Object Lessons:
Critical Visions of
Educational Technology[i]
Suzanne de
Castell, Simon Fraser University
Mary
Bryson, University of British Columbia
Jennifer Jenson,
York University
The rapidly evolving landscape of higher
education has changed the way institutions of higher learning must think using
computing technology'.As creators of the course management system used by
the largest, most advanced, and most diverse base of institutions and students
today, WebCT is uniquely positioned to develop and deliver technology that
helps institutions achieve these goals'WebCT Cobalt, our next generation
e-learning platform, will be the first educational solution to combine course
management with state-of-the art application architecture and customer
relationship management technology, and the first such system, to deliver
significant benefits to students, instructors, administrators, and CIO's.
WebCT: Leveraging
Technology to Transform the Educational Experience. (June, 2001)
Universities are not simply undergoing a technological
transformation. Beneath that change and camouflaged by it, lies another: the
commercialization of higher education. For here as elsewhere technology is but
a vehicle and a disarming disguise.
David Noble: Digital
Diploma Mills: The automation of higher education.
The stage upon which are
enacted contemporary debates concerning the significance and proper deployment
of educational technologies is populated with a familiar set of characters
- the concerned parent, the enthusiastic child, the harried teacher, the bewildered
administrator, and the miracle worker. Within the high-stakes context of the
current imperative to "Get Connected, and Share in the Dream", the
implementation of new information technologies, miracle workers occupy an
apparently facilitative and enabling role as expert cultural
interpreters of what Mark
Poster as dubbed, the "Second Media Age".
In the early days of educational
computing, the miracle workers'
yellow brick road was paved by techno-gurus like Seymour
Papert (the classic text is Mindstorms (Papert, 1980) - who created a
digital artifact - LOGO - around whom, like a campfire, members of a fervent
group of users sang the praises of that particular solution for the day's
.com challenge to education - the integration of digital tools into the resiliently
analogue environment of the typical public school. In the current climate,
miracle workers, conversant in a digital Newspeak (Orwell, 1987), peddle a
discourse peppered with buzzwords, such as: 'E-solutions', 'information
societies', 'personalization', 'pipelines',
'connectivity', and learning content management'. The miracle
worker appears like a mirage ' just-in-time assistance to get out of
the mire that typically follows in the frenzy that is produced by the imposition
of technological change on a massive scale. Miracle workers are often located
in universities, and take the form of 'high-flyer' academics with
branded and quasi entrepreneurial mega-projects and high-profile revenue-generating
products (e.g., Canada's TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence,
http://www.telelearn.ca/g_access/news.html),
whose impressive resources open doors to schools and/or communities caught
up in the frenzy to "Leverage technology to transform the educational
experience" (WebCT, 2001).
Alarmist rhetoric, reminiscent
of earlier debates about the so-called "literacy crisis" (see Graff,
1988), survives today in a wide range of educational policy documents (see,
for example, WebCT, 2001) and promotional
materials that urge educators to grapple with the implications of an "explosion
in knowledge, coupled with powerful new communication and information processing
technologies" and, thereby, to promote widespread "technological
literacy". Arguments that enthusiastically promote the widespread implementation
of educational computing typically predict that these technologies will (a)
facilitate and transform teaching processes, and (b) promote significant positive
gains, both academic and vocational, for students.
The obstacles standing
in the way of integration efforts are immense. And so, there is a frenzy of
activity at present dedicated to creating Success Stories with digital technologies
(e.g., "California
Schools Get Hooked").
Consider the following headline (May 21, 2001)
from Wired News:
|
Bringing the Information Super Highway to
the Dirt Road
|
|
Surfing the Net is second nature
to most American schoolchildren these days. But not on the Pala Indian
reservation in Southern California. That's about to change, thanks to a
partnership between Native Americans Indians and researchers at the University
of California at San Diego. The High Performance Wireless
Research and Education Network (HPWREN) team is creating, demonstrating, and
evaluating a high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in a number of
"hard to reach" areas in San Diego county'Located at the foot
of Palomar Mountain in east San Diego county, the Pala Indian reservation is
home to 600 tribal members including more than 150 children who attend
elementary school on the reservation. Until last month, the tribe could only
dream of access to high-speed Internet connectivity... |
Success stories like the one above equate integration
with materiality, that is with the acquisition of hardware and software (i.e.
