Pedagogy before technology, OK?

Unconditional calls for language teachers to incorporate digital technology into their teaching are common. The reasons that are given are many and typically include the fact that (1) our students are ‘digital natives’ and expect technology to be integrated into their learning, (2) and digital technology is ubiquitous and has so many affordances for learning. Writing on the topic is almost invariably enthusiastic and the general conclusion is that the integration of technology is necessary and essential. Here’s a fairly typical example: digital technology is ‘an essential multisensory extension to the textbook’ (Torben Schmidt and Thomas Strasser in Surkamp & Viebrock, 2018: 221).

 

Teachers who are reluctant or fail to embrace technology are often ‘characterised as technophobic, or too traditional in their teaching style, or reluctant to adopt change’ (Watson, 2001: 253). (It’s those pesky teachers again.)

Claims for the importance of digital technology are often backed up by vague references to research. Michael Carrier, for example, in his introductory chapter to ‘Digital Language Learning and Teaching’ (Carrier et al. 2017: 3) writes that ‘research results […] seem to show conclusively that the use of educational technology adds certain degrees of richness to the learning and teaching process […] at the very least, digital learning seems to provide enhanced motivation for learners’.

Unfortunately, this is simply not true. Neither in language learning / teaching, nor in education more generally, is there any clear evidence of the necessary benefits of introducing educational technology. In the broader context, the ‘PISA analysis of the impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on reading, mathematics, and science (OECD, 2015: 3) in countries heavily invested in educational technology showed mixed effects and “no appreciable improvements”’ (Herodotou et al., 2019). Educational technology can or might  ‘add certain degrees of richness’ or ‘provide enhanced motivation’, but that is not the same as saying that it does or will. The shift from can to will, a piece of modal legerdemain used to advocate for educational technology, is neatly illustrated in a quote from the MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, whose remit is to improve learning and teaching across the university via digital learning: ‘Digital Learning technologies can enable students to grasp concepts more quickly [etc….] Digital technologies will enable this in new and better ways and create possibilities beyond the limits of our current imagination’ (quoted by Carrier, 2017: 1).

Before moving on, here’s another example. The introduction to Li Li’s ‘New Technologies and Language Learning’ (Li, 2017: x) states, with a cautious can, that one of the objectives of the book is ‘to provide examples of how technologies can be used in assisting language education’. In the next paragraph, however, caution is thrown to the wind and we are told, unequivocally, that ‘technology is beneficial for language learning’.

Pedagogy before technology

Examples of gratuitous technology use are not hard to find. Mark Warschauer (who, as the founding director of the Digital Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, could be fairly described as an edtech enthusiast) describes one example: ‘I remember observing a beginners’ French class a number of years ago, the teacher bragged about how engaged the learners were in creating multimedia in French. However, the students were spending most of their time and energy talking with each other in English about how to make PowerPoints, when, as beginning learners, they really needed to be spending time hearing as much French as possible’ (quoted in the Guardian, May 2014).

As a result, no doubt, of having similar experiences, it seems that many people are becoming a little more circumspect in their enthusiasm for edtech. In the same Guardian article as Warschauer’s recollections, Russell Stannard ‘says the trick is to put the pedagogy first, not the technology. “You’ve got to know why you’re using it. Teachers do need to learn to use new technology, but the driving force should always be the pedagogy behind it’. Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney and Mark Pegrum (Hockly et al., 2013: 45) concur: ‘Content and pedagogy come before technology. We must decide on our content and pedagogical aims before determining whether our students should use pens or keyboards, write essays or blogs, or design posters or videos’. And Graham Stanley (2013: 1) in the introduction to his ‘Language Learning With Technology’ states that his ‘book makes a point of putting pedagogy at the forefront of the lesson, which is why content has been organised around specific learning content goals rather than specific technologies’.

But, Axel Krommer, of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, has argued that the principle of ‘pedagogy before technology’ is ‘trivial at best’. In a piece for the Goethe Institute he writes ‘a theory with which everyone agrees and whose opposite no-one believes true is meaningless’, although he adds that it may be useful as ‘an admonitory wake-up call when educational institutions risk being blinded by technological possibilities that cause them to neglect pedagogical principles that should really be taken for granted’. It was this piece that set me thinking more about ‘pedagogy before technology’.

