All our truths are, in a sense, fictions- they are stories we choose to believe. Hilary Lawson (1989, p. xxviii)
Both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction...Scientific practice may be considered a kind of story-telling practice- a rule-governed, constrained, historically changing craft of narrating the history of nature. Scientific practice and scientific theories produce and are embedded in particular kinds of stories...Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice in the sense of historically specific practices of interpretation and testimony. Donna Haraway (1989, p. 4)
As "Talking Head" David Byrne tells us in "True Stories", our task at the present time&endash;the 'postmodern project'&endash;is to, in his words, "Stop making sense". This paper is an attempt to do just that. And this, contrary to what one might imagine, is not so easy to do. For the discursive context of research and practice in relation to educational computing is one in which 'sense' is doggedly (even if often contra-factually) made, in which seamless narratives attempt to tell 'true stories' of how and why new technologies are to be harnessed in the service of educational ends, and about the prospects and pitfalls therein.
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, British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1990) that urge educators to grapple with the implications of an "explosion in knowledge, coupled with powerful new communication and information processing technologies" and, therefore, to promote widespread "technological literacy". Arguments that enthusiastically promote the widespread implementation of educational computing typically predict that these technologies will (a) facilitate teaching processes, and (b) promote significant positive gains, both academic and vocational, for students. However, evaluation studies suggest that unreflexive and unabashed optimism about the necessarily transformative nature of new educational technologies is both naive and historically unfounded (see Cuban, 1986).
Historical analyses of documentary evidence from times "when old technologies were new" (Marvin, 1988) suggest that, generally speaking, the implementation of new technologies begins in documentary (or in virtual) reality with wild projections of massive transformation by futurologists and with descriptions of high hopes for the realization of widespread social and economic reform, and end up in actual reality with failed predictions and quashed hopes. It comes as no surprize to discover, then, that the "official" story of the impact of new educational technologies, like film or television, on teachers' practices or on students' accomplishments is a resolutely disappointing one. A similarly resilient gap between predictions and outcomes has routinely been reported in studies of the educational implementations of computers (Cohen, 1987; Cuban, 1986; Ragsdale, 1988). Additionally, sociological studies have documented systematic gender, class, and race inequities in both white collar computer occupations and educational uses of technology (for an excellent summary, see Sutton, 1991).
This paper comes out of an attempt to 'make sense' of the disorienting terrain of educational computing, necessitated by (the first author) having assumed the role of principle co-investigator in a multi-site longitudinal study of the implementation of computers in elementary school classrooms (Bryson, 1993), and discovering, with great dismay, that those accounts and incidents which, to this researcher, appeared to hold out the greatest potential educational benefits often were regarded by teachers and administrators as 'irrelevant', 'impractical', 'too radical', and the like, or as prescribing or constituting 'low level' or 'illegitimate' computer uses.
Like Sheherezade, in the 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights, educational theorists are allowed to extend their livelihood in the "publish or perish" world of the ivory tower by virtue of the degree to which their tales serve valued institutional purposes (Lather, 1990). The analysis offered here, then, construes the discourses of educational research as being made up of an eclectic inventory of tales whose primary purpose is to provide a regulative, or sense-making, technology. Postmodern inversions, deliberate uses of irony, and distortions of chronological linearity aside, these tales prototypically are made up of a predictable range of elements, including: intransigent conflicts (e.g., "Why Johnny still can't read"), laudable intentions (e.g., "We aim for full and eager participation in literacy activities by all children"), persistent obstacles ("low self-esteem hampers girls' performance in mathematics"), notable successes ("LD child composes entire novel on word-processor!"), and a host of central characters (e.g., "the at-risk child" or "the primary teacher") .
