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Preparing Teachers for Technology Integration:
Creating a Culture of Inquiry in the Context of Use
MICHELE JACOBSEN
University of Calgary, Canada
PAT CLIFFORD AND SHARON FRIESEN
Galileo Educational Network, Canada
Experience is something you undergo, it is not an accumulation of experi-
ences.
In September 2000, teachers in the province of Alberta, Canada, began the
three-year implementation process for an Information and Communications
Technology (ICT) Program of Studies (Alberta Learning, 2000) with
kindergarten to grade 12 students. This innovative curriculum, demanding
the effective infusion of technology for communicating, inquiring, prob-
lem-solving and decision-making in core curricula, puts Alberta at the
forefront in terms of what it means for students to think and learn with the
full range of digital technologies that are so much a part of today’s
changed—and changing—world.
Visionary educational technology researchers (diSessa, 2000; Goldman-
Segall, 1998; Papert, 2000, 1980) and the experience of the Galileo
Educational Network (http://www.galileo.org) paint the same picture of
what thinking and learning need to look like in a knowledge era. Mind-
storms, Seymour Papert’s book written in 1980, is a call to deconstruct the
existing educational system by making a space for the love of learning that
hands-on and minds-on engagement brings. Mindstorms continues to be a
headlight for the present time as schools become increasingly disconnected
from the societies of which they are a part, and the digital technologies
needed to build new structures become increasingly available. He claimed
that every child can program, and that learning to program can affect how
children learn everything else (Papert, 2000, 1980). In his latest treatise on a
Jacobsen, M., Clifford, P., & Friesen, S. (2002). Preparing teachers for
technology integration: Creating a culture of inquiry in the context of use.
Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 2(3), 363-388.
364
new direction for innovation in education, the focus is on power as a
property of ideas. Papert (2000) advocated the re-empowering of disem-
powered ideas in his program of idea work for educators, and idea power
for children. In Changing Minds, diSessa (2000) demonstrated how
computers can be the basis for a new literacy, a computational literacy,
which changes how people think and learn. In Points of Viewing, Goldman-
Segall (1998) portrayed the cultural interactions and changes that can occur
when meaningful partnerships are formed between learners and digital
media. Building upon shifts in technology from broadcast to interactive
digital media, Goldman-Segall (1998) promoted the idea of schooling as the
learner actively constructing instead of just an expert instructing.
We no longer live in a world in which information is scarce, and the teach-
er’s role is to hand deliver content to children. Overwhelmed by information
from a wealth of sources, students desperately need the skills to create new
knowledge, not just consume the old. Problems never come neatly packaged,
defined-in-advance, and amenable to the rote application of familiar strate-
gies—except in school. As our world learned on September 11, 2001 real
problems erupt unexpectedly, demanding careful and creative attention in
chaotic environments that had once seemed stable and unshakable. The old
certainties of a world defined by four classroom walls and impermeable
boundaries have disappeared forever, replaced by global interdependencies
and complex systems that require flexibility, responsiveness, and imagination.
Our society can no longer afford to think of engaged learning, nimbleness,
creativity, and commitment to action as educational “frills.” Multiple and
conflicting perspectives are no longer problems to be fixed, ignored, or
eliminated. They are the way the world works. Our human survival depends
on our ability to learn new things and use ideas to solve problems in deeply
ambiguous and confusing situations; and it depends on our ability to teach
our children how to do this. For Canada to compete and excel in a global
community, our young people need to develop the understandings, skills,
and attributes that will serve them well in a knowledge era. To increase
options for further advancement and educational opportunities, our teachers
need to be aware of idea power (Papert, 2000), the vital importance of
computational literacy (diSessa, 2000), and the cultural perspectivities
(Goldman-Segall, 1998) that will serve our children well across disciplines
of study, and in future citizenship.
365
This is a time in which it is profoundly tempting to withdraw into old
certainties, to return to familiar landscapes of teaching and learning whose
routines and well-worn grooves give us comfort and a sense of control and
order. But the world itself holds a different lesson for us: a lesson about the
importance of teaching the young to live well when the very shape of that
world emerges every day in ways that are unlike anything we have ever
known before.
NEW WAYS OF LEARNING DEMAND NEW WAYS OF TEACHING
Today’s classrooms do not look much different than they did 20 years ago
when school districts began to invest heavily in technology. While recog-
nizing that there are pockets of genuine innovation in classrooms, schools,
and universities across the province of Alberta, we feel confident in making
a few generalizations about the current state of affairs in education as a
whole. First, while many school and university students are using technolo-
gy in their personal lives in a wide variety of ways, they are not using
computers very extensively in classrooms to learn effectively in a variety of
subject areas. There are a number of explanations for this state of affairs.
One, computers tend to be available to students mainly in labs. This means
that for many students, computing remains an event, scheduled in advance
according to the convenience of a timetable. Technology is not yet seam-
lessly integrated as a powerful way to think and learn. Too often, instead of
making possible the new ways in which people can share and exchange
information in a digital commons, school networks and workstations are
secure, standardized, preconfigured, and completely locked down. Two,
tasks involving technology tend to involve a fairly low level of thinking and
research, focusing heavily on the presentation of final products rather than
on thinking differently, rigorously and effectively at every stage of a
project. Third, there is a growing “digital divide” between what students
actually know how to do with technology and what they are permitted to do
in school. There are growing numbers of students who routinely expect
their school computers to be old, connectivity to be slow, networks to be
unstable, and their teachers’ knowledge and confidence to be significantly
less than their own.