"connectivity"). Integration in each of the following contexts,
however, is accomplished very differently discursively despite like-minded
exhortations and proclamations. Consider these two rather divergent views
(cited in Bryson and de Castell, 1998, pp. 542-543 - Available: http://www.shecan.com)
of what bringing digital technologies into a school means:
|
"The most significant impact of technology on education
will come from an extensive transformation of the curriculum and
instructional practices... Technology-based education makes learning more
active and interactive for each student. Technology brings resources to the classroom
that motivate, stimulate, and encourage students. Computers are an integral
part of many of today's jobs, and computer literacy will be even more
essential in the future. Our job is to help learners today to prepare for the
challenges of tomorrow." School District,
District Technology Policy |
|
"It's just simple things that drive me crazy. Like, we
have this lab of new computers and this great paint program, and no mice. Can
you believe it? It's been three months since they delivered those machines, and
no one knows who is responsible for getting the mice. So they sit
there." New Technologies and
the Primary Program Project Teacher |
We know, from our
own small-scale educational technology research, as well as from large-scale
studies carried out in public schools of the actual uses made by teachers
of new information technologies, that the level of implementation of these
new tools has not come close to matching their apparent promise.
In the U.S., Henry Becker
and colleagues recently completed an important national study of teachers
and computer use (Teaching, Learning, and Computing, http://www.crito.uci.edu/tlc/html/tlc_home.html).
The authors report that whereas until recently, teachers' computer use
has been limited by the computer/student ratio, by 1998 the typical school
had one computer for every 6 students enrolled, or about four computers per
classroom if they were actually divided equally among all instructional rooms.
Becker's analysis of the
survey data suggests that at the high school level, the majority of intensive
experiences with computers that students have are in courses outside of the
academic core, and often in computer studies and business education
classes. Becker's results indicate that a majority of teachers across
grades 4 to 12 either do not use computers at all with their students or do so
only occasionally; the "typical" teacher provides students with fewer
than ten opportunities to use computers during a school year.
This apparent and
longstanding lack of success in reaching implementation goals with respect to
uses of digital tools in schools has created a specific niche for the working
of miracles--- the provision of digitally-mediated environments within which to
re-mediate the production of knowledge in educational contexts. Today's
education workers are accorded a special role in the "knowledge
society" - the catch phrase that is driving a significant segment of
activity in the implementation field --- the educator as broker of information.
Within such a context,
the miracle worker's effectiveness is measured by their capacity to spin
narratives of success against all odds by providing tools that appear to
transform students' engagements with information - or, worse, info-tainment.
Moving from a banal reproduction and passive consumption of existing forms, to
a productive and dynamic apprenticeship in a constructivist community of
practice, these romantic narratives about the significant changes that
invariably ensue when a school adopts the miracle worker's platform are the
stock in trade.
It could be argued at
this point that we lack an educational theory of technology (which is not the
same thing as a theory of educational technology, of which we have of course a
number.) The difference between these is that theories of educational
technology take for granted, whether as good or as harmful, the integration of
education and technology; an educational theory of technology, by contrast,
would investigate technology from the standpoint of educational values and
purposes, and with reference to what can be discerned from a study of the
technology as a socially-situated artifact. Such a theory of technology would
offer material grounding to a rethinking of educational epistemology.
Accordingly, an educational theory of technology would seek to articulate
particular machine capabilities with specific epistemic purposes. In order to
learn from our tools, we have also to study them, as well as the context of
their intended use.
We take seriously Ursula
Franklin's (1990) insistence that technology is not only an artifact but
also a system of social practices, but this is not to say that technology
has no relevant artifactual status at all. So while an educational theory
of technology need not be technologically determinist, reading off what can
and should be done in education from purported structural and material features
of the machine, neither can it sensibly be technologically indeterminist,
as if artifactual capacities and limitations were not any kind of consideration
at all.
A potent irony is that, confronting a range of
enormously powerful, radically transformative digital tools, educators have
sought to render their and their students' encounters with and uses of these
transformative tools (a) familiar and (b) comfortable. Take a look, for example,
at an online educational environment, 'HomeRoom', which encourages teachers
to: 'Create customized, skill-specific tests for
your students, aligned to state standards or a specific state test.' (http://www.homeroom.com/educators/scr_assign.asp).