It is argued here that, in an ongoing dialogical process of co-construction, university-based researchers' narratives both constitute, and are constituted by, necessarily partial and "interested" accounts generated by teachers, ministry-based education workers, students, and others within the broader educational community. Researchers' accounts about new educational technologies, then, are seen here as a species of 'meta-narrative' which informs and is informed by practitioners' first-order accounts (also construed as 'stories') of the nature and proper function of computer technology in the classroom. Such accounts are given to teachers and, through teachers, to students themselves, in curricular resources and curriculum guides, in the teachers’ guides and publishers manuals accompanying educational software packages, in policy directives, in-service workshops on implementation, in casual conversations among teachers themselves, in teachers' magazines and, not least of course, in the tales told 'out of school' about educational computing. The burgeoning discourses of academic research itself define. then, for educators, and, indirectly for students, the limits and possibilities of computers. Accordingly, they both shape and constrain the ways in which teachers can teach, and learners can learn, using that technology, as well as what and how, researchers can investigate these classroom practices.
In this paper, we describe three kinds of stories that are told about educational computing. Making use of a text-based interpretive strategy (which we have described elsewhere in a meta-textual analysis of the discourses of "gender differences and educational computing"- Bryson & de Castell, in pressa), we argue here that it is productive to analyze stories about educational technologies in terms of how these embedded narratives contribute to the constitution of distinct "textual communities" (Stock, 1983) involving authorized interpreters whose function it is to generate theoretical accounts (and related research strategies and pedagogical practices) whose purpose it is to situate computers appropriately within educational environments. The kinds of stories that are told about educational computing, we suggest, reflect differently ordered sets of assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the purposes of schooling, investments in specific constructions of gender/race/class identity politics, and the scope&endash;and the limits&endash;of computer technology in the classroom. We argue that it is principally the interpretive constraints imposed by these stories, and only secondarily the material capacities and constraints of the technology itself, which differently construct possibilities for pedagogic relations among students, teachers, and educational technologies. It is these stories, then, which preconstruct human subjects&endash;teachers and learners&endash;in terms of their possible relations to the technologies at their disposal, and delimit, accordingly, the prospects such technology holds out for the improvement of educational practice.
On the basis of our ongoing field study, in conjunction with a review of research and 'lay' discussion on the uses and abuses of computer technology in education, we have found it possible (and, we hope, productive) to discriminate three paradigmatic types of accounts, here construed as 'stories' about educational computing. They are, first, the modernist/romantic tale, second, the critical/tragic tale, and third, the postmodern/ironic tale (after Van Maannen, J., 1988 and White, H., 1973). We briefly characterize each of these in turn, then go on to try to specify some ways in which each 'story' shapes in quite different ways what teachers can do, and how students can learn, with computer technology, and how these in turn both shape and constrain what, and how, researchers can study these classroom practices. The paper concludes with some remarks about possible implications for researchers, in particular, with some warnings about how 'making sense' is always in danger of making nonsense of well-meaning attempts to advance educational goals through the implementation of computer technology in the classroom.