A second general trend observed is that many classroom teachers and
faculty members in teacher preparation programs lack confidence in their
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own ability to think broadly with technology. Few classroom teachers use
computers extensively in their own lives outside of school. Traditional
models of professional development, such as workshops and courses, have
not been particularly successful in helping teachers and university faculty to
find ways to integrate technology into their teaching. Faculty members and
classroom teachers are not comfortable with this state of affairs. They often
feel bad about not knowing how to use technology for teaching and
learning. They use phrases like “technopeasant,” “technophobe,” “resident
luddite,” or “stupid about computers” to describe themselves.
Related to this second trend is the third observation that many education
faculty and teachers who do feel more confident about their own ability to
use computers for professional tasks are often uncertain about how to use
technology in their teaching. Those in academic and school leadership
positions often have less experience with technology than their teachers,
and are therefore not always able to provide strong leadership, or strongly
informed support for required changes to enable the effective infusion of
technology in their buildings. Almost by default, visions for the use of
technology for teaching and learning are often created by IT specialists who
are not educators. Network design and student access are often determined
according to what is standard, easy to maintain and monitor, rather than
according to what is educationally sound. Alberta Learning’s ICT Program
of Studies (2000) tends to be poorly understood by teachers in schools, and
education faculty in teacher preparation programs. Many believe the
program of studies focuses on teaching about computers, rather than
learning with technology. Dominant curriculum models, based on fragmen-
tation and discrete units of study (even in e-learning), tend to emphasize
course delivery and information-transfer rather than knowledge creation.
While there are thousands of examples of digital media objects and teacher-
created units and lessons that claim a meaningful technology component,
there are far fewer authentic images of the effective and imaginative
infusion of technology.
Teachers and leaders in the schools and school districts often look to new
teachers to shore up the gap between technology presence and use. Howev-
er, the fourth observation is that the current generation of preservice
teachers simply do not routinely infuse technology in their own learning
and student teaching, and thus, few bring the skills and experiences that are
needed to transform today’s classrooms. There are several possible explana-
tions for this state of affairs. First, information and communication technol-
ogy tends to be regarded as an optional area of specialization in preservice
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courses rather than as a crucial way for everyone to learn. Second, when
compulsory courses are available, they tend to emphasize software applica-
tions rather than technology-infused curriculum design. Third, not enough
preservice teachers are being taught in ways that demonstrate effective
infusion of technology in all subject areas. There is a great deal of talk
about constructivism on North American campuses, but fewer examples of
how to live and learn in these ways. Fourth, issues of perceived threats to
professional freedom and standardized accountability mechanisms make it
difficult to insist on the widespread and effective infusion of technology-
enhanced teaching practices in preservice courses. Finally, there has been
no mechanism to deliberately place preservice students in technology-
enhanced classrooms where experienced teachers are finding new ways of
teaching and learning with technology.
The final trend that concerns us is that many good teachers are leaving the
profession. There is little or no sustained support for beginning teachers to
learn or consolidate new ways of teaching. There is a lack of widespread
support and professional development to help existing classroom teachers
make the necessary changes to classroom practices, let alone support the
enthusiastic efforts of beginning teachers. Classroom teachers with a high
level of technology expertise, or commitment to learning to teach in new
ways with technology, frequently end up frustrated by the barriers they face
in using what they know in their daily work with children—and they leave.
TEACHER PREPARATION AND TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION
A shift in thinking is required for teacher preparation that is similar to the
one needed in professional development for inservice teachers (Clifford &
Friesen, 2001; Jacobsen, 2001). It is simply not good enough to teach the
next generation of teachers in ways we were taught because they will live
and teach children in a different age. Preservice teachers must routinely
encounter the effective infusion of technology in the normal course of their
learning at the university and in their practicum placements in schools. Let
us be clear about this—no one of us has learned in classrooms where these
powerful new tools were freely available to use. The technology is simply
too new. This means that educators in school and university classrooms
must figure out what to do with these new digital media, and create mean-
ingful learning opportunities for students that they themselves have never
368
experienced. Learning how to teach and learn in new ways with technology
requires imagination, intellect, creativity, and no small courage.
The Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary is no stranger to
innovation and revolution. Teacher education programs in general are
organized around an applied science model within which individual courses
are framed by philosophical and theoretical content, and these in turn are
followed by short-term practice teaching in schools. Beginning in 1996, the
University of Calgary embarked on a course of action to discontinue its
teacher education programs formed in the conventional model, and to
replace them with a program in which the elements of the professional
degree program are integrated, the learners are treated as professionals-in-
the-making, the richness of pedagogical knowledge is acknowledged, and
cooperative problem-solving is valued. The Master of Teaching Program at
the University of Calgary is a two-year teacher preparation program that
fosters closer links between theory and practice and more effective one-to-
one communication between teacher educators, classroom teachers, student
teachers and learners. The Master of Teaching (MT) program replaced
discrete courses with professional, case study, and field seminars, indepen-
dent studies, and extensive field experience. Students spend approximately
equal amounts of time on campus and in the field from the first day in the
program, and the one experience is expected to reflexively inform the other.