Like an endlessly rehearsed mantra, we hear that what is essential for the
implementation and integration of technology in the classroom is that teachers
should become 'comfortable' using it.
We might well stop a
moment and consider the absurdity of such a demand: we have developed a
powerful means for reshaping human knowledge, communications, educational
structures and relations, epistemic concepts and practices, and have
incalculably increased the amount and kind of information available to ordinary
people worldwide, we have a master code capable of utilizing in one platform
what have for the entire history of our species thus far been irreducibly
different kinds of things--writing and speech, images and sound--every
conceivable form of information can now be combined with every other kind to
create a different form of communication, and what we seek is comfort and
familiarity?
What about novelty,
unprecedented innovation, intellectual challenge, ideological dissent? Why are
these sidelined by familiarity and comfort? How is it even conceivable that the
latter can stand in for the former? Nevertheless this has been education's'
typical response to digital tools. And to that end, lesson plans are devised
and promoted through education 'portals' or templates or programs
and environments are designed by educational technology experts that as nearly
as possible replicate the traditional school-like questions, tasks and
activities that this new technology threatens to replace. Beyond being the
means of its OWN production, how is this use of technology better than a
textbook? How, indeed, is it any different? What has an on-line lesson got to
do with digital tools at all?
Typically, therefore, it
is remarkably traditional content that we deliver by computer, on CD-ROM or via
the web, using few of the tools of the computer or the web beyond their
capacities for display and distribution. This is equivalent to using a high
end, multicapacity, powerful server for typing practice -- another not
unfamiliar school-based practice we would never find in any other context. We
have to begin to see this as no less ridiculous as using a jackhammer to insert
a picture hanger into drywall. From this standpoint we might reconceive
teachers who resist technology less as uninformed Luddites and more as the only
folks capable of seeing the nakedness of the emperor, and honest enough to say
so (an argument that is fully developed in Bryson and de Castell, 1998.)
In trying to develop an
understanding of what technology can do for education, it is important to look
at particularly well-regarded instructional uses of technology in education,
the innovations spotlighted in media celebrations of "technology in the
classroom". Consider here just two genres of prominent and
"successful" computer-supported learning environments: the programmed
instruction package or "integrated learning system" (e.g.,
SuccessMaker, http://www.successmaker.com/)
and the networked E-Learning environment (e.g., WebCT, http://www.webct.com),
where a range of online tools are provided to support both teachers and
learners in a form of activity typically characterized as "collaborative
knowledge-building."
There are a number of
"integrated learning system" software packages available for sale in
schools today. Each utilizes an extensive and sophisticated database to deliver
multi-level use drill and practice software to individual students. The
software also provides individualized error analysis profiles, specifying areas
for remediation and providing instructional tasks that promise to bring the
learner up to the prescribed standards for their grade level in each subject
area. Here is the all-purpose individualized curriculum delivery tool.
These curriculum
delivery tools, however, provide no room for invention and no room for
production. They are systems built for compliance and as such embody no
educational theory: education is reduced to instruction, and the extent of its
theorization consists in these imperatives:
· Deliver
set curriculum
· Meet
set standards
· Evaluate
outcomes based on these pre-established criteria
· Administer
remedial practice where students' work fails to meet these criteria, and above
all
· Track,
record, document.
Online E-learning environments,
like WebCT (see www.webct.com) emphasize
networked communication and integrated course delivery and management tools,
and are represented as a very different kind of technology: a toolkit for
collaborative knowledge-building that explicitly encourages active involvement
in its production on the part both of instructors and students. This technology,
its proponents would argue, DOES embody an educational theory, and it goes
something like this: the systematic development of cognitive and communicative
skills which are constitutive of learner-effectiveness and engagement and,
therefore, directly facilitative of students' educational success. However,
a closer look at WebCT, which is now in use at over 2300 universities and
colleges, reveals that its WYSIWYG interface is intended to make it easy for
instructors to put course content online,
which then makes it possible for educational administrators to reduce face-to-face
instructional time and replace expensive faculty teaching time with 'plug-and-play'
content modules, sessional instructors, and a heavy reliance on machine-scoreable
multiple-choice assessment protocols. One of the more recent additions to
the WebCT toolkit ' the E-Pack ' signals the trajectory that this form of
educational technology is traversing through the rough ground of implementation.