A dynamic way of dealing with intellectual abstractions over time, unbounded by the circumstances of any given facts but adaptable to new facts, new data, change. Well-structured problems that would require children to use a variety of computing tools at appropriate place would teach perhaps the most valuable skill of all, which is problem solving. Beyond that, students acquire the confidence to deal with complexity, for even the simplest programs can transform a certain degree of messy, muddy detail into more clearly structured intellectual representations. (McCorduck, 1985, p. 229)
Romantic tales of modernist technicists prescribe "computer literacy" as a necessary rite of passage for youth born into the "information age" &endash; the systematic inculcation of specific skills and dispositions which allow for successful adaptation to the inexorable demands of relentless progress toward a "space-age" society. These tales are here characterized as "romantic" in the sense that their authors demonstrate a consistent, uncritical, and zealous faith in (a) the possibility of accessing, measuring, and manipulating original and organic "truths" about "human nature" and (b) the necessarily salutary role to be played by reason, new technologies, and the technics of the natural sciences in fueling "progress" and thereby resolving significant social and empirical problems and generally improving quality of life. The views of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreibner, former president of the Paris-based World Center for Microcomputer and Human Resources, construct the technicist's vision of the relationship between technology and pedagogy:
The computer is the first intellectual revolution in 500 years. It is bound to transform every aspect of the human endeavor&endash;agriculture, industry, the office, medicine, education. To ignore this revolution is to make oneself irrelevant.... Every characteristic&endash;creativity, imagination, talent&endash;that makes a human being different from a machine can be enhanced by the computer revolution.... [With regard to education], when computer and telecommunications networks are sufficiently developed, the lectures, research, and new findings of important intellectuals and academics can be made available to students around the world. (quoted in Bowers, 1988, p. 117)
Within this view, a shift is posited from investing considerable effort in learning facts and mastering bodies of knowledge to strategically locating up-to-date information as a means to an end&endash;the solution of significant problems&endash;which is seen here as the key mechanism that underlies scientific progress. Educational uses of computers, typically characterized within the technicist's view, as our most powerful information-processing technology, take a center-stage positioning, since the central aim of education, on this view, is to prepare students for effective participation in an economy that trades in "knowledge" and "solutions" as key forms of "cultural capital".
Technicist visions of educational technology present computers as "value-neutral tools" which, however, can become educationally valuable but only insofar as one can distinguish between optimal and sub-optimal implementation and pedagogical strategies. Accordingly, technicist accounts make contrastive use of metaphors such as "boob-tube" vs. "Proteus of machines" (e.g., Papert, 1980) or dichotomies between "drill and practice" vs. "learning environments" (e.g., J.S. Brown, 1985; Shute, Glaser, & Resnick, 1986) in order to privilege as properly 'educational', certain forms of computer-based pedagogical activities, and to relegate others, seen as idle entertainment or 'busy-work', to the margins.
The "boob-tube" metaphor, for instance, constructs a particular kind of educational use of computers which is usually construed as negative since it is supposed to replicate the child's passive assimilation of insignificant or harmful images during televiewing. Drill and practice software, videogames, and computer-automated worksheets are the most common kinds of educational computing relegated to this undesirable category. Most texts on educational computing suggest that teachers avoid relying on this kind of educational software. The "Foundation Document" for the new "Primary Program" in British Columbia (B.C. Ministry of Education, 1990) suggests, for example, that: "Evaluation of software is necessary to ensure that the child is actively engaged in learning and not merely focussing on decontextualized drill and isolated skills" (p. 36).
The "Proteus of machines" metaphor, by contrast, was coined by Seymour Papert, whose LOGO-based research is widely acknowledged to be the most influential amongst technicist computer educators (see Bowers, 1988; Broughton, 1984). "Proteus" refers to the sea god who could change shape depending on the unique exigencies of any given situation. In an elaboration of this metaphor, Papert (1980) wrote that: "The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes" (p. viii).
This view that there exists a privileged form of educational computing presupposes that educationally fruitful and empowering environments can be designed which are responsive to individual differences and which therefore are able to support self-directed, independent, intellectual activity. As Papert (1984) argued: "The computer allows us for the first time to match the subject matter and learning style to the personality type" (p. 425). Technicist metaphors for educational computing are consistent, then, with parallel dualistic notions of "higher-order" or "abstract" vs. "low-level" or "concrete" learning in cognitive-developmental psychology. In educational applications of cognitive-developmental psychology, the goal of pedagogy is to provide instruction which goes beyond training in "basic skills".
