This research will focus on the implications of utilizing technology within the classroom space effectively and efficiently. I plan to situate my research alongside current topics of technology use, policy, and disability studies within secondary schools. The research will evaluate the ways technology has been implemented and updated over the years to determine its best use in the classroom.
Jamie Martinez discusses in, A Performatory Approach to Teaching, Learning, and Technology that technology, besides the desktop computer, has been utilized in the classroom space inefficiently. She argues that teachers receive little to no training making the technology useless and eventually obsolete in the space causing frustration to them and their students. Martinez’s study takes me back to my own experience in class when my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Kohn always seemed to be mid-sentence when she was interrupted by the annoying ‘ding’ of the smart-board alignment screen, forcing her to pause and chick through a series of checks to continue using the touch screen. A piece of technology that was meant to be an attempt at multimodal digital use ended up being a complicating, never-working projector. Contemporary research suggests that disability studies must be considered in the discussion of technology use. P. Karlsson states in, “Stakeholders’ Views of the Introduction of Assistive Technology in the Classroom,” “To enhance the way technology is matched to the student and successfully implemented, classroom teachers need to be fully involved in the whole assistive technology process.” (Karlsson, w.p.). Here, it’s important to note that all current research acknowledges the changing field of education on the broader level—expectations for career readiness, levels of technology, etc., are all changing and need to be considered on the broad view of whole education.
My research will work to determine the ways classroom technology has been used in the past and look towards research such as Stephanie L. Kerchbaum’s, Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference and P. Karlsson’s, “Stakeholders’ Views of the Introduction of Assistive Technology in the Classroom” to discuss how to best utilize it and plan for updates in the future.
Annotated Bibliography
“ADA Reasonable Accommodations for School Employees.” Oregon School Board Association.
2017.
In addition to the requirement of the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which as a federal civil rights law protects individuals with disabilities from discrimination, particularly in places of employment for the purposes of this source, the Oregon School Board Association implements further accommodations. The Oregon Fair Employment Practice Act practices prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability. This website acts as a legal resource, analyzing the details of the “Reasonable Accommodations” for individuals living with disabilities currently employed in Oregon school districts and community colleges. The document discusses when accommodation are/are not required and practices for institutions to avoid liability issues. In addition, it provides examples of cases involving reasonable accommodations and how courts within Oregon jurisdiction have decided those cases. Oregon is a standout state in the U.S. for its choice to further its accountability for accommodation. This website serves as a standard for which other states can model their disability accommodations.
Anonymous. “Teaching/Undergraduate and Graduate Education Symposium: Beyond PowerPoint: Uses of Technology in the Classroom.” Journal of Diary Science, 2010.
The article works to summarize state and national policies concerning the technologies implemented in classroom spaces. It goes on to discuss specific district budgeting in states such as Oregon and Washington to determine the logistics of actually installing technology such as ‘smartboards’ in the classroom space. This document is useful in building a foundation to work from throughout this study. It’s vital to guide my research alongside policy changes over the years—in order for the research to be accurate and useful through more contemporary sources.
Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse University Press. 2013.
In the first book written with Disability Rhetoric as its premise, Jay Timothy Dolmage challenges classical rhetoric, saying that rhetoric, at large, has ignored the body. In his use of Mētis (the rhetorical concept of adaptive intelligence) he embodies rhetoric as being both double and divergent. Rather than approaching rhetoric with logic, metis approaches it from different means, often considered “backwards” or “sideways.” In resisting the cultural idea of normativity, Dolmage gives validity to the different ways in which bodies “speak,” despite some bodies being differently abled. His argument takes a three-step approach: 1) The body is, and always has been, rhetorical, whether as a product or experiment. 2) Rhetoric is always embodied, the body is rhetorical because it communicates and thinks. 3) Disability shapes our rhetoric, because the embodiment of difference is the possibility of meaning. By incorporating Mētis, Dolmage reimagines education as a place of adaptation, change, uniqueness, invention, etc., rather than it’s historical place of accumulation, retention, comprehension, and reproduction.
Karlsson, P, et al. “Stakeholders’ Views of the Introduction of Assistive Technology in the Classroom: How Family-Centered Is Australian Practice for Students with Cerebral Palsy?” Child: Care, Health and Development, 2017.
Karlson’s study works to investigate the approaches used by schools when assistive technology assessments and implementation occurred in the classroom. Compared to similar changes made after the No Child Left Behind Act—Australian schools were required to take their national exams online. This, as researchers know, was a difficult change to implement nationwide. This study looks at the steps taken to educate the teachers running the exams. The study also looked into the services required for students with disabilities to take the exams with the necessary services. Speech pathologists, in particular, are seen to be extremely helpful to students with IEFAs, and need to be required for exam testing but this will not be fully achieved for many years. This study is valued through my research and will serve as a good addition to my own cannon concerning classroom technology.
Kerchbaum, Stephanie L. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference. Conference on College
Composition and Communication. 2014.
In a discussion of the importance of difference within composition classrooms, Kerchbaum discusses the importance of teachers recognizing students’ differences, because the ways in which teachers orient students affects student-teacher relationships and the possibilities for the classroom at large. An attention to flexibility in change is stressed in relationship to the rigidity of classical rhetoric and classroom management. To best learn to communicate across difference, Kerchbaum stresses the importance of always pushing to know more about the Other, while simultaneously understanding that we can never fully know the Other as a “totalized and whole consciousness.” While recognizing that difference in everyday interactions is rarely recognized, productively negotiated, or honestly addressed, it is acknowledged that it is in marking difference that it comes alive. By distinguishing the markers of difference as often being painful, we see the ways in which markers of difference are most obviously present in a writing classroom, where difference is expressed in the vulnerability of writing.
Martinez, Jamie E. A Performatory Approach to Teaching, Learning and Technology, 2011.
https://login.proxybz.lib.montana.edu:3443/connect?session=sLMjVaSJ68dAKBmo&qurl=https%3a%2f%2flink.springer.com%2fcontent%2fpdf%2f10.1007%252F978-94-6091-666-3.pdf
The digital text works to discuss the ways performance is utilized to make the most of classroom spaces and the resources available to the school. Martinez situates her argument in low-income Latino communities. Technological advancements are happening all around us, outside of the classroom, but test scores and overall school effectiveness is declining. TEDtalks, she notes, are full of wonderful ideas and projects that make positive use of children’s fascination with technology. Martinez suggests that’s this is the key, provide students with a base that is driven by their curiosities, then connect them through the technology they use to communities that provide opportunities for them—it’s possible to be in contact with people and ideas from all over the world. Martinez’s text is extremely valuable as I discuss how low-income schools can still provide effective teaching through technology.