The campus elements of the program include case, professional, and field
seminars. Much of the “academic” content of the program is carried by a
series of case studies with which students must wrestle, research, take
positions, and defend their perspective in well thought-out writing. Each
case encompasses far more knowledge than any one student can deal with
in the time given—hence the incentive for collaborative learning endeavors.
Team work and collaborative inquiry and problem solving is encouraged,
valued, and rewarded. Field seminars provide a forum for the exchange of
ideas and experiences gleaned from the variety of educational settings in
which a group of students find themselves, not to mention dealing with
many of the pragmatic issues that characterize the lives of teachers and
students. Professional seminars offer students an opportunity to reflect
critically on themselves as teachers-in-the-making, to pursue topics and
skills of particular interest, and to engage in the many debates that surround
the nature of education and teaching. In its fifth year, the MT program
clearly demonstrated its capability to prepare teachers who are energetic,
reflective, cooperative practitioners capable of solving problems, confronting
369
new challenges, and taking and defending positions on complex issues. The
move away from specialist courses has not been without its challenges,
however, and one of the first to rear its head was how to re-examine the
integration of technology. The Master of Teaching program accepts 400
students per year, which translates into approximately 800 students in
progress at any one time. The MT program must address technology in
education but it must do so within the structure of the new program.
For the past two years, the three of us have co-taught preservice teachers
about the integration of technology into learning and teaching. Our plan-
ning for this special topics seminar on integrating technology across the
curriculum was guided by a vision of engaged learning and educational
reform (Clifford & Friesen, 2001, 1998, 1993; Jacobsen, 2001), and a
commitment to address the kinds of concerns outlined at the beginning of
this article. We wanted preservice teachers to experience digitally rich,
inquiry-based learning environments on campus and in their field place-
ments. Thus, technology infusion was situated within the larger context of
inquiry-based learning. Our seminar was not about technology; it was about
teaching and thinking with technology. We moved well beyond skills
acquisition or a focus on software applications, and instead created a
context of use within which preservice teachers learned by designing
learning opportunities for real students in real classrooms (Figure 1).
Through focused tasks, we designed opportunities for them to learn in just
the ways they will be called upon to teach children (Clifford, Friesen, &
Jacobsen 1998).
Figure 1. Student teacher learning robotics with children in ways she will
be called upon to teach children.
370
In the design of our seminar on technology across the curriculum, we drew
on what we know about good professional development practice: (a)
technology is best learned just-in-time, instead of just-in-case, (b) planning,
designing, implementing, and evaluating are best done in collaboration with
others, (c) learning must be situated in authentic, challenging, and multidis-
ciplinary tasks, (d) a culture of inquiry around technology for learning
supports risk-taking and knowledge creation, and (e) teachers need inten-
tional and meaningful opportunities to reflect on professional development
and growth.
Technology Is Best Learned Just-In-Time, Not Just-In-Case
Students were able to take advantage of newly renovated, technology-
enabled learning spaces in our seminar. In the first year that we taught the
seminar, students had to move from the traditional “lecture” space, in which
we had rows of desks facing an overhead projection of a computer screen,
to two separate computer labs to work on their projects. The constraints of a
lab model that we had to grapple with were similar to the computer lab
model that most teachers in schools encounter.
The design of our learning environment in the second year leveraged the
ubiquitous access to technology in the seminar space (i.e., 16 networked
workstations) and also the larger public learning spaces (i.e., 30+ additional
workstations, multimedia development suites, scanners, digital and video
cameras, LCD projectors, SmartBoards, CD burners, and so on). Our
students had access to more than four dozen networked computers distribut-
ed throughout the seminar and public learning spaces. All seminar rooms
are equipped with Ethernet ports and traditional white boards to provide an
effective blend of visualization and communication technologies. Breakout
rooms provide faculty and students with secluded workspaces for open
discussion and group work—an excellent complement to the Faculty of
Education’s philosophy of inquiry-based and collaborative learning. The
fluid and ready access to technology tools, Internet access, and to each
other changed the learning culture—it was easier for students to gather
around a workstation or deskspace to collaborate, and to move out into
public spaces as needed, rather than as a special field trip to a computer lab.
The permeable environment permitted flexible arrangements and grouping,
and also provided ready access to other experts (i.e., faculty support staff).
371
A primary goal of the reference and technology support staff is to provide
the essential support to the students and faculty as they make complex and
often difficult transitions to new ways of learning, teaching, and organizing
instruction.
The first assignment was two-fold: students were required (a) to read the
ICT Program of Studies (Alberta Learning, 2000), reflect upon their own
readiness to teach it, and to set learning goals within that context, and (b) to
publish their reflections in an individual, web-based portfolio that would
eventually contain all of their coursework. Each student created a personal,
and personalized, web site for the purpose. For students with no experience
with scripting web pages, we provided a template to scaffold their early
efforts.
“Oh, Easy for Leonardo”
The requirement that students engage with the program of studies, and
publish a response on a web site they had to design themselves, sent many
into a tailspin (not unlike that experienced by seasoned classroom teachers
and faculty members). There were tears and complaints, and many were
worried about a perceived mismatch between their present ability and our
expectations. These concerns are typical. When a novice first enters the
culture of technology use, everything seems overwhelming. There are
several ways in which we might have responded to this level of distress.