Research from cognitive science questions this assumption [about teaching and basic skills] and leads to a quite different view of children's learning and appropriate instruction.... Researchers are developing models of intervention that...provide access to explicit models of thinking in areas that have traditionally been termed "advanced" or "higher order".... Cognitive research on comprehension processes has shown the importance of trying to relate what you read to what you already know, checking to see that your understanding of new information fits with what you have already read, setting up expectations for what is to follow and then seeing whether they've been fulfilled (Means & Knapp, 1990, pp. 1-7)
"Technicist" researchers in educational computing posit a relation between children's acquisition of particular "higher" forms of thinking, such as hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and their engagement with computers in activities like LOGO programming (e.g., Papert, 1980) or word processing (e.g., Joram, Woodruff, Bryson, & Lindsay, 1992). Papert, for example, describes the goal for engagement with computers as "intellectual model building". Hence his focus is on facilitating the attainment of abstract, logico-deductive reasoning as a high priority pedagogical goal. One of the main themes in Papert's characterization of the significance of LOGO programming is that it instantiates a pedagogical approach that is "ego-syntonic", that is, it is in-tune with how children 'naturally' learn. As such, it is supposed to represent an approach to educational computing that is both revolutionary and superior to traditional methods. As Papert (1980) wrote:
In many schools today, the phrase 'computer-aided instruction' means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer.... And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. (pp. 5-19)
It is interesting to note that although Papert's more recent accounts (e.g., Turkle & Papert, 1990) of the role of new technologies in education now include explicit committments to the goals, broadly conceived, of social equity (e.g., the ongoing program of research on LOGO, educational computing, and minority students' learning processes in Project Headlight- an inner-city school in Boston), the investigative methodology continues explicitly to target putative relationships between certain "thinking styles" (exhibited by minority students and women), such as "narrative" or "concrete" thinking and "low levels of educational achievement" (see also Motherwell, 1988).
Other studies reporting actual implementation of the LOGO language reveal that the construal of this kind of educational computing as somehow "natural" or "ego syntonic" is highly problematic. Emihovich and Miller (1988), for example, reported a study where they argue that the instructional value of LOGO in educating children "at risk" for failure in traditional educational contexts was that it enabled them to match minority students so-called "learning styles" with a "suitable" form of computer-based instruction. Following Papert, they suggest that "Ethnic differences are an important determinant of students' learning styles" (p. 474). The purpose of this study was to remediate what the authors construed to be a lack of 'higher-order thinking' in black American children. Citing a report from the Carnegie Corporation, which invokes Shirley Heath's (1986) ethnographic study of variations in the functions and uses of literacy across three Appalachian mill-town communities, the authors write that:
One way for the United States to retain its competitive edge is for children to use a highly prized learning style called metacognitive thinking...minority children from communities like Trackton often lack opportunities to display metacognitive skills.... Programming builds upon the learning strengths of black students, such as high responsiveness to visual and auditory stimuli and desire to collaborate with and pass on information to peers (italics addded for emphasis). By encouraging minority children to talk and share their ideas and to use the "turtle" as a concrete representation of their thinking, a learning environment can be constructed that may make these students more aware of their thought processes. (p. 476)
Stories of this kind, it is to be noted, persistently conceptualize equity issues as questions of psychological 'styles', of individual (albeit perhaps culturally induced) 'differences' in what are called 'thinking styles'. The metaphor of thinking 'style' here takes the contextually variable differences in functions and uses of literacy of the sort explicitly discussed by Shirley Heath in her own account of her work with minority students from Trackton, and rhetorically reduces what are clearly socio-economic inequities to matters of fashion and preference, even matters of individual 'taste'. And such 'ways of telling'&endash;to adopt one of Heath's own expressions, manage to obscure significant critical observations, for example, by the likes of John Ogbu (1981), whose analysis of the failure of institutional schooling adequately to respond to the unique and pressing needs of students from oppressed groups, which he refers to as 'subordinate minorities' he argues has far more to do with their 'caste-like' status, than with their 'thinking styles'. Indeed this rhetoric of 'thinking styles' functions to constitute essentialist ontological categories out of what are far more plausibly seen as vastly unequal access to power in school, as in society (and in school, not coincidentally, because this is the case in society).