WebCT has partnered with major textbook publishers to create online versions
of high-use texts, eliminating in one easy and seductive step the need for
any faculty involvement in designing university-based courses.
E-Packs make it easy for instructors to start teaching online
without having to create a course from scratch. e-Packs provide instructors
with fully customizable course materials around which to build their courses,
including video animations, sample syllabi, lecture notes, quiz and test banks,
and glossaries are combined with the functionality of WebCT's course management
software. (http://www.webct.com/content/)
Looking more closely, we
see a difference more of degree than of kind between an integrated learning
system's use of large, elaborate data-bases to provide step-by-step programmed
instruction and up-to-date, "on-demand" individual assessment, and an
online E-learning environment that provides instructors with powerful and
integrated 'learning and
content management' tools designed in order to engender mindful
collaborative learners with explicit 'higher-order' cognitive
dispositions and abilities. While the former is more obviously a totally
routinized, content-corrupt, pedagogy-corrupt system to promote and enforce
learner compliance to a fully pre-programmed curricular delivery system, the
latter's fundamental structures are themselves built entirely from
traditional school-knowledge resources and their activity-systems are no less
categorically pre-scripted.
Another respect in which
these celebrated educational technologies are similar is their high cost and
re-location from the sphere of educational research and development to the
high-stakes corporate environment of E-Business.
A question arises for us
at this juncture -- can a different kind of work be done that involves
immersion in a culture of digital technologies, and yet that takes into serious
account the threat of cultural colonization inherent in this brave new world,
even as it produces engagements with these tools. And is it possible to do this
work in a guise distinct from that of the newly hybridized
miracle-worker-entrepreneur?
The advent of
post-structural epistemologies and research traditions has provided a new field
for research endeavors where the aim is no longer to reduce complexity by the
disciplined reinvention of the familiar in a play of simulations, but rather,
to cultivate novelty, to nurture difference, and to inject complexity into its
question in ways that prohibit easy readings or unproblematic interpretation.
Like many who work with
new information technologies and educational settings, our program of research
has been inspired by Donna Haraway's (1991) imperative, best elucidated in
the 'Cyborg
Manifesto', that minorities involve
ourselves with digital tools and delve deeply into the possibilities for creating
new and potent forms of subjectivity in our engagements with the cyber-mediated
world of zeros and ones.
Most educational
technology design and development, we argue, has been predicated on the
uncritical simulation of culturally valued knowledge, roles and practices.
These traditionally imitative practices---thinly veiled be-like-me injunctions
to mimic the cognitive styles and work practices of recognized
'experts', whether in science or research or programming or
literary production, insofar as their modus operandi is simulation, do not
allow for the kinds of parody, irony, or other intentionally transgressive
disruptions, that the evil twin sister of simulation, diss/simulation, or parodic imitation does.
And so we have found it
interesting to think about the scope of a technology-intensive, educationally
oriented invitation to play, to produce, and to diss-simulate expertise -- in
short, a program for the deployment of digital tools used not for replication
and reproduction, but for creation, for authentic, that is, agentive production, for hacking
into the codes of conventional schooling, and introducing viruses into its
well-ordered set of assumptions and structures -- or, as some would put it, to
deploy digital tools in order to engage in "culture-jamming".
Culture
Jamming (see Lasn, 1999) provides an interesting example of a politically
articulate intervention and strategy of representation where agency is evident
in the active contestation of oppressive regimes of truth - and that could
as easily be a description of the research mandate of the first of three projects
we will briefly describe next - to interfere with the construction of and
silences about "the normal" in and out of school.
For the past eight years, we have been working collaboratively with
a group of women in a research collective called GenTech (http://www.shecan.com).
Our focus has been a phenomenon that has received much media attention of
late - it has become commonplace in social science communities in North America
to represent as "problematic" that many girls and women are neither
full, nor even interested, participants in the digital world of the twenty-first
century (find a description of this project at Bryson and de Castell, 1996).
Whereas female students have made impressive gains in some areas like math
and science, girls
and women are staying away in droves from computer-intensive areas of the
curriculum - and of the culture.
"Culture
Jamming" seemed to us to point to one way out of the paralysis that
postmodern theories engender in their ambivalence toward intervention or agency
in research where marginality is the dominant narrative, so in the GenTech
project, we deliberately interfered with the gender order of the masculinist
culture of computing, looking critically at how to overturn the established
order governing relations among girls, tools, and schools.
