Since School One is on their spring break this week (which means that I did not have the opportunity to work in the field), I wanted to take a quick break from my regular posting to talk a little bit about role of tools within the space of the classroom. As such, I want to begin by examining what the term “tool” suggests. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “tool” is defined as “a thing (concrete or abstract) with which some operation is performed; a means of effecting something; an instrument.” This definition insinuates that the tool is a separate entity (a “thing”), but as I have found in my fieldwork thus far, what we consider “tools” never exist purely in a vacuum.
My reason for making this point is that the implementation of a one-to-one laptop program at any school (not just School One) requires a rethinking of the function that the laptop serves. In a lot of the material I’ve read, laptops (and consequently, digital tools) are described as mere tools in the classroom that leverage the participatory nature of our present culture. However, the laptop does not necessarily prove just a tool; it integrates itself into the learning and growing that an educative space seeks to demonstrate as exhibited by more “mature” programs. Thus, my question proves to be: why do computers (or any type of technology) seem to enter into the space as a foreign object, subject to harsh criticism?
To answer this question, I turn to the introduction of Elisabeth Ellsworth’s “Teaching Positions”. Ellsworth provides an example wherein she describes the introduction of glassware into her science classroom. When she asked her teacher about what to do with, he replied that “if [she] could think of something [she] wanted to do with [the glassware], [she] could use it” (3). This suggests the viewing of these “tools” as foreign and somehow separate from the curriculum instituted within this particular space. Consequently, this anecdote exhibits the way in which we view tools in the classroom: they are viewed as separate from the classroom space when they are first introduced — they are treated as foreign objects, and as novelties within the established confines of the classroom.
But as glassware has been accepted as part of the construct of the science classroom, I anticipate the laptop becoming an integral part of the classroom (at least at School One). In my opinion, the biggest struggle that any new technology within the classroom faces, proves to be the categorization of it as a “tool”. Thus, the issue is then how to make the process of assimilating a “tool” into the space of the school much smoother? How can we restructure the frameworks at place in the creation of this space to acknowledge the function of the laptop past its categorization as simply a “tool”?
