On disruption and integration: two views of digital media technologies in K-12 schools

ABSTRACT

In this review essay, Earl Aguilera compares two recent contributions to the growing body of literature on technology in education, Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation and Antero Garcia’s Good Reception, to examine the conceptual and practical contributions of each text, along with points of divergence through which readers might glean additional insights. Sims and Garcia both address efforts rooted in a growing area of work around integrating digital media technologies into K-12 schools, but present contrasting perspectives and differing notions of technological disruption and integration. While Sims’ ethnographic work on the “school for digital kids” is rich in conceptual tools that help readers understand what he calls cycles of disruptive fixation that have occurred throughout the history of public education in the United States, Garcia’s embedded perspectives as high school teacher provide practical guidance for integrating new media technologies with responsive and critical pedagogical practices. Taken together, these texts highlight both the promises and the pitfalls of integrating new media technologies into existing models and contexts of education often labeled as outmoded for life and work in the 21st century.

KEYWORDS:

• Education reform
• digital media and learning
• educational technology
• ethnography
• youth participatory action research

As I sit down to type this essay, a smartphone vibration breaks the silence of the room. One of my students has sent me a message through our university’s online learning management system. “To be honest, I’ve never been very good with technology…” the student beings, after a brief introduction to technical dilemma related to assignment submission. While both research and personal experience have helped me to reframe misconceptions of “digital natives” in my own pedagogical practice, my mind wanders back to these framings of young people growing up in a world of increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies (Brown & Czerniewicz, 2010).

Taking a break from writing, I navigate to the Twitter website in my internet browser. As I scroll through the latest updates to my personalized “feed” of content, I happen upon several posts from former high school students of mine. Intermingled among linguistic constructions such as “Weird flex, but OK,” are emoji symbols, hashtags linking to niche online communities, and looping digital images named “GIFs” after their file extensions. I find myself first impressed by the linguistic and multimodal deftness exhibited by the youth creating and sharing these posts, then curious as to how they might be interpreted by “outsiders” to such communicative practices.

For many educators today, these digitally networked media technologies and practices have become an almost unremarkable and often taken-for-granted part of everyday life (Lister, Giddings, Dovey, Grant, & Kelly, 2008). In the popular media and commercial discourses, these technological advances are often framed as a force for positive social transformation (Cuban, 2001). Perhaps just as often, these technologies are framed as no less than an existential threat to the social fabric of our communities – as has been the case historically with other instances of moral panic (Ingraham & Reeves, 2016). And there may be justification for aspects of both of these perspectives, as well as less extreme positions.

Within educational research in particular, a growing body of scholarship has been concerned with investigating the promises and pitfalls of integrating technology – interactive digital media and internet-connected devices in particular – into educational settings across grade levels and contexts (Howard & Mozejko, 2015). In particular, a group of scholars have been characterizing their work within an emerging interdisciplinary subfield known as “Digital Media and Learning” or DML (Gee, 2009; Ito et al., 2009). The two books discussed in this essay, Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation and Antero Garcia’s Good Reception, both address efforts connected to the DML movement, while each providing uniquely situated perspectives into spaces where education and digital media technologies are coming together.

Tracing the foundations of digital media and learning

Before examining these books, it may be helpful to situate them within the broader contexts, issues, and debates that inform the perspectives of their authors. While some may trace contemporary interest in integrating new digital media into schools to the work of computer scientist and educator Seymour Papert (1980), it may also be valuable to explore the traditions of literacy studies and how these may have informed current scholarship in DML. These include perspectives that emphasize (1) literacy as a social practice, (2) new literacies evolving around new technologies, and (3) literacies evolving around forms of media beyond just the written/printed word. Considering these overlapping histories and agendas, linguist and digital media scholar James Paul Gee has characterized the modern umbrella of DML scholarship as an “amalgam” of work from each of these different areas (Gee, 2010).

Scholarship that began to re-conceptualize literacy beyond a cognitive, technical, and individualistic phenomenon has been collectively referred to as the “New Literacy Studies,” or “NLS” (Street, 2003). This collection of perspectives emphasizes the sociocultural nature of literacy, rather than purely cognitive approaches to reading and writing. Rather than focusing solely on a narrowly defined, print-based skillset within a Western schooling contexts, this body of research seeks to examine literacy as it developed in settings of indigenous communities, family and home settings, local neighborhood cultures, and many other contexts (Heath & Street, 2008). This includes work to recognize the multilitieracies that these scholars observed as emerging in increasingly globalized and diversifying contexts (New London Group, 1996).

