As teacher educators in Malaysia with a commitment to the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning, we live and work in the diverse cultural and political contexts of education and schooling that affect many of our practices and beliefs. How can knowledge and understanding of pedagogy with ICT be constructed by teachers to promote effective teacher education in this field? The Smart Schools initiated by the government to proclaim its priority to increase the use of ICT in Malaysian schools (Smart School Blueprint, 1997) was neatly laid out. All teachers will be expected to show evidence of specific standards in their ICT capability through training given under Smart School Teacher Training Programme. The nature of `teacher knowledge' is addressed in current Malaysia Smart School Blueprint in the definitions of standards of subject knowledge and teaching strategies. This initial research inquiry focused on `What is the intention dimension between teachers' knowledge of pedagogy and ICT in teaching and learning of English?' It is this range of theories and beliefs that generate action in the classroom. The models of future teacher education for continuing staff development should acknowledge and challenge these in supporting the development of pedagogy using the ICT innovation. There are interesting and challenging claims made for the potential of ICT in teaching and learning. The purpose and role of the teacher can be clarified and refined in the context of using ICT (Scrimshaw, 1997a). Smart School Learning Management Systems, whilst reflecting a constructivist model of learning, have been demonstrated to provide opportunities for teachers to develop their use of diagnostic tools and change their practice (Underwood et al, 1997). The contexts in which these teachers practice may also be changed by the use of ICT, both in terms of place and time. The current focus is on interactive whole class teaching utilized by the Smart School Trained English Teachers, which is more teacher-centered and directed. In order to capture the ICT use intentional dimension portrayal, researcher has used a modified Concern Based Adoption Method (CBAM) (G.E. Hall & S.M.Hord (1987), Susan Loucks-Horsley(1996) to analyze the level of use of ICT in the innovation among these teachers. In short, the research question changed from `How does ICT support the development of teaching and learning?' to `What is the intention between teachers' knowledge of pedagogy and ICT in teaching and learning? The cultural, political, emotional and moral experience of the teacher engaging with teaching and learning in the digitalised approach is admitted. The implications of the research for in-service teacher training and continuing professional development are acknowledged.
This is a case study about English language teachers, who were trained in smart school (SS) pedagogy but teaching in normal schools. It is about the intent and beliefs of these teachers with regards to the use of ICT in the Smart school pedagogy they have acquired and their actions in the English language classroom. When the study started I was a teacher trainer at one of Malaysia’s teacher training college. I was involved with the training of the teachers in the SS pedagogy. The study actually started with my asking perhaps a very naïve question; “Why are the teachers being trained in SS pedagogy when most of them will be posted to normal day school?” The SS programme is part of the Malaysia ambitious Multimedia Super Corridor project. The programme was identified in late 1996 and implemented a year later. It was put under the jurisdiction of Malaysia Ministry of Education (MOE) and its Teacher Training Division was given the task to train teachers for these schools. When I started this study in 2001, the Teacher Training Division had trained 983 teachers from 83 schools. The training started in 1998 under a project called ‘Projek Rintis Sekolah Bestari, KPM, 2000’ (Smart schools’ Teacher Training programme). The project was seen as crucial to transit Malaysia from an agriculture based economy to an industrialized economy and, be a leader in this Information Age.
In order to make this vision a reality it was envisaged that Malaysia needed to make a fundamental shift towards a more technologically literate, thinking work force that are able to perform in a global work environment and utilize fully the tools available in this Information Age. This fundamental shift needed inevitably meant that the education system must undergo a radical transformation. Based on that precinct, the Malaysian MOE decided that the schooling culture needed to be transformed as it was always lamented that the Malaysian schools put too much emphasis on memory-based learning. MOE believes that it was timely to stress on a more informed, thinking, creative and caring, education through leading-edge technology. It is against this backdrop that SS became one of the flagship applications in the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project. As Malaysian teacher educators, we have been entrusted in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. We live and work in the diverse cultural and political contexts of education and schooling that question many practices and beliefs. There is the potential for ICT to be the catalyst for significant change in digitalised pedagogy, yet the picture painted and the policies proposed under Smart School concepts are not yet reflected in the experience of many classroom teachers. How can knowledge and understanding of pedagogy with ICT be constructed by teachers, teacher trainers, educational researchers and policy makers to promote effective teacher education in this field?
