Beyond workforce preparation: contested visions of ‘twenty-first century’ education reform

ABSTRACT

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent ‘twenty-first century’ future, this article uses the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate two contrasting sociotechnical visions: A Silicon Valley vision that aimed to reduce inequalities in test-based outcomes by disseminating ‘achievement technologies’; and an Oakland vision that aspired to address systemic environmental, economic and educational inequities using ‘civic technologies’. The diversity of these futures, and the distinctive kinds of digital technologies that co-produced these visions, trouble assumptions about ‘technology’ as an unquestioned good and problematize constructions of the ‘twenty-first century’ as an ostensibly shared, democratic future. I conclude by encouraging educational researchers to clarify a politics of the ‘twenty-first century’ and explore how ‘bounded imaginaries’, like those evident in the Oakland case, offer a potentially fruitful basis for reframing global education technology policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociotechnical imaginaries
• digital technology
• nonprofit organizations
• education politics

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge Megan Alpine, Shun-Nan Chiang, Amanda Lashaw and two anonymous reviewers for their insights and critical feedback on this paper. All remaining limitations are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ethan Chang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8242-3984

Notes

1. Although notions of a ‘blank canvas’ obscure attention to ongoing historical struggles, I use this metaphor to convey the non-neutrality of technologies and interplay between technologies and social practices.

2. As one illustrative example, Wentland (2016) uses sociotechnical imaginaries to investigate the relationship between the cultural assumptions and aspirations of mobility experts, information and communication technology companies, and grid operators and the material construction of the electronic vehicle (EV). His analysis reveals how cultural assumptions about desirable societies, and in particular, views of sustainable transportation, were reflected in, and extended by, technological innovations.

3. Studies by Popkewitz, Olsson, and Pettersson provide a generative discursive backdrop for this inquiry. Specifically, Popkewitz et al.’s (2006) analysis of ‘the learning society’, a cultural discourse that tacitly draws boundaries of privileged ‘cosmopolitan learners’ and those that fail to possess normative values (e.g. reason, progress, control over risks and future uncertainties), informs my curiosity and interest in local variation. I build on their generative textual analyses of futurity and global convergence and explore the impromptu and everyday sociomaterial practices through which actors materialize potentially competing futures within shared global discursive contexts.

4. In an earlier draft, I referred to CommunitiTech as a ‘digital application’. The InnovateEquity team clarified that CommunitiTech is not an ‘app’, but a mobile responsive website. One team member, Alicia, clarified this distinction:

A mobile responsive website represents our efforts to center the tool around community participation, i.e. not everyone has a smart phone, or data to download an app – therefore, CommunitiTech is a mobile responsive website so anyone can access it regardless of device or data.

5. For a cogent analysis of Skinner’s ‘teaching machines’, see Watters’s (2014) The Monsters of Education Technology. Watters traces Skinner’s efforts to mechanize learning and observes, ‘No doubt, ed-tech today draws quite heavily on Skinner’s ideas because Skinner (and his fellow education psychologist Edward Thorndike) has been so influential in how we view teaching and learning and how we view schooling’ (p. 14). Her account links technological innovations to cultural frameworks of schooling and helps to explain enduring patterns of interest and investment in technology in the historical-present.

6. I refer to this interpretation of equity as ‘narrow’ in reference to Ladson-Billings’s (2006) critique of the ‘achievement gap’. Ladson-Billings argues that the ‘achievement gap’ obscures attention to an ‘education debt’: historical, economic, socio-political, and moral debts that weigh unequally on students of color. Following Ladson-Billings, equity involves more than minimizing scores on achievement tests, but interrupting within- and out-of-school barriers to opportunity, particularly for young people of color and young people from historically disinvested communities (see also, Carter & Welner, 2013).

7. As one illustrative example, a district superintendent used his one minute to express the challenges of communicating with multilingual families in a district with 49 different home languages. No companies addressed this district leader’s concern or acknowledged ways they might improve their platform to make it useful for multi-lingual families. Notably, Accelerate-Edu’s explicit prompting of edu-tech companies with a fill-in-the-blank statement reveals their anticipation of entrepreneurs’ dismissal of school actors’ needs. Finally, the differential time Accelerate-Edu allotted for administrators and educators (1-minute) compared to edu-tech entrepreneurs (3-mintues) reflects organizational priorities that ironically belie Accelerate-Edu’s stated aims of ‘flipping’ the paradigm of corporate-school partnerships in ways that center district and school needs.

8. Two of the 33 companies who participated in the Pitch Games eventually received district contracts with local Silicon Valley school districts.

9. For this specific project, the relations between community input and decision-making processes represented an enduring and contested topic of debate. For this specific article, I do not have space to elaborate on this component of InnovateEquity’s work. Yet, it is relevant here to note that Jasanoff and Kim’s (2015) third developmental stage of sociotechnical imaginaries, ‘resistance’, offers a useful language for interpreting the tremendous opposition InnovateEquity encountered in their efforts to link community voice to decision-making processes. Equity-oriented and community-based visions of downtown Oakland bumped up against institutionalized, common sense approaches to development, which one development-oriented consultant synthesized in his recommendation: ‘the community needs to be educated to not fear development’. Much discord and lengthy negotiations characterized the processes through which community data would actually impact the downtown plan.

10. This refusal represents a unique challenge to what Popkewitz (2008) and Pettersson et al. (2007) document in their tracing of the tacit rules and standards of reasoning that inform efforts to control and rationally organize for the future. InnovateEquity enacted practices that rejected modernist, linear, rational orderings of time and space. Instead, they constructed a vision of the future that was contingent and permanently open to revision.

11. Smith and Tidwell’s (2016) analysis of coal miners’ imagined energy futures identified how local, aspirational visions of coal mining as respectable, blue-collar labor, challenged prevailing sociotechnical imaginaries. Despite these local visions, prevailing actors and relations of power suppressed and undermined the legitimacy of these alternative futures. Following Smith and Tidwell (2016), researchers might investigate the actors, interests, and mechanisms through which alternative educational futures are sanctioned or penalized. Specifying the opportunities and barriers to local visions represents a potentially fruitful, and much needed area of inquiry for critical studies of digital technologies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Educational Research Association's Minority Dissertation Fellowship.