Stemming partly from the NLS, another tradition of scholars began to emphasize the study of new kinds of literacies beyond “traditional” print literacy – especially “digital literacies” and literacy practices embedded in popular culture (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Scholarship exploring these “new literacies” has tended to emphasize the relationship of digital technologies and literacy practices, all within a broader social context. Examples of work in this area include scholarship on online chat and forum discussion practices among youth (Ito et al., 2009); video games and learning (Steinkuehler, Squire, & Barab, 2012); and cultural production through online memes (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007).

Another area of scholarship stemming from the NLS has been blending a focus on the socially situated nature of literacy with the “media literacy” movement, which itself evolved within the broader field of communications studies (Buckingham 2003). Historically, media literacy scholars were concerned with how people construct meaning from advertisements, newspapers, television, film, and the like (as well as how people construct these media to express meaning). Proponents of new media literacies now highlight, as an example, the increasing blurring of the lines between producers and consumers of digital media, as well as what they see as newly emerging gaps in participation, transparency, and ethical practice in a digitally mediated, increasingly participatory culture. (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006).

Taken together, these areas of scholarship have contributed to the DML movement’s focus on the social learning contexts involving digital media technologies.

Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism provides an ethnographic account of one effort by educational reformers, technological experts, and powerful philanthropists to instantiate the ideals of the DML movement – in particular, a focus on videogame-based pedagogies, media-production practices, and digitally networked out-of-school learning. While Sims follows a particularfixation of ethnographic work, namely, attempting to mask the identity of a prominent and highly publicized project, he does admit this poses a challenge given the nature of the school. Indeed, one of the reports published by the MacArthur foundation, a prominent funder helping to publicize DML, focuses on the design and opening of the school (Salen Tekinbas, Torres, Wolozin, Rufo-Tepper, & Shapiro, 2010). As one might conclude from Sims’ descriptions of photography and video-recorded publicity, this report paints a much more positive picture of the school than is revealed through Sims’ work.

Charting the life of what he refers to as “The Downtown School” from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class, Sims documents how this highly publicized vision of tech-driven, educational reform often reverted to more conventional practices of scripted teaching, rote learning, and highly regulated classroom behavior. Sims’ account also highlights how the school’s idealistic attempts at transforming education actually ended up perpetuating many of the inequities – including divisions along race, class, and gender lines – that the school’s founders were hoping to address in the first place. Ultimately, Sims’ work highlights the school as a case example of how cycles of techno-philanthropism and attempted educational reform can fail in their interventional goals, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for future cycles of what he calls “disruptive fixation.”

Early in his book, Sims overviews several ways of thinking about the word fixation that guide his work. In common and contemporary usage, the term often refers to a kind of unhealthy attachment or obsession. It may connote a kind of tunnel vision or narrowness of view that results from directing one’s gaze toward a particular object. Finally, as Sims points out, it can be accompanied by an older, less pejorative connotation: referring to processes that can “transform volatile energies and forces into something more settled and stable” – in other words, to fix them in place or form (p. 12). From his perspective, a mutually constitutive understanding of the term fixation, drawing from each of these framings, may be the most helpful in understanding the role of disruptive fixations in techno-philanthropism.

By contrast Antero Garcia’s Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School, approaches contemporary issues of technology and education from the perspective of a classroom teacher working to understand and draw on his 9th graders’ seeming infatuation with digital media technologies, all in the hopes of supporting his students’ academic achievement, identity-building, and civic engagement. While grounding his observations in the broader context of historically marginalized communities and schools, Garcia’s work paints a more intimate picture, “warts and all,” of a year in the life of his 9th grade English class. Blending observations of his own students mobile media use, interviews and focus groups with students, and notes from his own experimental efforts to integrate mobile media into the academic activities of his class, Garcia’s work provides insights into the lived realities of historically marginalized students, along with a hopeful vision and practical guidance for shifting our educational focus toward what he calls a wireless critical pedagogy. In Garcia’s framing, this approach draws on Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s notions of “conscientización,” or the development of a critical consciousness of the social and political conditions of students’ everyday realities (Freire, 1970). Garcia then extends this by conceptualizing “wirelessness” as both a reflection of the potential for wirelessly connected mobile technologies in promoting critical consciousness, as well as the view that enacting such a critical pedagogy does not necessitate digital technology at all.