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of a question which has underpinned a research and development programmes focusing on English Language teachers' pedagogy with ICT in the normal schools. This initial inquiry focused particularly on the understanding of intention within the context of the general use of ICT of the three Smart School trained English Language teachers. The influences of culture, subject knowledge and pedagogy on the development of classroom practice were identified and presented within a framework of Concern Based Adoption Method (CBAM) (G.E. Hall & S.M.Hord (1987), Susan Loucks-Horsley(1996) After further reflection, however, it was acknowledged that this framework did not reflect the complexity of the interaction of these themes in developing pedagogy, nor enable the production of a satisfactory description of the experience of the teachers in trying to meet the many requirements placed upon them in the use of ICT in their work. The research paradigm needed to encompass both an interpretivist approach to the teachers' experience and action, and a critical theory approach to the constraints and contradictions of the requirements placed upon teachers by political and structural systems.
Government policy for education in Malaysia embraces a positive and progressive view of ICT as evidenced by the recent Prime Minister’s announcement on ‘Smartization’ of all schools in Malaysia. The Smart Schools were initiated by the government to proclaim its priority to increase the use of ICT in Malaysian schools (Smart School Blueprint, 1997). The comprehensive Blueprint highlighted the modernization of the teaching-learning process, management functions, human resources, technology through the advancement in pedagogy and improvement in ICT and teacher development materials for life long learning. All teachers will be expected to show evidence of specific standards in their ICT capability through training given under Smart School Teacher Training Programme. These reports and developments for legislation reflect a political push for access to information and learning to prepare all students for life in the information age. It seems to be assumed and uncontested that the first will lead to the second. Against the concept of virtual classroom and flexible learning modes is a contradictory rhetoric and policy about the nature of knowledge and pedagogy. The Smart School Curriculum and Assessment framework present a future model of clear subject boundaries and content which can be assessed objectively in order to provide indicators of school effectiveness and performance. The nature of `teacher knowledge' is addressed in current Malaysia Smart School Blueprint in the definitions of standards of subject knowledge and teaching strategies. There is a detailed model of a Teacher Training Curriculum and Standards under Smart School Teacher Training programme, both in subjects - English, Mathematics, Science, Bahasa Malaysia as well as Information Technology - and in general professional practice. This, however, has been recently questioned by studies which describe how effective Smart School teachers were distinguished from other teachers, not by the level of previous subject qualifications, but by a particular set of beliefs and understandings, both about the pupils' learning and the subject itself. (Lim et al 2001, Hamzah, 2001)
|THE INITIAL RESEARCH INQUIRY|
Teachers' perceptions and experience of their purpose and practice in the demanding times of educational reform need to be considered. There has been a number of key studies which focus on teachers' personal and professional experience whilst coping with multiple innovations and change in their interpretation of autonomy and professionalism. Indeed, Hargreaves argues,
“…while policy rhetoric stresses knowledge and technique as central to good teaching, I draw attention to the importance of purpose, passion and desire. Seeing teacher development in this light, I argue, highlights the central place of moral, political and emotional issues in the field..” (Hargreaves, 1995, p. 9)
Based on this premise, the question of `What is the intentional dimension between teachers' knowledge of pedagogy and ICT in teaching and learning of English?’ is relevant for discussion here. This line of inquiry arose out of a desire to understand how the knowledge that underpins Smart School Trained English Language teachers' pedagogical practices interacts with the knowledge that they bring to their uses of ICT in learning environments. The nature and complexity of describing `teacher knowledge' is recognized, particularly in a national context in which `teacher knowledge' is increasingly defined and prescribed. The effective use of ICT in classrooms is, however, linked to teachers' theories, beliefs and understandings of the subject domain, as well as access to, and competence with, resources (Watson, 1993). It is this range of theories and beliefs that fuel action in the classroom and models of teacher education for continuing staff development should acknowledge and challenge them in support of the development of pedagogy. The three Smart School Trained teachers’ intentions revealed in this study constitute the result of active interaction in synthesizing the information (course input) into pedagogical knowledge. In order to capture the ICT use intentional dimension portrayal, researcher has used a modified Concern Based Adoption Method (CBAM) (G.E. Hall & S.M.Hord (1987), Susan Loucks-Horsley(1996) to analyze the level of use of ICT in the innovation among these teachers. The modified CBAM which contained levels of concerns in term of ICT use intentional dimension portrayal is as outlined in Table 1 below:
Table 1: Indicators of Intentional Level of Use of ICT innovation
Teachers are influenced by many concerns which differ in their origin, demands and impact. The images of the purposes and progression of ICT in the wider society are reinforced by the priority given to ICT in education policy, both national and local. These contrast, however, with other education policies which describe the curriculum to be delivered, the nature of subject knowledge required of teachers and the teaching strategies prescribed for the raising of standards. The school and classroom may have limited ICT resources, inappropriate for the range of teaching strategies recommended, often contrasting unfavorably with those resources found in some of the pupils' homes as portrayed in table 2 below.