From a technocentric perspective, we might have reassured students,
“There, there, dears, don’t worry, IT is actually very easy,” and grabbed the
mouse and clicked madly away (like geeks on speed). We might have told
students that learning the computer part is really quite easy—just take a
couple of extra courses or attend a few workshops. We could have set up
some kind of detailed course manual, reminiscent of the “Easy Hobbi-
Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions” over which Dylan
Thomas (1954, 1959, p. 13) sighs in A Child’s Christmas in Wales: “O easy
for Leonardo.” But we didn’t.
Our response was to tell students this truth. Learning and teaching with
technology is hard, it can be overwhelming, and the field is always chang-
ing. The way in which preservice teachers reacted to the ICT Program of
Studies and building web pages is much like the reaction of many class-
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room teachers and faculty members when they grapple with how to integrate
technology and the curriculum. It is also the way that experienced technolo-
gy users venture into an area that is unfamiliar to them. Because the field is
changing so quickly, everyone is in some sense a beginner. And everyone
has exactly the same starting place—where they are, at the moment. While
where you are will change with experience and the acquisition of skills and
knowledge, there will always be new skills, new knowledge, and new starting
places for us all.
It was also important for our students to understand that teaching and
learning with technology is much more than dividing up the supposed chore
of integrating technology by “teaming” with the computer teacher. We
resisted the image of classes of children taking field trips to the computer
lab to learn software applications that they would subsequently apply in
core subject areas under the supervision of their classroom teacher. Nor, we
told our students, is technology integration a matter of content teachers
providing fodder for computer classes: “Here, my students will write their
Hamlet essays in class, and come to your Info Pro to word process them.”
What we supported instead was a robust experience of learning to think with
technology within the context of a meaningful and challenging task. What
the students thought about, and how they used digital tools to do that
thinking became inextricably bound up together. They began at once to do
authentic work with us—work that led to deepening understandings of the
relationships between tools and content, design and publication as the work
developed. While our students began publishing almost at once, they did
not create electronic fridge magnets that pinned down thinking they had
done elsewhere in handwritten journals. Nor did they word process their
reflections and observations to be handed in to the teacher. Instead, publish-
ing their coursework and reflections on a web server became a public
commitment to a professional community. Thus, the act of designing,
creating and publishing their working website became an integral part of
their thinking about the reflexive relationships among teaching, learning
and technology.
Some students had created web pages before, and set to designing their web
site at once. Others worked with us to learn how use the template and how
to upload their finished sites to the university server. Each time a new site
went up, there were whoops and squeals and broad grins of pure delight.
Students felt the special rush of seeing their own work on the Web. They
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were like parents with a newborn—even though some of the initial sites were
a little plain and a bit wrinkled, they were beautiful to their creators. Our
students were proud of themselves, and we were delighted, too. But
something quite unexpected happened with those pages throughout the
course of the seminar. We were content to have those early, functional sites
to house each student’s work, but they, themselves, were not content to stop
there. As they gained new knowledge and skills, they kept going back and
redesigning their websites, and adding new pages. And each time, their sites
became new and exciting all over again.
One student dissolved after our first class, certain that her complete lack of
technology experience would make it impossible for her to achieve any
kind of success. She ended the year not only proficient in a wide range of
technology skills unimaginable to her at the start, but also confident in her
own ability to design engaging inquiries for students. She joined three other
students who requested placements together in a school where teachers
were working on new approaches to teaching with technology. We came to
call this group “The Roadies,” because they wanted this particular school
because it required a full hour’s drive each way from the city, and they
knew they would use the time to plan and talk as professionals together.
One of the first things this group did was, in fact, to critique one of the
focused tasks to which we had linked them online. While the presentation
of this task was smooth and very entertaining, The Roadies felt that the
content was shallow and the game-like structure of the simulation too easy
to navigate without actually learning anything. Borrowing ideas from the
task they liked, they set about to design something they felt was more
worthwhile, and then they planned to roll this new version of the task into
the integrated unit of study they later developed together. Knowing that
they had then two solid months to create a coherent study, the set to work
with a will to develop the kinds of technological fluencies that would help
them enact what they imagined to be possible.
Several of our students talked about being inspired into a culture of use
which is different in kind than the application focus of many preservice
courses in IT. We concentrated on just-in-time, not just-in-case, instruction
with technology applications.
We discovered through our own direct experience a fundamental truth we
had only known in our minds: when you begin to think differently about
technology and learning, and you have different spaces in which to learn
374
and teach, you can design different approaches to learning. If your basic
assumption is that everyone needs to learn the same technology skills at the
same time before they can do anything meaningful with them, then a
computer lab scenario makes sense. You can have workshops, lessons, and
skill-building sessions on how to manipulate a word processor, use a
spreadsheet, or build a web page. However, when the teaching space itself
is more fluid, new possibilities emerge. We were able to introduce mean-
ingful, challenging, and multidisciplinary tasks that posed complex and
meaningful learning problems, and enabled a host of possible solutions. In
the context of these tasks, the three of us coached and guided individuals
and groups of students to design creative solutions, and to acquire the skills
and competencies they needed to solve their problem in the way they
wanted to approach the task. The tasks were large enough that no one
student could complete them by themselves. The tasks required preservice
teachers to draw upon their multiple and diverse perspectives, and to share
emerging expertise with the technology.
