Since it was my main interest to explore how different tools relate to each other within critical pedagogy, I required a framing that would facilitate me piecing out and reconstructing what ideas and artifacts each author is proposing, what they are using them for, and how they inform the further construction of other ideas and artifacts in their work. Thus, I propose the following model to give myself a structure and a vocabulary to explore these relationships and to dissect the concepts that each article is using.
When working with this model, my assumption is that all educational interventions have tools, explicit or implicit, that address all the questions across all the Realms. The key for this project, then, and the reason why I find it interesting to apply it first to critical pedagogy, is to reveal which tools do work on which Realm. Critical pedagogies care about Praxis, conceived as a union of theoretical thought and concrete action, and as such critical authors are more interested in making explicit their tools and in exploring the interrelations between them. Thus, they are the perfect tradition to test the model with, to explore when and where tools are applied to answer specific questions, and to investigate how different tools build upon each other.
The model so far is composed of seven Realms of Application, each determined by one to three key questions, where the technologies that fall within each Realm are those that engage meaningfully with at least one. These are:
- Where does education happen?
- How does the context (physical, cultural, emotional and intellectual) affect the process of education?
- What is education?
- Why do we educate?
- What does it mean to learn?
- How do we learn?
- How and why do we document our evolving technologies and practices?
- How do we connect insight in one realm of application to other realms?
- How do we develop a practice across multiple instances of teaching/learning/designing?
- How do we give structure, purpose or meaning to our practice?
- What do artifacts with the purpose of teaching specific concepts, skills, or ideas look like?
- How do we as teachers facilitate learning?
- How do we apply educational technologies with our students?
It is of fundamental importance to this work that the purpose of the Realms I have proposed is not misunderstood: this is not a typology of the tools of educational technology, and it should never be read as an ontological categorization of the artifacts and ideas explored through it. I have chosen to call them Realms of Application because I want to encourage the reader to think about the work that I am doing here more as an analysis of use rather than of the shape of the tool itself. I am interested in the work that is done with ideas, in how they actively inform each other, and so my emphasis is on how they are deployed rather than how they are. Thus, consider tools as falling within a Realm when they are applied by an author in such a way that the tool works to grapple with one of the key questions of that Realm.
This, of course, allows for the fact that some tools will be multi-purpose and will therefore fall within multiple Realms at the same time. This is not only accepted but intended in the model. The boundaries between where one idea or artifact ends and the next one begins are never clear, as one builds upon the previous to facilitate the next. So, I propose that we desist from drawing arbitrary lines between ideas, and instead focus on the work they do and how this relates to each other. Multi-purpose tools will then be completely acceptable, so long as we can identify this multi-purposeness in the particular: rather than ascribing a generalness to any given idea or artifact, let us analyze how it is used to answer questions across various, specific, Realms.
For the moment, I am refraining from providing an elegant diagram of the model to prevent two key misunderstandings that are hard to remove from a graphic: firstly, the fact that this is not a categorization of technologies. If I draw circles or boxes around each Realm, this would imply that a technology is bounded by falling within any given realm. If I do not draw these boxes, it might then be implied that the realms blend naturally into each other, which is yet to be determined. Secondly, there is the issue of spatial arrangement in a graphic. If I put Research in the middle with all other Realms connected to it, what does that imply about the hierarchy and links of these Realms? It is true that I am interested in exploring these questions, but I do not want to create the impression that there is a specific way in which the Realms connect to each other. Such lines would have to be drawn in the particular, for each educator’s tools, and as such a general graphic would not just be unhelpful, it would be actively misleading.
In constructing this model, I must admit that I have drawn very little from existing sources. This is because, in the field of educational technology, I have so far found no examples of any models being constructed to analyze technologies in a similar way as I am interested in doing so here. This is not to say the do not exist, just that if they do I have yet to encounter them. In the field of critical pedagogy I have also found no examples of any systematic analysis of the tools of the field, other than Kincheloe’s summary that, by his own admission, serves as a condensation of common points rather than as a guide to analyze the myriad approaches critical pedagogy includes. Meanwhile, models from farther afield, like McLuhan and Powers’ (1989) tetrad, are too far away from the understanding of Technology I propose and from the purpose of evaluating educational technologies specifically to be of much value for this project. Thus, I have created my own. It is neither complete nor perfect, and this review is as much an exploration of the model itself as it is of the articles included here.