Technicist accounts of technology, then, just like skills-based accounts of literacy, are thus construed here to be incapable of acknowledging socio-politically grounded differences which create for different learners, quite different and indeed inequitable relations to educational technologies. And because they adopt an 'artifactual' view of such technologies, severing them from the normative contexts of social practice with which they have their uses, such accounts make possible the production of abstract generalizations enabling the construal of material inequality in terms of equal access to new educational opportunities.
Knowledge is always inescapably complicit with the first-order myths and enabling fictions that underwrite its claims to truth. (Norris, 1985, p. 23)
Critical discourses about educational technology, by contrast, are explicitly concerned with what is "problematic" about the value-neutral role accorded to the use of computers by technicist educational reformers. We have characterized critical stories as "tragic", because their primary aim is typically to provide an opportunity for a cautious and sobering 'stepping back from the fray' so as to see more clearly the potentially destructive and oppressive network of unequal social and material relations within which new technologies are typicaly constituted. In constructing a critical analysis in terms of what is 'problematic' about the educational uses of computers, we refer specifically to a method of inquiry usually associated with Michel Foucault&endash;that is, to bring to the center of the stage those issues which are traditionally left in the wings&endash;to transform what is usually accepted as a set of givens into a set of questions. As Foucault (1983) wrote:
What I want to do is not the history of solutions.... I would like to do the genealogy of problems, or problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.... I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger. (p. 147)
In critical theorizing, this process of problematizing the 'taken for granted' in pedagogical discourses about institutionalized learning is often referred to as one of exposing the "hidden curriculum" (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Freire, 1971; Giroux, 1981; and Weiler, 1988). The hidden curriculum includes a wide range of ideological and marginalizing dimensions of schooling that are not typically acknowledged or discussed in state-sanctioned educational discourses&endash;restrictive constructs that might include, for example, gender roles, class-based epistemologies, and non-standard language codes.
A significant proportion of critical discourses on educational computing deal explicitly with the task of making explicit the implicit hidden curriculum inscribed in technicist applications of educational technologies (e.g., Bowers, 1988; Broughton, 1984). In The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing, Bowers (1988) argues that computers are not, as is commonly believed, value-neutral educational tools. Indeed, he goes on to say, technocrats focus on educational uses of computers as a potentially transformative technology precisely because their own goals are themselves ideologically skewed in precisely the direction provided by modernist views of progress. This view of progress includes: (a) increased control over access to and manipulation of information, (b) abstract rationality as the most effective form of human thinking, (c) and individualism and entrepreneurship as constituting the most effect models for human commerce.
According to critical theorists, "hegemonic", or oppressive, relations between dominant and marginalized groups are unlikely to change with the advent of computers unless we understand how it is that value-neutral accounts of this new technology are actually playing a key role in reifying education as a systematic process of acculturation to the values and normative practices of dominant groups. Broughton (1984), for example, exposes the epistemological underpinnings of Papert's LOGO culture, in constructing a critical discourse for educational computing. Tracing Papert's particular view of learning to cognitive/developmental models, such as that associated with Jean Piaget, with whom Papert studied for six years, Broughton criticizes the ways in which these models serve to lend an aura of scientificity, or systematic rationality to models of human thinking that place the ability to reason, or to make use of inductive/deductive logical operations at the highest level of human intellectual achievements. The historical context for the construction of these theories draws, of course, directly on Cartesian notions of rationality as the most privileged form of thinking and on notions of universal, cross-cultural accounts of learning. As Valerie Walkerdine (1989) points out:
This fixed sequence takes us from pre-logical to logico-mathematical reasoning at first concrete and then abstract. The assumed pinnacle of abstract reasoning is rarely if ever questioned. And yet of course it is precisely that which various groups are routinely accused of not being able to reach: girls, working class children, blacks, third world children, etc. ...This sequence is itself an historical product of a certain world-view produced out of European models of mind developed at a moment in the development of a European capitalism dependent on the colonization and domination of the Other, held to be different and inferior. (p. 5)
What critical theory stresses, then, is that in the technicists' processes of categorizing, and thus hierarchizing, different types of software or different types of learning, covertly entrenched are existing social norms and relations of power. Foucault (1978), in analyses of the nineteenth century construction of the domains of knowledge which we now know as psychiatry, statistics, medical science, jurisprudence, and education, argued that hierarchical classificatory schemes of the kind central to the modernist tale, serve to define, to subjugate, and thereby to regulate, what comes to be regarded as normal behavior. Foucault (1980) refers to these practices as the "technologies of normalization", and argues that the invention of these schemes is an essential component of the exercise of power.