Axiomatic to GenTech's school-based
intervention work (http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/gentech/sshrcreport2.html)
were the presumptions that:
· Kinds of tool-use, a particular stance in the face
of power tools, and restrictions on access to new tools are easily identifiable
as vital cultural locations where the performances of gender take specific
shapes
· Heteronormative gender performances are overwhelmingly
hegemonic for many women
· Therefore, to queer gender it is essential to interfere with the representation of, as well as actual access to and uses of technology by girls and women.
In this project, we
worked with small groups of girls, who then taught peers and younger girls, who
then trained boys. This was to try to invert the usual power structure of the
culture of school-based computing, in which girls are absent and silent, and
their absence and silence are typically invisible to their teachers. We made
efforts to expand and enrich the community of female experts by inviting
mothers to the school to see, and hopefully to encourage and be encouraged by,
what their daughters were learning. The teachers responded to learning new
technologies predictably: they were apprehensive, already had labeled
themselves as incompetent -- "dumb people click here"-- and at the
same time were visibly excited by and absorbed in the learning, even as they
remained highly skeptical about computers in general, (and for good reasons
that we won't go into here but we describe in detail in a paper on the GenTech
web site called "Teachers as Luddites").
The instruction we
provided to teachers and students was both extremely simple and extremely time
and labour-intensive. We worked intensively with a group of five female
teachers, once a week for a full school year to help them learn basic skills to
facilitate the integration of technology into their curriculum -- something
that none of them had done before. There are thousands upon thousands of
schools, classrooms and teachers who are presently expected and increasingly
required to use new technologies, but if teaching a single teacher requires at
least half a person one day a week for a full year, then clearly that
requirement will simply not be fulfilled, and indeed this is the case today:
there are NO resources available to teachers to do the kind of work we were
doing in the Einstein's Sisters Project. In the hopes of providing some means
of filling the "training gap" we were beginning to understand, we
decided to create a digitally-mediated learning environment entitled, 'Computers for Lunch' (see http://www.computersforlunch.com).
At the end of the
school-based project, we didn't want to just pick up our tools and leave.
We felt an obligation to the people who had worked so hard to make the project
successful, and we well knew that we ourselves were at risk of playing miracle
workers with this project (indeed, and ironically enough, we were
positioned in 2000 as 'miracle workers' with a "pioneer in new
media'' award for the GenTech project from a national women in
technology organization!).
We were very much aware
that our intervention, which looked so good on the surface, was completely
non-scalable and non-sustainable. So our challenge now was to devise a way to
provide instruction and support, not just for 5, but for an unlimited numbers
of teachers at once, after the grant funding had run out and it was no longer
possible for us to be physically present. We wanted Computers
for Lunch to be free, accessible to anyone at anytime, directly
relevant to teachers work with students, and very well scaffolded so as to
preclude "failure"-- an important requirement for novice users. We
wanted to use what we had learned from our years of school-based fieldwork to
design a learning tool that would be scalable and sustainable for this particular -- but nevertheless
highly generalizeable community of elementary school teachers and learners.
This meant that we were
adamantly committed to the use of appropriate technology: we wanted only to use
software teachers would already find on their school computers, and the program
had to be usable in low-tech, poor connectivity contexts, because that is the
state of internet access in most public schools. We wanted streamlined content
that would strip away all the info-bloat instructional sites usually have, and,
very important for a mostly female user-group, which would keep technical
language to a minimum, and would be activity based.
This next stage of our
work involved creating a free, fully accessible, practical resource on-line for
learning essential computer skills in a way that would engage elementary
teachers and their students, and paid particular attention to ways of more
equitably supporting learning by women and girls.
Computers
for Lunch
consists in over 600 interlinked webpages covering seven different kinds of
activities. It is written in html, using dreamweaver and flash animation, and
it also comes in a CD ROM format for schools with no or low connectivity.
The next step has been
to put the tool to use in a range of other kinds of contexts and try to see how
it works, to see, in particular, what kinds of supports novice learners need to
utilize on-line resources, and from that basis, to begin to build a new and
more sophisticated learning tool.
