Integrating art and technology: an action research case study in a high school in the United States of America, 2001
Abstract
This study was inspired by James Tarrant’s (1989) extension of John
Dewey’s (1916) understanding of democracy and education. Democracy as we
dream it has yet to be invented and can only be realized as a process, as the
experience of being an equal among equals. It is a moral imperative, in a Kantian
sense, for educators to assert their conversational mutuality with students as
participants in re-creating democratic process.
The purpose of the study was to explore a much-cited barrier to
technology innovation in schools: teacher resistance to technology. Focal
participants were teachers, staff, artists, and parents of art students who worked or
volunteered in a Fine Arts Academy within a public high school. I found that
teacher resistance to technology was a phenomenon amenable to influence
through conversation, care, collaboration, and connectivity.
Two new concepts emerged as a result of this study: polarity thinking and
emotional scaffolding. Polarity thinking is a perceptual schematization in which
concepts are understood to be antagonistic. Certain effects of polarity thinking can
delay self-actualization, collaboration, innovation, and change. Emotional
scaffolding extends the horizon of Lev Vygotsky's (1934) concept of the Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD) to include Nel Noddings’ (1981) concept of the
ethic of care in education. Emotional scaffolding supports learners creatively as
well as critically.
I recommed that change agents adopt a definition of cognition that values
the role emotional intelligence plays in learning, and be willing to participate
emotionally as well as cognitively, ethically as well as rationally. I suggest that
curriculum theorists interested in technology integration in the schools recognize
the importance of celebration and identify joyful, caring ways to share
information, skills, and resources with specific schools and individual teachers; to
influence the social ecology of education towards connectivities that support
group and individual self-actualization.
Department
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