Critical research on educational computing documents systematic inequities in both access to, and utilization of, technology by members of marginalized groups (see Apple & Jungck, 1991; Damarin, 1993; Noble, in press; and Sutton, 1991). Critical discourses typically focus at the first level on technology as a material commodity which is unequally distributed and therefore differentially accessible&endash;the 'political-economic' critique of educational technology. At a second level&endash;broadly speaking, the 'sociology of knowledge' critique, critical discourses focus on how those in power adapt and channel innovation in order to retain control over emerging forms of knowledge, thereby reproducing (see Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) existing oppressive social structures during periods of potentially liberatory social transformation. Kathleen Weiler (1988) describes this process as follows:
As state institutions, they [public schools] reflect the logic of state power within a certain economic formation, in this case, capitalism. Their hierarchical structure, the content of the formal curriculum, the nature of the hidden curriculum of rules and social relationships all tend to reproduce the status quo. In this society, that entails the reproduction of existing class, racial, and gender divisions. Those who are in control, who dominate and benefit from this structure, attempt in both conscious and unconscious ways to shape the schools so as to maintain their own privilege. (p. 150)
In a national survey of 1,082 computer-using schools conducted by the Center for Social Organization of Schools (1983-84), for example, it was reported that:
1. More computers are being placed in the hands of middle- and upper-class children than poor; 2. When computers are placed in schools for poor children they are used for rote drill and practice instead of the cognitive enrichment that they provide for middle- and upper-class students;
3. Female students have less involvement than male students with computers in schools, irrespective of class or ethnicity.
(quoted in LCHC, 1989, p. 74)
Likewise, Persell and Cookson (1987), report a study of the prevalence and uses of computers in a range of American schools, including coeducational, boys', and girls' elite boarding schools. On the 'political economy' point, their findings suggest that: (a) larger, better-endowed schools were more likely than smaller, and less well-endowed schools to have computer centers, and (b) boys' schools and coeducational schools were more likely than girls' schools to have computer facilities, and that (c) white boys were much more frequent computer users than were any other sub-group. With respect to the (broadly so described) 'sociology of knowledge' critique, it has been argued that both in form and in content, educational computing privileges dominate assumptions and practices in very much the same ways that the traditional textual curriculum does, but indeed, to worse effect, given the relative accessibility of textual as opposed to technological educational resources. Hence, there is a tendency on the part of adherents to critical theory 'accounts' to minimize expectations, both teachers' and students'&endash;of what the technology can do for them, and what they can do with the technology.
Moving from critical theory to postmodernism, we find the traditionally 'gloomy posture' of the 'critical tale'&endash;an essentially tragic tale of pre-ordained and hence inevitable misfortune has been mitigated in recent years by the 'post-critical' stories about the pedagogic 'possibilities' (e.g., Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991) opened up in virtue of the 'contradictory and contested' terrain of educational praxis, such that the critical tale's tragic predictions of inevitable reproduction of educational inequities are disclosed as a species of mechanistic determinism which construes human subjects as the unwitting dupes of an exorable hegemonic process. Contestation and resistance by both teacher and students are proposed within a 'logic of possibility' capable of transforming traditionally reproductive education into a new, postmodern pluralism whose 'levelling' of all traditions, even the previously sacrosanct, holds out the promise of a new educational equity, within which educational technology, because of its unique capacities for blurring human/machine boundaries, plays a central role.