Pedagogy before technology (on condition that there is technology)

Another person to lament the placing of technology before pedagogy is Nik Peachey. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, entitled ‘Technology can sometimes be wasted on English language teaching’, he complains about how teachers are left to sort out how to use technology ‘in a pedagogically effective way, often with very little training or support’. He appears to take it as given that technology is a positive force, and argues that it shouldn’t be wasted. The issue, he says, is that better teacher training is needed so that teachers’ ‘digital literacies’ are improved and to ensure that technological potential is fulfilled.

His position, therefore, cannot really be said to be one of ‘pedagogy before technology’. Like the other writers mentioned above, he comes to the pedagogy through and after an interest in the technology. The educational use of digital technology per se is never seriously questioned. The same holds true for almost the entirety of the world of CALL research.

A Canadian conference ‘Pedagogy b4 Technology’ illustrates my point beautifully.

There are occasional exceptions. A recent example which I found interesting was an article by Herodotou et al (2019), in which the authors take as their starting point a set of OECD educational goals (quality of life, including health, civic engagement, social connections, education, security, life satisfaction and the environment), and then investigate the extent to which a variety of learning approaches (formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with robots, learning with drones, citizen inquiry) – not all of which involve technology – might contribute to the realisation of these goals.

Technology before pedagogy as policy

Some of the high school English teachers I work with have to use tablets in one lesson a week. Some welcome it, some accept it (they can catch up with other duties while the kids are busy with exercises on the tablet), others just roll their eyes at the mention of this policy. In the same school system, English language learning materials can only be bought if they come in digital versions (even if it is the paper versions that are actually used). The digital versions are mostly used for projecting pages onto the IWBs. Meanwhile, budgets and the time available for in-service training have been cut.

Elsewhere, a chain of universities decides that a certain proportion of all courses must be taught online. English language courses, being less prestigious than major subjects, are one of the first to be migrated to platforms. The staff, few of whom have tenure or time to spare, cope as best as they can, with some support from a department head. Training is provided in the mechanics of operating the platform, and, hopefully before too long, more training will become available to optimize the use of the platform for pedagogical purposes. An adequate budget has yet to be agreed.

The reasons why so many educational authorities introduce such policies are, at best, only superficially related to pedagogy. There is a belief, widely held, that technology cannot fail to make things better. In the words of Tony Blair: ‘Technology has revolutionised the way we work and is now set to transform education. Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills’. But there is also the potential of education technology to scale education up (i.e. increase student numbers), to reduce long-term costs, to facilitate accountability, to increase productivity, to restrict the power of teachers (and their unions), and so on.

In such circumstances, which are not uncommon, it seems to me that there are more pressing things to worry about than teachers who are not sufficiently thinking about the pedagogical uses to which they put the technology that they have to use. Working conditions, pay and hours, are all affected by the digitalisation of education. These things do get talked about (see, for example, Walsh, 2019), but only rarely.

Technology as pedagogy

Blended learning, described by Pete Sharma in 2010 as a ‘buzz word’ in ELT, remains a popular pedagogical approach. In a recent article (2019), he enthuses about the possibilities of blended learning, suggesting that teachers should use it all the time: ‘teaching in this new digital age should use the technologies which students meet in their everyday lives, such as the Internet, laptop, smartphone and tablet’. It’s also, he claims, time-efficient, but other pedagogical justifications are scant: ‘some language areas are really suited to be studied outside the classroom. Extensive reading and practising difficult phonemes, for instance’.

Blended learning and digital technology are inseparable. Hockley (2018) explains the spread of blended learning in ELT as being driven primarily by ‘the twin drivers of economics (i.e. lower costs) and increasingly accessible and affordable hardware and software’. It might be nice to believe that ‘it is pedagogy, rather than technology, that should underpin the design of blended learning programmes’ (McCarthy, 2016, back cover), but the technology is the pedagogy here. Precisely how it is used is almost inevitably an afterthought.

Which pedagogy, anyway?

We can talk about putting pedagogy before technology, but this raises the question of which particular pedagogy we want to put in the driving seat. Presumably not all pedagogies are of equal value.