For Garcia, what matters much more than the technologies through which we enact these pedagogies is the foundation of mutual support and trust that teachers build with their students. While he does not make claims of the replicability of his efforts (and in fact, in some cases cautions against such attempts), he closes his book with practical guidelines, frameworks, and templates for teachers interested in pursuing similar efforts with their students.

Defining disruption

One prominent point of convergence across these two works in their shared focus on the concept of “disruption.” The idea of disruption, or as Sims’ pithily defines it, “radical redesign” in education, plays a prominent conceptual role throughout Sims’ book. For Sims, cycles of disruptive fixation – beginning with reformers problematizing the dominant educational approach of the day and rendering these problems as if they could be remedied with the technical solutions the reform experts had on hand – have a long history in education. And while the portrayals of disruption in certain mainstream media outlets currently evokes positive connotations tied to discourses of technological innovation, many such disruptive fixations have failed to live up to the visions of their proponents – though this is not to say, as Sims points out, that these disruptions do not have their beneficiaries.

Garcia also addresses the idea of disruption in his chapter focusing on observational studies of students’ mobile technology practices within and outside his classroom. As he points out, classroom teachers often attribute a different meaning to the idea of disruption: as a “major problem in classes…to be avoided at all costs” (p. 91). Like Sims, Garcia also points to present discourses of technological innovation – as well as the examples of market disruption – as imbuing the term disruption with more positive connotations outside of the classroom. While this portion of the book seems to approach the kind of fixation Sims’ warns about, Garcia’s argument quickly returns to a more nuanced perspective emphasizing individuals over iPads. As he states in this chapter’s conclusion, “When we invest in technology in schools, we do so in rudimentary ways: we pay a lot of money for devices that we hope will fix the persistent problems of public schooling” (2017, p. 92). Instead, Garcia advocates for the view that trust and relationships need to be the foundation of any attempts at educational change, and that “investment in disruption should look to the people in classrooms rather than the devices” (p. 92). Echoing Sims’ view of cycles of disruptive fixation without naming them, Garcia continues the book with illustrations of his own attempts toward moving past these fixations and toward meaningful change in his classroom practices.

Readers of both Sims’ and Garcia’s perspectives on the idea of disruptive technologies in classrooms may find these perspectives reminiscent of recently resurfacing debates in education reform, particularly about the nature of learning and the role of schooling in the 21st century, though these are not necessarily new ones. As Sims’ points out in his opening chapters, educational reformers have had a history of problematizing the currently dominant approach to education, whether it be Progressivist movements of the early 1900s in the United States, or the subsequent backlash and push toward standardization that followed, and in many ways, continues to this day. Similar cycles of disruptive fixation can be seen in the development of literacy research and education, as alluded to by the NLS’s reaction to purely cognitivist views of education in the mid 20th century and the so-called “reading wars” that occupied the minds of academics arguing over whether phonics-based or meaning-based approaches were the “best” way to teach reading (Pearson, 2004). When we apply this cyclical concept to technology integration more broadly, and new digital media specifically, we can once again begin to notice battle lines being drawn between proponents of DML and those who caution against the dangers of “screen time” for youth and students (Daugherty, Dossani, Johnson, & Wright, 2014).

Re-centering humanity

Critics of disruptive technologies (ranging from the technology of writing to virtual and augmented reality platforms) sometimes focus on the dehumanizing nature of mechanization, automation, and surveillance (Haslam, 2006). While the theme of dehumanization is more of an implicit undercurrent throughout Sims’ work, Garcia’s book addresses the notion of dehumanizing practices in education early and directly. From adults in the school hallways obscuring individual student identities through “commands barked at masses of students” (p. 30), to surveillance practices arguably enacted to control students’ bodies, Garcia shares data on the frequency and nature of a variety of dehumanizing practices and policies he (and some of his students) identify as impacting the day-to-day lives of students throughout his school.