Our approach challenges notions that constructionist classrooms are loose
and unstructured. The just-in-time approach was a thread that ran through
everything we did. It was flexible, generative and responsive—everything
we did as instructors, and everything we talked about was in response to
student queries and needs. The complex and multifaceted relationships we
built between and among our students and ourselves also challenges current
images of good teaching as a move from “sage on the stage to guide on the
side.” This image, while generous in its impulse to suggest that teachers
adopt a more facilitative stance, understates the actual complexity of
teaching. There are times when the teacher actually does provide informa-
tion and content; there are times when the teacher probes and questions
student thinking. There are times for critique, for coaching, for finding
outside experts when the teacher’s own expertise has reached its limits. In
preparing future teachers to work effectively with technology, it becomes
essential to cultivate a multiplicity of competencies, scholarship, and
dispositions simultaneously.
Collaborative Planning, Design, Implementation, and Evaluation
All of our approaches to using and learning technology in the seminar were
in service of a task, not in service of learning technology for its own sake.
375
Our focused task requirement put the preservice teachers in the position of
the students they were going to teach. They had to actually complete one of
11 focused tasks designed for Kindergarten to Grade-11 students. The tasks
required little prior experience with technology to get started. However,
because of the nature of the tasks, there was no upper limit on the sophisti-
cation of technology use that was possible. Thus, there were steep learning
curves for all students no matter what their starting point. Everybody got to
sweat the same, and all students experienced the value and necessity of
working in teams to build on the strengths and diversity in the group.
Tasks were drawn from the draft Alberta Learning ICT Assessment Toolkit,
from the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) and from teacher sources.
Individuals signed up based on interest in a particular task, and then formed
groups based on their shared objectives. All of the tasks were designed to
be interesting and meaningful, and best, or only, doable through technolo-
gy. Groups were required to create something that really stretched their
thinking both about curriculum and technology. Each task immersed
students in experiencing what technology is good for, and engaged them
deeply with what classroom teachers often face when considering how they
will integrate the ICT program of studies across the curriculum.
The best way to understand the range of issues that surround technology
integration is to dig in and start working with the kinds of tasks one might
actually ask a student to do. The focused task requirement provided a range
of opportunities for preservice teachers to learn how to design and evaluate
challenging and authentic tasks. Groups did not have to design a pretend
task, or create something for pretend students from scratch. Instead, they
learned about Alberta Learning curricular expectations for thinking at the
communicating, inquiring, decision-making, and problem-solving level of
the ICT Program of Studies (2000) by actually doing something that has
been structured for real students. Our students gained first hand experience
with the type of learning we were asking them to create for students. This
understanding contributed to their thinking and development of an integrat-
ed unit of study.
Situating Learning in Authentic, Challenging, and Multidisciplinary Tasks
Planning for engaged student learning (North Central Regional Educational
Laboratory [NCREL], 1995, 2000) and technology integration requires an
376
applied understanding of project, instructional, and task design. To move
beyond the “add on” approach of using spreadsheets or word processing as
ends in themselves, teachers need to think and plan carefully about how to
infuse technology in teaching and learning. Working in small groups,
students collaborated on the design and development of an integrated unit
of study for authentic and meaningful integration of technology into one or
more core curricular area.
Inquiry Project
A major requirement of the fourth semester in the MT Program is that
students engage in an inquiry project that can be a field-oriented research
project at a school or community work place site that integrates theory and
practice. The stewardship of the inquiry project is located in the special
topics seminar. In the course of their Inquiry Project, students engage in
critical inquiry in a systematic and intentional manner, contribute to ongoing
efforts to improve teaching and learning at the field site, and demonstrate
the understandings and skills acquired throughout the first three semesters
of the Master of Teaching program. There is an expectation that the stu-
dents’ work will leave a legacy in the field.
Inquiry projects were designed to immerse preservice teachers in challeng-
ing and multidisciplinary work that made a difference in the present. They
were meant to be real work—not just another way of preparing them to do
something in the future. Responding to a focus on robotics at one elementa-
ry school, one undergraduate student, Rachel, learned how to construct and
program Lego robots alongside Grade 1and 2 students and their teachers.
She had never had any experience with robotics prior to her tenure at the
school. Starting with the youngest children in the school—the Grade 1,
Rachel gained confidence with her new found competencies and growing
understanding of how to guide children in inquiries and how to form the
connections with mandated core curriculum. She bought her own Mind-
storms kit to make robots at home to better understand the complexity of
children’s’ tasks. The momentum in the school grew as children in other
grades wanted to design, build, and program robots. Rachel seized the
opportunity to work with other teachers and children as the study of
robotics extended, rhizome-like into each grade. Weaving together student
questions, mandated core curricula and technology, she lived what it meant
377
to create an engaging inquiry learning environment for students. She
became part of the coaching team and worked with teachers and students
right up to Grade 5. Her pedagogical leadership developed and experienced
teachers depended upon Rachel’s contribution, her insights, and her
creative solutions. She focused her inquiry project, the major research
assignment for the special topic seminar, on documenting and interpreting
her experiences with young children and robotics (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Seminar instructor working with a student teacher and elementary
student on robotics investigations
We cultivated genuine partnerships between students and teachers at all
levels to harness our collective energy on behalf of children. For example,
in the first seminar, one of our students made a difference in his school
through his inquiry project. He chose to investigate networking options that
would leverage the older technology in an inner city school. Frustrated by
the fact that these students did not have the kind of network access that
would be routinely available to middle class students in middle class
neighborhoods, he ended up moving workstations around and stringing
cable himself. He created a network infrastructure that increased opportuni-
ties for student learning with technology that would otherwise not have
been available. His inquiry project focused on exploring issues of network
design, and it also became a treatise on social justice.
