Teachers, pedagogy and professional development - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 86

learning, rather than others getting teachers to change. In learning, the teachers were
developing their beliefs and ideas, developing their classroom practice . . .'.
Wright (2001) argues that relearning is at the heart of cultural, rather than cos-
metic, change. As Stenhouse (1975) accurately observed, 'teachers must want to
change: without the willingness of the teacher to participate in the process of restruc-
turing their own knowledge, any legislation will be to varying degrees ineffective or
limited' (Stenhouse, cited in Eckhardt 1995: 155).
Professional development can be understood as: '. . . an ideologically, attitudi-
nally, intellectually and epistemologically based stance on the part of the individual,
in relation to the practice of the profession to which s/he belongs, and which influ-
ences her/his professional practice' (Evans 2002: 130).
However, such a definition looks only at teachers as individuals and not as part
of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991); it is more of an individual
understanding of professional development, as opposed to a socially constructed
understanding of professionalism, as embedded in a community of shared practices.
This is important, as McCormick and Scrimshaw (2001) had criticized the technology
research community for not keeping up to date with recent theories of knowledge
that stress the social dimension of learning. These theories need to be applied to how
teachers learn to incorporate technology pedagogically - specifically, distributed cog-
nition and situated learning.
Evans (2002: 128) argues that the 'knowledge base in the field of teacher develop-
ment is still underdeveloped' and Fullan (1993) noted such an omission regarding an
'inadequately defined knowledge base about teaching' (Fullan 1993: 112), which is a
key obstacle in the evolution of teaching as a profession. In addition, there is insuf-
ficient attention given to the way teachers learn to construct new knowledge through
participation in a 'community of practice' as a joint venture, in education generally
and, specifically with technology (Younie 2007). See Chapter 10 for a further dis-
cussion on how to develop the knowledge base of the teaching profession through
adopting a communal constructivist approach and online community of practice.
Seeing the value of change with technology
If a teacher is convinced that the effort involved in learning new (technology) skills is
not worth the perceived gain, or that the skills will only have a short shelf life, teach-
ers are unlikely to make that effort. This argument is supported by Barnett's (1997)
concept of rationalization, on the part of the teacher who is over-burdened through
competing priorities and must make informed decisions about what they can focus
their time and energy on. Barnett argues that in an era of 'super-complexity' it is not
possible for teachers to do (or know) everything, therefore a rational decision needs
to be made about what can and cannot be done.
Doyle and Ponder (1977) argue similarly when they state that the benefits of
introducing something new (technology) are counter-balanced by the additional
effort required to organize it, which is conceptualized as the 'practicality ethic'. Tagg
(1995) supports this argument by claiming that successful teachers, in particular, will
be unwilling to drop approaches that work for the sake of something new unless