Contrasting this, Garcia argues, is a stance on humanizing education that is fundamentally about “acknowledging, seeing, and knowing the individuals we interact with” (p. 31). Alongside a focus on understanding the role that mobile media technologies plays in the lives of adolescents, Garcia regularly returns to his point that it is not the devices themselves, but educators’ understandings of ways they might help foster trust, caring relationships, and humanizing experiences in schools that make the difference.

For Sims, the theme of dehumanization can be implicitly understood in the examples he identifies of educational reformers and tech-philanthropists fixating on spaces, pedagogies, and technologies, but not necessarily on the everyday lived realities and experiences of students. Drawing on Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) notion of figured worlds, Sims describes how the reformers’ views (and thus their interventional designs) seemed to stem from presumptions of student interests in media production, as well as an assumption about kinds of future workers (e.g. media producers) and citizens (e.g. media-savvy) the reformers believed the world needed. And while Sims’ work does catalog and analyze these fixations, the book also includes more humanizing stories of student cliques that formed and persisted across economic and gender-based divides; the concerns voiced by students, parents, teachers, and administrative leaders of the school themselves; and even his own challenges as an observer often invited to be part of the school’s everyday rituals and practices.

As Sims states, the goal of his work is not to “systematically diagnose the shortcomings and successes of this particular attempt to disrupt education,” nor “prescribe better ways to do education reform or technology design.” (p. 5). However, in situating his own perspectives from an ethnographic lens and seeking to provide more “intimate” perspectives on a highly publicized educational reform project, Sims’ work can be read as re-centering a focus on the humanity of the people caught up in these cycles of disruptive fixation – and even the people who continue to propagate them.

Garcia’s direct references, as well as Sims’ allusions to notions of dehumanizing practices and centering learners’ humanity, both share a connection to the themes of humanization dealt with in Freire’s own Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). In discussing his own highly localized version of critical pedagogy, Freire identifies oppression as a force that dehumanizes both the oppressed and the oppressor. While recent scholarship on critical literacy (Luke, 2012) has called into question Freire binary separation of oppressor and oppressed, arguments about the dehumanizing effects of technologies can be seen in scholarship both within and outside the realm of educational research (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; O’Neill, 2016).

Parallel fixations

Having traced a few of the conceptual convergences between Sims’ and Garcia’s work, it may now be useful to touch on some points of divergence between the two. Such contrasts can yield additional insights for readers interested in the complex relationship of education and technology.

As he recognizes in an appendix to his work, Sims’ own book exhibits fixations often found within the realm of ethnographic research. These include, as he delineates, a methodological fixation with “researchers locating themselves alongside and within sociocultural processes at particular sites for lengthy periods of time;” a conceptual fixation on “close attention to the local,” and a philosophical fixation on developing “anthropological self-reflexivity” (2017, p. 179–180).

While this is not meant to serve as a critique of ethnographic work more broadly, I do believe it is important to recognize – as Sims himself does – that none of us are immune to the universal tendency to develop fixations of our own, whether at individual or institutional levels. In addition to these, the complex syntax and expansive lexicon of the text itself evince an intended audience of fellow academics and researchers familiar with the field of education. Recognizing my own biases as a self-identified “teacher first,” I found myself at various points of my reading Sims’ book yearning to hear more from the perspectives of students at the school. While his methodological notes suggest he does indeed draw conclusions based on interviews and informal conversations with students, explicit discussions of these are limited to brief moments situated among broader conceptual analyses of patterns of behavior or conversation. This is consistent with the academic tenor of the book overall, though educators seeking practical advice on how to move past the shortcomings of the Downtown School will need to turn their attention beyond Sims’ book to find it.

Garcia’s work, along a similarly self-aware pattern of thought, reflects the author’s own contrasting fixations with concepts such as critical pedagogy (discussed above), civic engagement, and Connected Learning – a pedagogical framework developed by proponents of DML in schools. This approach centers concepts of youth-driven learning as supported by peers, driven by student interest, academically oriented, production-centered, based on a shared purpose, and openly networked within and beyond the walls of a classroom – all supported by new media technologies (Ito et al., 2013). Documents inaugurating the development of Connected Learning and lauding its potential are marked with language alluding to issues of diversity, civic engagement, and promoting educational equity (see e.g. Ito et al., 2013). However, as work like Disruptive Fixation has begun to reveal, implementations of these commitments can be much more difficult in practice.

