Teachers, pedagogy and professional development - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 85

Metaphors for capturing the complexities of the contemporary
educational landscape
Metaphors, like models, enable us to better understand complex situations and proc-
esses. To this end, in education an 'ecological' metaphor has been developed. In an
ecological perspective of pedagogic adaptation and change, Davis (2008) argues there
is a diversity of factors that impact upon a practitioner's use of technology. These are
'envisioned in layers that frame the classroom as nested within the school, local area,
region, and the global biosphere of education' (Davis 2008: 2). From understanding
the different factors at each of these levels in a multidimensional model, we come
to understand teachers' use of technology as addressing a practitioner's concerns
at the time. From Hammond et al.'s (2009) research we understand those concerns
to involve teacher's beliefs about learning and how technology interacts with the
learning process.
It is important that this ecology model should be understood as describing a
dynamic and fluid process, which allows conceptual clarity while being not necessar-
ily stable, but rather shifting and changing to accommodate multiple tensions. It is
crucial to keep movement in play in relation to the tensions and contradictions that
are inevitably inherent within such complex systems so as to move towards resolu-
tions of these tensions or what are competing priorities. For example, at the macro
level, a change of government will most likely lead to change in education policy,
and at a micro level, a teacher's need to maintain behaviour in a classroom alongside
ensuring attainment and learning outcomes, can present as a range of competing pri-
orities. Teachers' evolutionary 'adaptations' are between the external pressures (gov-
ernment policy and curriculum directives), local contextual pressures (school needs)
and teachers' preferred practice (classroom context).
Having outlined the political pressures shaping teachers' practice, specifically the
demands of an audit culture, which prioritize public performance indicators (external
exams), the contemporary background context to teachers work needs to be appro-
priately understood. The next set of questions is:
· How do teachers develop their professional practice?
· How do teachers come to incorporate technology into their pedagogy, that
is, their set of preferred teaching and learning strategies? This is of particular
importance if technology is not a preferred strategy.
As Fullan (1982: 256) perceptively observes, 'educational change involves learning
how to do something new. It is for this reason that if any single factor is crucial to
change, it is professional development.'
Teachers' professional development
There are complex obstacles which teachers face in experiencing ownership of edu-
cational change, such as using new technologies for learning and teaching. Critically,
as Bell and Gilbert (1994: 493) argue, 'teacher development can be viewed as teachers