ‘how’ components of pedagogy identified by The New London Group (1996), it was clear that both classrooms provided overt instruction and opportunities for transformed practice. The teacher in School A used situated practice to allow students to bring some of their technological strengths to the activities conducted in the classroom and to encourage problem-solving.

In contrast, the lessons observed in the classroom in School B were teacher-directed and focused on specific learning, with only one way of doing the required task. While such focused teaching might have achieved the specific learning objectives at that time, it is interesting to ponder the possibilities of including critical framing in the pedagogical approach. With the current trend of convergence, many hand held technological devices have the potential to do the same tasks that students are often asked to do on computers (Lankshear & Knobel 2006; Newhouse et al. 2006).

Opening up classroom discussions to these possibilities and allowing students to demonstrate how they might do similar tasks with the technology available in their out of school lives could be useful ways of beginning to bridge the divide between home and school. Whilst both teachers identified deficiencies in their students’ skills relating to the use of technologies in school-validated ways, they recognised that their students had skills and knowledges that they themselves did not have. However, because school practices focused for the most part on computers, rather than on digital technologies more broadly, much of what students knew and could do with a range of digital technologies seemed to have no place in the classroom. This was in part because the technologies were not available.

However, it was also apparent that the teachers did not see that usages of technologies outside school, such as the playing of electronic games, might have anything to offer to school literacy learning.

The home-school divide raises important questions about the ways digital technologies are sometimes used in classrooms. It was certainly

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obvious in the two classrooms of the current study that the range of technologies on offer was narrow when compared to the range accessible by the students and their teachers outside school.

Understandably, the schools were unable to keep pace with the fast rate of technological change that was happening in the broader community. A challenge for schools and education systems more broadly is to find ways of working creatively and effectively with the rapid rate of technological change. We know that this challenge has seen some political traction in recent times, particularly with the Australian Government’s Digital Education Revolution, but the ability of school systems to stay abreast of technological change is certainly an area that warrants ongoing consideration.

Of considerable concern, however, is the issue surrounding the teaching of literacies or multiliteracies. In this research project, it became evident that the teachers saw the teaching of literacies as separate from computers and other technological devices, even though they regarded both the learning of technology and the learning of literacies as important. Yet, the expanding range of technological devices for accessing and reading information suggests that teachers need to rethink the teaching of literacies and multiliteracies. Not only is the use of technology important, but consideration must be given to the specific strategies that are required for reading, writing and designing texts in digital form.

Increased attention to what students already know and can do in their out of school lives is a way of beginning to link home and school. Finding ways to identify the ‘funds of knowledge’ that students bring to school can open up pedagogical possibilities (Gonzales et al. 2005). By taking the time to understand students’ prior knowledge and the resources they can contribute to classroom learning can provide sound foundations for situated practice and overt instruction and can open up taken-forgranted practices to critical examination. Although there are considerable barriers that impact on teachers’ approaches to the teaching of multiliteracies and digital technologies – and some of these may not be within teachers’ control – teachers need 160

opportunities to reflect on current practices and to examine and re-examine the possibilities for pedagogical change. It would appear, then, that bridging the divide that exists between home and school technology usage is still a challenge to be faced in some, if not many, classrooms.

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