Garcia does point out two important challenges to the CL framework, namely that for him, “connected learning” does not only describe the practices of youth, but extends to learners of all agers, and that his conception of connected learning does not always rely on new media. Garcia’s own approach to the complex issues at the intersection of entrenched educational contexts and the socially inequitable realities of many students involves looking at digital media to a degree, though mainly to the extent that students develop their own meaning-making social practices around these technologies. Weaving together student perspectives from interviews, focus group discussions, and documented student–teacher interactions, Garcia highlights his own hybrid role as both teacher and researcher as an important consideration for evaluating the merit of his work. Stories of his challenges and blunders as a teacher and researcher help illustrate a parallel fixation with exposing his everyday experience. Finally, Garcia is consistent in his fixation on teacher support, trust, and student–teacher relationships as the foundation of any educational innovation.

Pushing back, moving forward

Together, these texts highlight both the promises and the pitfalls of integrating new media technologies into existing contexts of formal education. And I would advocate the value of engaging with their ideas side-by-side, rather than relegating them to opposing poles of a spectrum of readership. As Jean Lave points out in a peritextual review printed on the back of the book, Sims’ Disruptive Fixation is rich with conceptual tools for understanding and analyzing educational reform movements, whether they be rooted in new media technologies or not. Such tools include a more mutually constructive view of fixation, a mapping of cycles of disruptive fixation in educational reform, the “lived fictions” of educational reformers treating the world “as if” it conforms to their particular visions, and the idea of “sanctioned counterpractices,” which Sims’ describes as students’ performances of nonconformity enacted in ways that align with the visions of those who hold power in a given educational context. The include practices of students’ exploiting the design of a videogame, in line with the school leaders’ visions of gaming literacies, but exclude practices by certain students which sought to subvert power differences between teachers and students.

Importantly, Sims’ work reveals that many of the social practices treated as “unsanctioned” by educators were enacted by racially minoritized and economically disadvantaged students. Such differential sanctioning practices can be seen as an echo of broader patterns of marginalization in schools (Delpit, 2006). As Sims later describes in the book, as Te Downtown progressed through its inaugural year, several of the students considered popular among these increasingly marginalized peer cliques were eventually pushed out of the school.

Providing another view of similar marginalizing experiences, this time from his own classroom, Garcia demonstrates the importance of paying specific attention to the structural inequities facing many students today. While he recognizes certain practices that he, as a teacher, found particularly frustrating (e.g. loud music on headphones during silent reading time), he uses Good Reception as an opportunity to publicly question his own assumptions about meaningful time spent in classroom, actively seeking to include a range of student language and literacy practices as evidence of meaningful engagement during school time. In this way, Good Reception provides a timely and urgent perspective on the importance of connecting the everyday experiences of youth with the educational spaces meant to prepare them for life and work beyond their schooling.

Each of these texts contributes to current debates in the fields of literacy and pedagogy about the nature of literacy, the role of schooling in a democratic society, and the disruptive possibilities of new media technologies in such systematically entrenched institutions as public schools in the United States. With regard to many educators and educational reformers current fixations on new media technologies, Sims’ work provides a timely and empirically grounded critique of the burgeoning field of DML, particularly as the ways its techno-idealistic principles play out in the messy contexts of communities, students, and parents whose lived realities, perspectives, and personal interests may not always conform to the idealized visions of these educational reformers. With regard to many academics’ fixations on theoretical purity, Garcia’s work demonstrates the importance of pedagogical approaches that draw on a variety of perspectives, but ultimately focus on centering the practices, interests, and well-being of students. While Sims’ work can help us develop a deeper awareness of how educational reform efforts (technologically driven or otherwise) often fail their intended beneficiaries, Garcia’s work points to the ways that we, as students, parents, teachers, and communities, might take action to advance our own visions of equitable and impactful education for all.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Earl Aguilera

Earl Aguilera is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at California State University, Fresno. His research, teaching, and advocacy centers critical perspectives on digital-age literacies, educational technologies, and humanizing pedagogies.