Table 2: Levels of Use of ICT/ T1
Pedagogy is often described as `the science of the art of teaching', and addressed in teacher education as the development of specific teaching strategies and skills. It can, however, be described as a cultural practice (Giroux, 1997) and defined as the `transformation of consciousness that takes place in the intersection of three agencies - the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they together produce' (Lusted, 1986, in Lather, 1990, p15). ICT could be considered to be a fourth agency, acting as a catalyst for the interaction between teacher, learner and knowledge (Loveless, 1995). Such a view does, however, highlight contradictions and tensions between the pedagogical practices required of teachers in current educational policy and the changes in practice made possible by the use of ICT as portrayed in table 3.
Table 3: Levels of Use of ICT/ T2
The potential for ICT to enhance, extend and change the role of the teacher can be perceived as an exciting opportunity or an arm twisting threat. Amongst these contrasting concerns within the educational systems, there is the teacher's own sense of professional purpose, competence, values, relationships and emotions. The demands for innovation and change can therefore be difficult, contradictory and confusing as portrayed by the teacher in table 4 below.
Table 4: Levels of Use of ICT/ T3
The debates about the impact of ICT in Malaysia are well rehearsed. Our society recognizes the impact of ICT in the economic, educational, social and personal lives of its members and much use is made of terms such as `The Information Highway Society', ‘Virtual Reality’ and `Cyber Culture'. The definitions of these terms are not always clear and the images and expectations that they evoke are problematic, addressed in debates about new literacies, new relationships and new visions of the post-industrial society. Anxieties are expressed about the ways in which ICT can be used for controlling information, surveillance, marketing, invading privacy and models of intelligence. Cyber Culture is, however, also celebrated as providing opportunities for communication and collaboration between communities and previously marginalized groups; for blurring the boundaries of communities and individual identities, and providing new representations of knowledge. The information age is usually presented as good, desirable, inevitable and embodied in our children.
Teaching in the Information Age
There are many interesting and challenging claims made for the potential of ICT in teaching and learning. The purpose and role of the teacher can be clarified and refined in the context of using ICT (Scrimshaw, 1997a). The Smart School Learning Management Systems, whilst reflecting a constructivist model of learning, have been demonstrated to provide opportunities for teachers to develop their use of diagnostic tools and change their practice (Smart School Teacher Training Programme, 1998). The contexts in which teachers’ practice may also be changed by the use of ICT, both in terms of place and time. Teachers may become ‘multipurpose’ in which they play a role many contexts – home schooling, electronic conferencing and managing flexible learning spaces (Davis, 1997, Kenny, 1997, Meisalo et al, 1996).
ICT can enhance existing pedagogy, from providing opportunities to develop composition in writing to developing on-line/digitalised skills. The presence of the ICT resources and applications in themselves are not sufficient to promote or challenge understanding, and effective capability with ICT depends not on skills, but on the context in which the experience is embedded. Indeed, innovative teachers use ICT in innovative ways. (Watson, 1993) There is a long research tradition in TESL focusing on teaching skills and classroom management to promote higher order interactions between learners and teachers. The current focus is on seven learning strategies (directive, generative, meditative, observational, collaborative, outside context and metacognitive) an interactive whole class teaching utilized by the Smart School Trained English Teachers, which is more teacher-centered and directed. These developments, whilst providing the opportunity to look afresh at `fitness for purpose', contrast with the picture of flexible learning associated with a constructivist approach to the use of ICT.
A Revised Framework for Research
The design of the first phase of the Smart School Teacher Training programme had been an attempt to rediscover pedagogy in an `autonomous' model of techniques and strategies which were not embedded in the cultural context in which values and tensions were made explicit. The position of the researchers looking for a `good view' of pedagogy also had to change, from the observation and interpretation of an outsider, to a more ethnographic stance of engagement with teachers' experience and the provision of `scaffolding' to support the development of action and meaning. In short, the research question changed from `How does ICT support the development of teaching and learning?' to `What is the intention dimension between teachers' knowledge of pedagogy and ICT in teaching and learning? Although the methodology used is similar - a qualitative, interpretive approach employing ethnographic techniques, the lens through which the data is seen and interpreted has changed. The cultural, political, emotional and moral experience of the teacher engaging with teaching and learning in the digital age is admitted. The tensions and contradictions in the inputs that influence classroom practice are made explicit and the political structures recognised. The models of knowledge which underpin the current policies determining the form of teacher education do not take into account the contexts in which teachers are being asked to bring about these changes, nor the contradictions in those demands. The implications of the research for in-service teacher training and continuing professional development are shifting from realism to relativism.
|By: Hamzah Md. Omar|
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