378
Creating a Culture of Inquiry Around Technology for Learning
One of the most powerful aspects of our special topics seminar was the
intentional placement of students in enriched field settings for their action
research projects. About a third of the class had the opportunity to work in
schools in which the Galileo Educational Network was providing onsite
support to teachers to design new learning experiences for students through
the effective technology infusion. In most teacher preparation programs,
field placements are more generic: students are matched to schools and
partner teachers mainly according to grade and subject specialty. This
“shotgun” approach to field placements builds on two notions. One is that
the main goal of field placements is to make sure the numbers work out,
given certain broad category matches. It assumes that, essentially, schools
and classrooms are convenient catchments in which preservice teachers can
“practice.” Second, many teacher associations fight targeted placements on
the grounds that all teachers are equally excellent in exactly the same ways.
From such a viewpoint, targeted placements may smack of elitism. That, of
course, is not at all our experience. We did not target “good” or “better”
schools and teachers. Instead, we asked ourselves this: “What energies can
we leverage if we place preservice teachers committed to developing their
ability to infuse technology into teaching and learning with experienced
teachers who are also intentionally pursuing their own professional growth
in this area?” With only three and one half months with the students we
knew that we could maximize the impact of their oncampus work by
deliberately seeking out field placements where the infusion of technology
was also a priority.
Reflection on Professional Development and Growth
It is an Alberta Learning requirement that all certified Alberta teachers
complete an annual professional growth plan. The teacher’s plan must
include goals, strategies, and evaluation. It is reviewed twice a year by either
the principal or a designated review body made up of the teacher’s col-
leagues and peers. Teachers are expected to consider the Teacher Quality
Standard (Alberta Learning, 1996), their school division’s goals and plans,
and their own school’s improvement plan when developing their profes-
sional growth plans. While plans of such detail were not appropriate in a
special topics seminar, we did reinforce the experience of our students
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throughout the whole MT program: the importance of cultivating reflective
habits of mind about professional practice. To that end, our students
prepared a professional growth plan throughout the seminar that included
three self-assessments. They published these as part of their web-based,
electronic portfolio.
WHY DID THIS SEMINAR WORK?
First, how do we know it worked? The most significant indicator is the high
caliber of the students’ scholarship. The quality of their work, their think-
ing, and their reflection was exemplary. Each student was able to meet
seminar requirements for curriculum design, planning and carrying out
substantive inquiry, reflection on professional growth, and the acquisition
of technology skills. Students asked us to burn a CD ROM of all the units of
study they created, and the focused tasks on which they had worked. As we
did this, we were struck once again by how much they had learned. From
our perspectives both in staff development and in teaching in the graduate
program at the University of Calgary, we have no hesitation in saying that
each of our students left the class better prepared to infuse technology in
their own classrooms than many experienced teachers. Many tackled
inquiry projects at a level of complexity that approached performance
expectations for graduate work.
Building on Diversity
We believe the exceptional degree of student success and engagement was
an outcome of deliberate design and instructional decisions that were
influenced by our knowledge of the current state of affairs in schools and
on campus. First, the space in the seminar was open enough for all students
to define a place for themselves. We designed the course so that it required
a wide range and diversity of projects. From the first day, our students
learned that it did not matter what grade or subject they were preparing to
teach. We were not concerned about whether or not they had extensive
experience with technology. It was all right to prefer different platforms,
different software, and alternative approaches to tasks than the ones we
suggested. That is, we structured the situation we wanted them to create for
380
their own students. They came to see that their diversity was not a problem
to be overcome, but an essential resource on which we all could draw.
Pedagogical Focus
Second, all aspects of the seminar were centered on pedagogical issues
rather than technology issues. There are two apparently contradictory
consequences of a strong initial focus on technology skills acquisition in the
common kinds of workshops and courses designed for experienced and
preservice teachers new to technology. The first is that participants often
seize on one or two of the applications they first learn to use, assuming that
now the job of integrating technology is taken care of. This enthusiasm is
apparent in how often teachers introduced to planning a technology
enriched experience for students start with statements like this, “I was
thinking of letting kids do PowerPoint
TM
reports on their animal…” Jamie
McKenzie (2000) uses the felicitous phrase “Power Pointlessness” to
describe the careless adoption of an otherwise effective presentation tool as
if it were the be-all and end-all of technology use in the classroom.
The second consequence of an initial focus on skills acquisition is that such
a focus feeds the growing sense of panic that sets in when many of us
squarely face a harsh, but often unspoken reality about technology: no mere
mortal can keep up with the innovations. No one in a classroom is going to
win the race against new hardware, new applications, and new capabilities.
There is always a new version, a new digital device or a new idea coming
down the pike. Another unspoken, but harsh reality of teaching is the deep
and pervasive assumption that somehow, as a teacher, I always have to
know more than my students. I have to be at least one chapter ahead in the
textbook, and I have to know how to use a software application myself
before I teach it to students. Considering the range of applications now
available to students and teachers, and the rate at which new versions are
introduced, it is easy to feel overwhelmed even by finding a starting place.
When preservice students can be convinced to give up the idea that they
need to know this application, and this application, and this application, and
accept that they will never know everything about every piece of software,
they undergo a transformation. Many feel suddenly liberated. They feel a
burden lifted when we say to them,
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Look, there is no way that you will ever be faster, more fluent,
more knowledgeable about what’s out there as technology tools
than all of your students. And you know what—that’s okay. It
actually gives you a whole lot of room to get things happening.
