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COPYRIGHT 2001 Project Innovation (Alabama)
Urban educators can quickly become overwhelmed as they consider how best to integrate educational technology into classroom instruction to support student learning and achievement. While centralized initiatives have led to the installation of infrastructure, hardware and software, strategic planning has lagged behind. Planning that allows for the professional development of teachers so that they may make informed use of these installations remains fragmented and piecemeal at best. Superintendents and principals are struggling with their own issues. Shareholders such as administrators, teachers, parents, vendors, technicians, and even school custodians fight over territory. Too often the person who holds a room key or the person keeping a server password determines who in the end will have access to needed resources. Unfortunately, such poor planning guarantees that students are the losers and will remain in the hinterland of technological innovations and progress. To guarantee access and equity for urban students, we must always take seriously the role of human agency and take responsibility for making informed decisions, including our redefining leadership to include shareholders (teachers, administrators, students, parents, community members) representing multiple perspectives.
Is the journey worth the effort? Sandholtz, Ringstaff, and Dwyer (1997) and others (Fosnot, 1996; Jonassen, 2000; Kahn and Friedman, 1998; McKenzie, 2000; Perkins, 1992) have documented the academic and social advancements students can make as they participate engage in technology-supported curriculum, including: developing higher order thinking competencies they can later transfer across learning problems; learning the processes of decision making and problem solving while they simultaneously master academic content; and, solving increasingly complex problems across the content areas.
Redefining Human Agency and Leadership
Bromley (1998) describes educators who view technology as being able to solve all problems and those who think technology is to be avoided. Both fail to understand the role of human agency:
They attribute too much to the technology itself, treating it as an implacable external force that autonomously drives the rest of society in one direction or another, and not enough to the social context of its use. Such technological determinism ascribes agency to technology rather than to people; it naturalizes technological change, implying inevitability and cloaking the social processes actually accountable for the path taken. The result can be a public sense of resigned acceptance, and a (learned) helplessness in the face of technological change, unless we shift our focus from the technology per se to the surrounding culture (p. 3).
For the majority of schools, restructuring of that culture by school and community members usually requires redefining the meaning of leadership and the assumed meanings of human agency. Lambert, Walker, Zimmerman, Cooper, Gardner, and Slack (1995) redefine leadership, not as traditionally understood as the actions undertaken by an individual, but "as essentially the enabling reciprocal processes among people, [so that] leadership becomes manifest within the relationships in a community, manifest in the spaces, the fields among participants, rather than in a set of behaviors performed by an individual leader" (p. 33). Furthermore, these authors argue:
Leadership is viewed as a reciprocal process among the adults in the school. Purposes and goals develop from among the participants, based upon values, beliefs, and individual and shared experiences. The school functions as a community that is self-motivating and that views the growth of its members as fundamental. There is an emphasis on language as a means for shaping the school culture, conveying commonality of experience, and articulating a joint vision. Shared inquiry is an important activity in problem identification and resolution; participants conduct action research and share findings as a way of improving practice (p. 9, Fig. 1.1).
Also, strategic educational technology planning necessitates that all stakeholders be perceived as potential change agents:
Failure to understand the nature and role of leadership may well be the `missing link' in our change efforts today. When we interpret constructivist leadership to mean the reciprocal relationship toward a common purpose of school, it brings into being a conceptual framework through which we can more clearly understand new change paradigms. Constructivist leadership takes into account the wholeness or ecological nature of community, full participation (including teacher as leader and teacher as change agent), and the momentum and natural undertaking of change (p.56-57).
Lambert et al (1995) suggest four criteria through which we can both support and determine the extent to which we are enabling constructivist leadership by stakeholders:
* Exercising leadership - allowing stakeholders to take opportunities for exercising leadership embedded into the spaces among them;
* Establishing patterns of relationships - supporting interdependence around meaningful and stakeholder defined goals, for example, in action research teams, learning groups, and planning groups;
* Supporting inquiry and the role of information - information gathered both within and without the organization, for example, from professional literature, observations, school-based data, and surveys; and,
* Breaking with old assumptions within contexts of trust, relationships, and self-discovery to consider new ways of teaching and learning.
These four criteria can now be used as a standard against which educational technology planning and implementation is measured and evaluated. These lens also provide a working guide to help us identify and manage complex problems, break them down into manageable components, research the unknowns, and finally design and implement solutions.
Working Toward an Urban Solution: Birth of the Bronx Superintendents' Forum
In this case study, I will present and examine the workings of the Bronx Superintendents' Learning and Leadership Forum and will ask to what extent the Forum has been able to address issues of human agency and leadership.
In April 1997, the Bronx educational technology coordinators from the six community school districts (PreK-8), the high school superintendent's office, and Lehman College of The City University of New York, met to discuss the complex and pressing challenges they faced in their efforts to integrate educational technology into the curriculum. Although the districts and the college had collaborated together on a number of initiatives over the past several years in the major curriculum areas, they had not Previously focused on...
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