No Lone Rangers: Pedagogical Technologists’ Mutualistic Relationships in Schools
No Lone Rangers: Pedagogical Technologists’ Mutualistic Relationships in Schools By Woo, David James Paper Proposal This paper explores the role of selected pedagogical technologists and examines what they do to impact schools’ ways of working with and through technology. In particular, it investigates pedagogical technologists’ mutualistic relationships with close working partners in schools and how these relationships impact school change. Pedagogical technologists are full-time coordinators of pedagogy and technology in schools. They are not teachers in a traditional sense nor do they focus predominantly on supporting the technical aspects of teaching with information technology (IT). Their primary duty is providing pedagogical support for teaching with and through IT and helping teachers and other school stakeholders use technology to best support student learning, taking into account technological, pedagogical, content knowledge. These pedagogical technologists are often drivers of school change. The pedagogical technologist role in Hong Kong schools may be emergent, due in part to the increasing presence of IT in schools and changes to the specific ways that schools think about IT in education. In examining the pedagogical technologist within an ecological conceptual framework, this paper identifies significant species and interactions in the pedagogical technologist’s ecology. It also identifies the qualities of these species and these interactions, and develops some general principles about what makes pedagogical technologists successful in schools. The paper employs a qualitative, multiple-case study research strategy with the pedagogical technologist role being the case unit of analysis. Data collection and analysis are grounded. Data is collected by observing and interacting with selected pedagogical technologists at work. The pedagogical technologists, principals and other school stakeholders are interviewed. Documents are collected, and photographs are taken. Some persistent qualities of interactions between pedagogical technologists and other species are illustrated in the data. Although the pedagogical technologists were discovered to have interacted with a wide range of species and members of those species, the pedagogical technologists that work in schools were found to work more closely with one member of a species in the school ecology than all the other members of any species. With these close partners, the pedagogical technologists in these schools have a greater impact on their schools’ ways of working with and through technology than if they had been working alone. In ecological metaphor terms, these relationships can be considered mutualistic, and the interactions between the pedagogical technologists serve several purposes. These purposes and the qualities of pedagogical technologists’s close partners are discussed. The findings strongly suggest that mutualistic relationships are essential for pedagogical technologists’ success in impacting schools’ ways of working with and through technology. Other implications for practitioners, organizations and researchers are discussed.