There are some things that the kids will always do better than
you. Let them. And there are important things that they need to
be taught. Your job as a teacher is to design and support the
learning experiences. They don’t know how to do that. You
have to figure out what these applications are good for. The
kids will figure out how to drive them.
Sometimes technology intimidates experienced and preservice teachers and
university faculty. It makes us feel stupid, inept, and somehow at the mercy
of forces we do not understand and cannot control. Teachers sometimes ask
us, “If I start letting the kids use all this technology, what’s happened to my
role as a teacher?” Of course, what they are really asking is what will
happen to me? Do I still have anything of value to offer? Ironically, in our
special topics seminar, identified as focusing on technology integration, we
were able both to raise and to address this very real and important concern.
Confident technology users ourselves, we know that deep understandings of
the character of inquiry-based learning and knowledge construction have
never been more important than they are in digitally rich environments
(Clifford & Friesen, 2001; Jacobsen & Goldman, 2001). It is entirely possible
to do foolish things with powerful tools just because they are there. Our
challenge was to help our preservice teachers develop fluency with teaching
and learning with technology, not just with technology, itself. In one of
those lovely little moments that open up whole worlds to them, one of our
students wrote to us about her experience of reading the Foundations level
of the ICT program of studies, and of hearing us talk about teaching and
learning as the primary focus of the course. “I thought,” she told us, “that
only people who were against technology ever raised questions about
ethics and values and what is worth doing. I was amazed to find it in the
curriculum, and to hear the three of you say critical things, too.”
As our students become aware of the possibilities of both using and not
using technology in their teaching, they developed a sense of their own
agency, their own ability to make their ideas happen. In exactly the sense in
which John Dewey once imagined a curriculum in which students built
things, they set about creating pieces to which they were committed, not
because they were technology tasks, but because they offered real possibili-
ties for children and youth to learn important things about the subjects our
382
students were learning to teach. Encouraged to imagine possibilities, they
developed a level of comfort with saying, “I don’t know how it can be
done, but I know it can be done, and I am going to find out how.” They
sought out help from the three of us, from the faculty of education support
staff, from experts made available to them through the Galileo Educational
Network. Husbands, wives, and roommates were drawn into their circle of
mentors.
It was hard work. For most, there was a huge learning curve, coupled with a
determination to dig in and learn what was needed in service of important
ideas. That is, the culture of inquiry we talked about creating in classrooms
became a living part of the seminar, itself.
Team Teaching
We, ourselves, worked collaboratively with one another and with the
support staff who were available to assist our students. The course was
enacted through the genuine collaboration that was required to get complex
things done. We depended on our own collaborative efforts, and we valued
and encouraged opportunities for students to access one another’s expertise.
This collaboration extended to the field placements, and the students
contributed to, and benefited from, the diversity among teaching staff as
well. In a world in which we know we must prepare students to work
effectively in teams both to define and to solve problems in ambiguous
situations, teacher isolation is a terrible problem.
The culture of schooling makes it very difficult for teachers to form strong
work teams. As part of helping preservice teachers both experience and
understand the power of collegial support, we forced our students to
become interdependent; “force” being both an extremely strong and a
particularly accurate word. There was no way that any student could meet
the demands of the course alone. They sought out one another, and they
had to negotiate all the ordinary troubles of working together as part of their
learning. We also made conversations about “grouping” part of the dis-
course of the class. Many were surprised, for example, that we required
them to choose a focused task based on interest. We suggested that groups
larger than four sometimes became unmanageable, but did not require them
to have any specific number in the group. We didn’t force all groups to be
383
equal in size. We didn’t try to sort them out by ability, nor did we say
anything about working or not working with friends. When it turned out
that no one signed up to do one of the tasks we had designed, we did not
break up other groups to cover it. Nor did we get upset when 10 groups
wanted to do the Travel Agent task. As they experienced intentional
pedagogy around grouping to accomplish a task, they had new questions to
ask about how this would work out with children.
What Are We Thinking About Doing Differently Next Time?
Ironically, given all that we have said about the intentional focus on
pedagogy rather than the technology itself, one of the first worrisome things
we discussed about the tasks and units that students created was how few of
them build spreadsheets and data bases into their work. It is not that we
wanted to be able to “check off” these applications from some sort of
preformed list of to-do’s and content to cover. Rather, we realized how little
experience most of us have with the kinds of thinking that these tools make
possible.
Spreadsheets are a standard feature of any integrated software package, and
have been for decades, but they are shockingly underused in classrooms.
They are good for exploring relationships between variables and properties,
forecasting, reckoning probabilities, and sharing data online (Clifford &
Friesen, 2001). There is a world of powerful information readily available to
students in both the physical and social sciences. A pedagogical use of
spreadsheets would allow students to concentrate on analysis and interpre-
tation—that is, on real thinking—rather than on performing repetitive
calculations, setting up tables or making charts. Thinking with data rather
than simply practicing the use of the software application lets students try
out strategies, revise hypotheses and ask and receive instant feedback to
the powerful question, “What if?”
Databases are good for helping students to organize and search for all sorts
of information: text, pictures, sounds, videos, and references to other
sources that contain more information (Clifford & Friesen, in press).