Since the educational
problems of technology (and not, it must be stressed, the problems of
educational technology) are global and mass-scale educational problems, we
would argue strongly that any innovation represented as a solution to these
educational problems must be scalable and accessible.
The consequences of
educators' and particularly educational theorists' failures
seriously to engage with educational questions about technology have had a
devastating impact on both research and practice in this domain. It is neither
correct nor right to distance oneself from the fray, and to assert that one
doesn't use technology: we all use a range of technologies in our
instructional practices. There is of course no obligation to use particular
digital tools, but here is surely an obligation to have a thoughtful and
informed understanding of how one's educational purposes are best served,
and by means of what cultural tools. Why would educators who work, as we here
do, under conditions where computers are ubiquitous, where they represent the
fastest growing career opportunities for graduates, where they are the primary
site of curriculum revision, pedagogical changes, policy formation and
professional development, where computers are used in almost every cultural
context, just say no to technology in our classrooms? Two reasons: time and
resources. Ministries of education everywhere are urging teachers to
"integrate technology into the curriculum" but are providing neither
the time, nor the tools, to do so. What public educational funds as are being
made available, are being disbursed either on hardware, like computers and
scanners and high speed Internet access, or they are being disbursed for the
purchase of rights to use educational software designed less for public
education than for monetary gain, and then marketed to the educational system
as 'educational technologies'.
We argue it is
irresponsible for educational administrators in ministries of education, school
districts and schools to utilize resources provided for integrating
technologies into the curriculum to support what is now a burgeoning corporate
involvement in educational software design, rather than to provide the time and
resources needed to enable teachers and learners to harness the new forms of
intelligence and new functional capabilities of digital tools to participate in
the world of technology as purposeful and capable producers and not merely
consumers of the products of others. The public school today has become the
charitable arm of technology industries, scaffolding and supporting their
growth and development, rather than supporting the technological growth and
development of teachers and learners.
Speaking not of
educational but, more broadly of cultural technologies, Constance Penley and
Andrew Ross (1991) observed in their introduction to Technoculture,
'we
fully recognize that cultural technologies are far from neutral and that they
are the result of social processes and power relations. Like all technologies,
they are ultimately developed in the interests of industrial and corporate
profits, and seldom in the name of greater community participation or creative
autonomy. (p. xii)
In
educational terms, we know that the odds are firmly stacked against
educationally productive uses of technology, and that so called educational technologies
will seldom be developed which actually serve the aims of developing and
supporting a critical, informed and responsible global citizenry. We know that,
"in many cases" as Penley and Ross go on to note, "'the
inbuilt principles of these technologies [both educational and cultural] are
precisely aimed at de-skilling, information gathering, surveillance and the
social management of large populations." However there ARE possibilities
within this environment for knowledge creation and communication that
explicitly seek to promote public educational goals. Because there are also in
these unregulated spaces quite remarkable and historically unprecedented
opportunities for educators and for educational institutions, to re-consider
'business as usual" and to make of public education a better place,
to better ends than its traditional form has nowadays become. For probably a
very short time, digital tools have given the public, a global public, the
possibility of unregulated knowledge-transfer and infinite interpersonal
relationship capabilities. Because of the interpenetration of the market with
these technologies--technology as the proverbial Trojan horse--there exists
tremendous pressure on public education to reorganize itself along business
lines. This has wrought, for the integration of technology into education, a
frenzy of simulation, of which this is only one example:
As photo opportunities go, this one was perfect. Except it was mostly a sham. While their husbands talked affairs of state in the Oval Office, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Aline Chretien ventured into a poor, black neighborhood [Burrville] where, through the wonders of technology, they watched the students of twinned schools in Washington and Ottawa share their hopes on a live, audio-visual Internet hookup. But soon the screens would go blank and be carted away, leaving Burrville's students taking turns on their single slow computer before the Chretiens finish[ed] their state visit today.
The Globe and Mail, 1997
Educational research thus
far may not have told us much of use, but it has surely made apparent to anyone
with eyes to see, the partial success of the project of building an educated
public. It is of importance to us in thinking through these ideas to look at
how new technologies--the first in human history capable of addressing a
geographically unlimited public sphere--might yet be deployed in the service of
creating a different and better incarnation of public education.
To see what these might
be, we need to look to our tools.
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[i] An earlier version of this chapter was presented at a meeting of the American Educational Studies Association (2000, Vancouver).