Whose interests, then, are served by such accounts and the practices that follow from them? Paradoxically, to be sure, those best served are conservative teachers, intellectuals, the already privileged. For teachers need not alter their practices to accommodate educational technologies if these are rightly seen to be inherently inequitable; intellectuals can bask in the rosy glow of their emancipatory intents, secure in the presumption that knowledge and rationality will set us free to become wise and critical consumers, not unwitting dupes of the marketplace; and the already privileged maintain that status, since their children, but not others&endash;who have access to new technologies neither at school nor at home&endash;will develop technological knowledge and skills which, like it or not, are highly valued as indispensable, not only in the modern workplace, but indeed in the academy as well. This presumption that rational analysis fuels the engine of emancipation is doubly problematic, ignoring as it does the elements of power, pleasure, and desire so central to our relations to new technologies. The critical tale thereby removes from children of lesser privilege what might be their only opportunities to participate in a technological culture seen as a critically important route to decent jobs and higher education, thus entrenching existing inequalities in the name of emancipation.
Is there life after poststructuralism, and if so, what form might its institutionalization take? How may we carry on our critical and pedagogical practice under the pitiless gaze of deconstruction in particular, a doctrine that desanctifies our once sacred texts, destabilizes our secure hierarchies of authors and readers, classics and criticism, out of reliable relations, and demystifies our humanist vision of high cultural and moral purpose? With the cat so far out of the bag, what is our best strategy for survival? (Felperin, 1985, pp. 216-17)
Not so many years ago, any given Saturday morning of televiewing might find countless North American children watching with fascination their favorite cartoon heroes&endash;Transformers&endash;fight for their survival by endlessly de/reconstructing their embodied characteristics and by assuming a myriad of features not satisfactorily accounted for by recourse to conventional binary categorization schemes purporting to enable a rational distinction between 'humans' and 'machines'. One might well argue that the "Transformers" satisfactorily incarnate a truly postmodern response to Turing's (1964) question, "Can machines think?".
Postmodernist accounts (see Barthes, 1977; Baudrillard, 1983; Derrida, 1978; Fraser, 1989), are discourses of montage, rupture, and dislocation. The fixed subjects (both human subjects and subject-matters) of modernist and critical discourses are re-articulated in new relations of displacement, as images, ideas, and the like are deleted from their orignial context, and the fragments reinserted into other contexts, which they thereby disrupt. This can be (and has been) criticized as engendering a species of disempowering paralysis of agency, or it can be represented as constituting a form of re-tooling, and hence, re-configuring, of praxis. A kind of ecologically-sound 'recycling' movement is the too-often overlooked real-world analogue to postmodernism's primary implications for re-thinking pedagogy. We have characterized postmodern tales as "ironic" because, as the philosopher Ricahrd Rorty (1989) has persuasively argued, irony seems a possible and plausible tentative relation to "truth" after a thorough-going deconstruction of all and any previously-held notions of epistemological or ontological stability.
Any attempt to define 'postmodernism', then, is necessarily at cross-purposes with its own discursive practices, which eschew all finite and self-confident attempts at constructing grand narratives, truths, or onological schemes. As Hutcheon (1989) explains:
Perhaps this is an appropriate condition, for postmodernism is a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political.... It seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural'...are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us.... Yet it must be admitted from the start that this is a strange kind of critique, one bound up, too, with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze and maybe even undermine (pp. 1-4).
Postmodern discourses about technology, then, deliberately blur 'natural kind' boundaries like: 'male and female', 'teacher and student', 'the natural and the artificial', or 'person and machine'. Donna Haraway (1990) suggests, paradigmatically, that: "...the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" (p. 191). She writes that:
We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.... This is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. (p. 191)
It has been argued of late that postmodernism's main contribution to theories of 'difference' has been the deconstruction of essentialist theories about sites of oppression in traditional theorizing (e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986) as fundamentally raced, classed, and hence as politically unproductive (Bryson & de Castell, in pressb; Bordo, 1990; Leach & Davies, 1990). Haraway's postmodern cyborg 'women', by contrast, embody fractured identities that are contested on multiple sites of oppression including age, race, sexual orientation, etc....
