UCLA

Working from a Critical Race Theory framework, in the article entitled “Educational Technology as Interest Convergence: Who is really served by technology in urban schools?”, I apply the theory of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) to understand the current educational technology landscape in urban schools serving majority Black and Latinx children. Educational technology policy is both morally unconscionable, practically inadequate, and undermining the democratic purpose of public schooling in the service of corporate interests to the detriment of students of color. I argue that technology, similar to the law, is built by fallible humans and cannot be understood or improved without a race conscious perspective (Benjamin, 2019; Nakamura & Chow-White, 2013), especially in urban schools. If teachers are going to attempt to use technology to further their social justice goals, then they need to be aware of the potential negative outcomes that come from relying on interest convergence to drive social transformation. This theoretical paper creates the basis upon which further work can be done to design teacher education contexts which counter the detrimental effects of policies made within the structure of interest convergence while also taking advantage of the historic moment in educational technology for the needs of students and their communities.

Article two entitled “Developing Teacher Candidate Critical Technology Identity in an Urban Teacher Residency” is an analysis of the written work of the teacher candidates involved in the residency program. To design for an educational context in which marginalized youth in urban schools are provided with the space and chance to utilize technologies to transform not only their learning, but also their communities and worlds for a more just future, we can start with understanding how teachers own experiences, identities, and ideologies mediate their learning and vision of technology use in the classroom.

To understand how teachers come to adapt their practices in the classroom which utilize technology, and any changes to that practice we might hope to encourage, we must understand the current identities teachers have already developed around technology use both in and outside of school. In the course of this paper, I focused on the educational histories, goals, and narratives of technological experience to build a framework for how teachers begin their process of learning to teach with technology. We must understand those historical narratives that make up the identities which have been both imposed upon new teachers (digital native, social media obsessed, technology reliant) and those to which they ascribe (gamer, skeptic, efficiency oriented). Those identities are deeply consequential for how they approach technology integration and support in their teacher education programs, in their field placements, and in their own classrooms in the early years of their teaching

Based on the theoretical framing of Article I and the findings of Article II, the third paper entitled “Designing for Complexity: Critical Technology Literacies in Teacher Education” describes four design principles that will be useful for other teacher education programs when designing for critical technology literacies. First, technology courses should encourage playful enactment with the goal of productive failure; meaning that our work should focus on getting teacher candidates comfortable enough with each other and their own histories with technology for them to engage with new digital tools in ‘badly structured’ (Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012) manner with plenty of opportunities to have digital tools fail. The opportunity to have tools fail without catastrophic outcomes in front of their own students helps teachers see creative uses for digital tools rather than static steps to follow – similar to the power of productive failure for learning mathematics. Related to this is the design expectation that personal and professional technology identities mediate what teachers take up from readings and learning activities in the class. Because of the need for playful enactment and complex intersections between identity, classroom context, and digital tool availability, it is important to structure teacher learning around critical practices rather than some particular list of tools. And finally, most importantly, it is necessary to design structures in teacher learning contexts where they are expected to engage with one another in accountable talk to make connections between the digital and social justice realms.