Key Questions
What do artifacts with the purpose of teaching specific concepts, skills, or ideas look like?
Examples in Reviewed Articles
Technologies in the realm of Lesson are the most narrowly applicable of all kinds of educational technology. They are always specific structures (a course, an exercise, a presentation) intended to be applied for a specific purpose at a specific time and place. They address the key question, What do artifacts with the purpose of teaching specific concepts, skills, or ideas look like?, by their very existence: a math exercise is itself an artifact for teaching the math concept it is designed to teach.
Though critical pedagogies tend to reject the wholesale transference of Lesson tools (such as worksheets and exercise books), they are still commonly described in texts. Often, however, these descriptions serve purposes other than the transference of the Lesson artifact: they highlight frameworks or heuristics for its construction, thus supporting tools of Methodology, or they serve as documentation of things tried in the past, thus serving as tools of Research. It is no surprise, then, that Kincheloe’s concepts do not directly address any particular lesson, as doing so would be prescriptive and defeat the purpose of the rest of his points. In analyzing how the reviewed authors write about Lesson artifacts, I am interested in what other tools they inform and are informed by, rather than in piecing out how and why they worked in the time and place they were created.
Analysis of reviewed articles
Blikstein (2008) derives his Lesson tools from active Research, creating and adapting activities based on the observed interests of his students. Because of his constructivist ideas of Learning, his Lesson tools are entirely artifact based: for his documentarian students, the purpose is to learn to leverage the technology to better observe and influence their world, but the artifact used to do that is only the camera itself. Everything else emerges from placing the device in their hands. Then, the author abstracts a Methodology based on this active Research process from observing these Lessons emerging by themselves.
Though McLean (2020) and Elsasser and Irvine (1987) provide examples of how their Lessons are derived from the emerging concerns of their students, they are less interested in highlighting the continuous Research process and more concerned with how Context tools determine the way Lessons are constructed in each instance. As their students’ environment evolves, so do their class activities and discussions, for Elsasser and Irvine changing throughout the course, and for McLean year after year.
Frankenstein (1987), meanwhile, pursues a mixed path between the emergent concerns of her students and her own Methodology considerations. While the individual topics examined arise from students’ lives, the skills based math curriculum is preordained, as is the general structure of her course with its focus on the dialectical use of tools and addressing math anxiety. She chooses instead to highlight the process of constructing Lessons derived from Methodology derived from Theory. In the appendix to her article, she delves in detail into how the approach informs the final artifact, further underlining how her practicce relies first and foremost on Methodological tools to construct individual Lessons. Zimmet (1987) follows a similar path, determining the topic of her Lessons from the concerns of her students, yet drawing structure and meaning from Methodology tools. Again, her Lessons illustrate a complex integration of the two sources, while highlighting how she is creating structure, rather than letting experiences emerge on their own.
For Fasching-Varner et al. (2020), the interplay between contextual emergence and design based on Theory is a central concern. Like Frankenstein, they derive the basic structure of their Lessons from a grounding in Theory. Yet, like McLean and Blikstein, they consider the Lesson to be fully emergent. Their program structure is controlled, but the students are left free within that structure, and Learning happens experientially.
Finally, for Sagaram (2020) Lessons flow directly from Methodology, with little consideration for the emergent experiences of her students. Crucially, her Methodology is already actively informed by an analysis of Context, and so it is imbued with a rich understanding of how environmental factors such as culture and socioeconomic status affect the learning of her students. However, the connection is never made directly from Context to Lesson, which serves to highlight the particular emphasis that Sagaram places on the structuring effects of her Methodology tools.