Databases allow students to create knowledge by working with information,
not just memorizing it. Using databases, they can look for commonalities
and differences among groups or classes of things, analyze relationships,
384
identify and interpret trends and patterns, test and refine hypotheses, and
organize and share information. For databases to be really powerful
intellectual tools, students need to be involved in every aspect of their
construction. They need to debate and determine the categories, or fields,
decide what data will count, and collect information effectively to populate
the categories. All of this involves coming to terms with fundamental
structures and ideas in the topic or discipline they are studying.
We think it is important for preservice teachers to know about and experi-
ence first hand, the power of spreadsheets and databases. Thus, we need to
think some more about how to introduce preservice teachers to the use of
spreadsheets and databases as thinking tools, and not just “how to’s”
about setting them up. Can we design a meaningful requirement so our
students need to use these tools, perhaps in the way that we established the
requirement that they design, construct, and upload an e-portfolio to get all
the work of the course done?
We decry workshops as a starting point for teachers and faculty members
when they begin to think about infusing technology throughout their
curriculum. That is not to say, however, that we think workshops per se are
unhelpful. We offered structured instruction on “how to” use specific tools
throughout the course. Once students knew that they needed specific tools,
they had a real need to learn how to get started with them, or how to locate
and use advanced features. Our students found these sessions helpful, and
wanted more. Scheduling appropriate and timely workshops amidst all the
other activity of the seminar is a real challenge, one that we want to meet
even more effectively in the future. We know that the solution to this
problem will lie in becoming a more effective team with faculty support
services.
Another priority will be to secure technologically-enabled field placements
for all preservice teachers in the special topics seminar, and ultimately, for
all 800 students in the teacher preparation program. Experienced teachers
are looking towards new graduates for competency and leadership in the
area of technology integration. However, there is a disturbing disconnect
between the inquiry-based approach that preservice teachers are beginning
to learn with on campus, and what they often encounter in schools. In their
preservice program, new teachers have to be learning in enabled environ-
ments on campus and in the schools. They need to be placed with classroom
teachers who are themselves being supported in making the often difficult
385
changes to conventional practice that technology demands and requires.
Deliberate and considered attention to how preservice and classroom
teachers are matched will require that universities, schools, and professional
developers work more closely than they have in the past.
Finally, we will search for additional ways to showcase the range and
quality of student work. In our first run at the seminar, we made student
projects available online through their portfolios, but we did not encourage
or require everyone in the class to engage with their peers’ work. The
second time, we built peer assessment into each task, so there was a
significant amount of class time available to see and respond to each other’s
work, and to talk about strengths and weaknesses. Encouraged by the class,
we produced a CD ROM for students to purchase at the end of the course.
Each student gave us permission to include parts or all of their work.
Anyone who then wished a permanent record of what they had accom-
plished could carry away ideas and examples of good work. We have
shared this class portfolio with others interested in issues of teacher
preparation, and the results are always the same: people are astounded at
how much can be accomplished in a very short time. We think others
outside the immediate circle of interest in technology also need to see what
teaching and learning with technology can look like. We will encourage more
of our students to frame their inquiry projects with a view to possible
publication, and we will consider how we can use some of the technology
tools available to us to share their work more widely.
CONCLUSIONS
A deep commitment to the principles that pervade the entire Masters of
Teaching program at the University of Calgary guided the creation of our
special topics learning environment. We opened spaces in which preservice
teachers used ICT fluently for personal productivity in the creation and
maintenance of professional documents. Preservice teachers developed an
understanding of Alberta Learning’s (2000) ICT Program of Studies, and
discussed the implications for learning and teaching in their discipline/grade
level and for their own professional growth plans. Students were articulate
in describing the ways that technology had influenced their own learning
and in describing the ways they had seen technology play a role in others’
teaching and learning. In groups, and as individuals, students wrote,
communicated, made decisions, and conducted inquiry smoothly and
effectively using technological aids if and when these technologies contrib-
386
uted to those processes. Students intelligently questioned uses of ICT and
were appropriately skeptical about naive enthusiasms and overly simple
“solutions.” In the context of focused tasks and integrated units of study
that they created, students discussed the strengths and weaknesses of ICT in
a wide range of applications. They moved beyond being mere proponents
of ICT usage, or already-hardened skeptics, and became thoughtful profes-
sionals who choose tools appropriate for the tasks they needed to accom-
plish. Students developed an informed personal position on ICT use in
education and articulated and defended that position with each other.
In the school placements, preservice teachers encouraged their students
both to actively question the place of ICT in their learning and to make
responsible use of ICT in their own work. They developed an understanding
of technology and its uses in learning and teaching that supports the
pedagogic responsibility to foster students’ development of understanding
and meaningful learning. In the context of their own creative work, preser-
vice students understood and developed ethical dispositions and practices in
relation to the uses of technology in the classroom, and to encourage the
uses of technology in ethical and pedagogically sound ways. They devel-
oped a capacity for critical inquiry and became ongoing learners in the
applications of technology in learning and teaching, essential dispositions
given the rapid pace at which information technologies are transforming our
world.
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Acknowledgements
The authors appreciate and thank the education students in two sections of our
special topics seminar, many of whom are currently making a difference in chil-
dren’s lives as classroom teachers.
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Michele Jacobsen
University of Calgary
Calgary, Canada
dmjacobs@ucalgary.ca
Pat Clifford and Sharon Friesen
Galileo Educational Network, Canada
Contact Information:
