Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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302 O. Erstad
‘dialogue conferences’, where teachers met and discussed their own change processes,
and related these to others. One teacher describes his experiences of this in
the following way:
To be able to look at yourself at a distance makes it clearer what you are
actually doing. When you at the same time get comments, questions and
ideas from others in the same situation, it forces you to reflect on your own
everyday experiences in the classroom, and through that process you get more
conscious about what, why and how.
Many of these discussions are about the teacher’s own conception of their own roles
and the changes they go through. This relates to many aspects of the institution of
school, where new technologies is one aspect. However, we see that schools that do
not look into their institutional practices have more problems of how they define
the educational purposes of using ICT in their teaching, and thereby not creating
a space for digital literacy to develop, because it is not seen as embedded in their
social practices and then easily becomes just a technology they try to master.
Teachers and ICT in educational practice
From these overall considerations and results I now turn to how the teachers
relate to the changing circumstances of technology- rich learning environments.
This has been an important part of the project since how the teachers relate to
ICT is a key element for the implications ICT might have on literacy and learning.
As with many other change processes in schools we see that groups of teachers
handle change processes related to the introduction of ICT in different ways. It is
an ‘object’ that brings something new into the school culture. Almost all schools
experience a divide within their school community as a consequence of this. As
one teacher states:
PILOT has created negative consequences internally in the community of
teachers because some teachers have huge problems in managing using ICT.
We have sort of two parts of the teacher community, those who can master
the machines in a reasonable way and those who cannot . . . It is a sore feeling
among some and I think they feel more unsuccessful after the project
than before.
The expectations in the project, of increased educational use of ICT among teachers
in their practices, created situations like this teacher describes. As we see from this
school there is an increase in the division between the ones that master the technology
and the ones that do not, which creates different feelings about their own
success. The intervention made in the school community and the stated objective
of looking more closely at the educational use of ICT in the classrooms, made it
evident that teachers defined their own situation in this context in different ways.