One of the most common uses of digital technology that has been designed specifically for language learning is the IWB- or platform-delivered coursebook and its accompanying digital workbook. We know that a majority of teachers using online coursebook packages direct their students more readily to tasks with clear right / wrong answers (e.g. drag-and-drop or gap-fill grammar exercises) than they do to the forum facilities where communicative language use is possible. Here, technology is merely replicating and, perhaps (because of its ease of use), encouraging established pedagogical practices. The pedagogy precedes the technology, but it’s probably not the best pedagogy in the world. Nor does it make best use of the technology’s potential. Would the affordances of the technology make a better starting point for course design?

Graham Stanley’s book (2013) offers suggestions for using technology for a variety of purposes, ranging from deliberate practice of grammar and vocabulary to ways of facilitating opportunities for skills practice. It’s an eclectic mix, similar to the range of activities on offer in the average coursebook for adults or teenagers. It is pedagogy-neutral in the sense that it does not offer a set of principles of language learning or teaching, and from these derive a set of practices for using the technology. It is a recipe book for using technological tools and, like all recipe books, prioritises activities over principles. I like the book and I don’t intend these comments as criticism. My point is simply that it’s not easy to take pedagogical principles as a starting point. Does the world of ELT even have generally agreed pedagogical principles?

And what is it that we’re teaching?

One final thought … If we consider how learners are likely to be using the English they are learning in their real-world futures, technology will not be far away: reading online, listening to / watching online material, writing and speaking with messaging apps, writing with text, email or Google Docs … If, in designing pedagogical approaches, we wish to include features of authentic language use, it’s hard to see how we can avoid placing technology fairly near the centre of the stage. Technologically-mediated language use is inseparable from pedagogy: one does not precede the other.

Similarly, if we believe that it is part of the English teacher’s job to develop the digital literacy (e.g. Hockly et al., 2013), visual literacy (e.g. Donaghy, 2015) or multimodal literacy of their students – not, incidentally, a belief that I share – then, again, technology cannot be separated from pedagogy.

Pedagogy before technology, OK??

So, I ask myself what precisely it is that people mean when they say that pedagogy should come before technology. The locutionary force, or referential meaning, usually remains unclear: in the absence of a particular pedagogy and particular contexts, what exactly is being said? The illocutionary force, likewise, is difficult to understand in the absence of a particular addressee: is the message only intended for teachers suffering from Everest Syndrome? And the perlocutionary force is equally intriguing: how are people who make the statement positioning themselves, and in relation to which addressee? Along the lines of green-washing and woke-washing, are we sometimes seeing cases of pedagogy-washing?

REFERENCES

Carrier, M., Damerow, R. M. & Bailey, K. M. (2017) Digital Language Learning and Teaching: Research, theory, and practice. New York: Routledge

Donaghy, K. (2015) Film in Action. Peaslake, Surrey: DELTA Publishing

Herodotou, C., Sharples, M., Gaved, M., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Rienties, B., Scanlon, E. & Whitelock, D. (2019) Innovative Pedagogies of the Future: An Evidence-Based Selection. Frontiers in Education, 4 (113)

Hockly, N. (2018) Blended Learning. ELT Journal 72 (1): pp. 97 – 101

Hockly, N., Dudeney, G. & Pegrum, M. (2013) Digital Literacies. Harlow: Pearson

Li, L. (2017) New Technologies and Language Learning. London: Palgrave

McCarthy, M. (Ed.) (2016) The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

OECD (2015) Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection, PISA. Paris: OECD Publishing

Sharma, P. (2010) Blended Learning. ELT Journal, 64 (4): pp. 456 – 458

Sharma, P. (2019) The Complete Guide to Running a Blended Learning Course. Oxford University Press English Language Teaching Global Blog 17 October 2019. Available at: https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2019/10/17/complete-guidagogyde-blended-learning/

Stanley, G. (2013) Language Learning with Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Surkamp, C. & Viebrock, B. (Eds.) (2018) Teaching English as a Foreign Language: An Introduction. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler

Walsh, P. (2019) Precarity. ELT Journal, 73 (4): pp. 459–462

Watson, D. M. (2001) Pedagogy before Technology: Re-thinking the Relationship between ICT and Teaching. Education and Information Technologies 6:4: pp.251–26

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