Haraway's somewhat abstract and obtuse allegory about cyborgs finds a 'real-world' analogue in the fascinating story of the now-famous Minitel service in France (De Lacy, 1989). Minitel, which is distributed, free, to French telephone subscribers, was designed in 1978 as the world's first electronic telephone directory. Although viewed as a useful information-source, De Lacy argues that Minitel was not widely used in its first incarnation. However, when transformed (in 1981) into a direct-dialogue messaging system, communicating via Minitel under an infinite range of assumed guises became an instant national obsession. The communicative opacity afforded by Minitel technology has allowed users to play with, deconstruct and reconstruct, the traditional constraints that shape face-to-face discourse, such as biological sex, social class, ethnicity, age, body-size, etc.... Minitel has also provided a direct means for members of traditionally marginalized groups, such as gays and lesbians, people living with AIDS or cancer, and the elderly, to form effective coalitions for political organization and action. De Lacy reports that Minitel has also provided a medium for the development of unique dialects, or 'Minitel patois', thereby providing an accessible medium for the deliberate reconstruction of the French language, which has heretofore been strictly guarded as the purview of the elite Academie Francaise.
Postmodernist theorists (e.g., Gore, 1993; Lather, 1991; Luke, & Gore, 1992) have, of-late, challenged many of the axiomatic assumptions of critical theorists of education. Perhaps the most serious challenge has been to cast doubt on the implicit claim of critical theorists (such as Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Freire, 1971; or Giroux, 1981) that so-called "liberatory" and/or reflexive practices enable one to identitfy, and thereby to manipulate, the ideological bases of oppressive pedagogies. Elizabeth Ellsworth's (1989) "Why Doesn't this Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy", describes her experience of the contradictions inherent in actively engaging with liberatory pedagogy as follows:
Our classroom was the site of dispersing, shifting, and contradictory contexts of knowing that coalesced differently in different moments of student/professor speech, action, and emotion. This situation meant that individuals and affinity groups constantly had to change strategies and priorities of resistance against oppressive ways of knowing and being known. The antagonist became power itself as it was deployed within our classroom&endash;oppressive ways of knowing and oppressive knowledges. (p. 322)
Ellsworth's and Haraway's accounts of shifting and unstable subjects do not easily lend themselves to easy extrapolations into the traditionally rather conservative and stable domain of educational computing. We may, however, make a preliminary attempt, extrapolating from research which, it must be noted, does not necessarily present itself in these terms.
Griffin and Cole (1987), for example, report results from a computer-mediated literacy project with minority children that offer promising insights into the ways in which technology can act as a catalyst for reconfiguring relations between children, tasks, and teachers in educational contexts. In this concluding section of the paper, we treat that research as a species of 'post-modern' tale, and sketch out some of the perils and prospects of such a tale, as these seem to follow from such critical analyses as Ellsworth's and, if far more generally, Foucault's.
The authors begin their account with a description of the well-documented findings of both unequal access to technology and of an exclusive focus on low-level or 'basic skills'&endash;which they term the "parts problem"&endash;which currently characterizes both traditional literacy pedagogy and computer-supported instruction when these are provided to members of marginalized cultural groups&endash;female students, working class children, ethnic minority students, etc. Results from evaluation studies conducted since the arrival of computers in educational settings, they report, seem to indicate that (a) education is not thereby made more equally accessible to all parts of the population, and (b) some children's (i.e., minority students') interactions with computers aren't ever getting to the more open-ended, more challenging parts of complex tasks. Griffin and Cole argue that in order to address the "parts problem", educators need to abandon the notion that competencies can be hierarchically organized in terms of higher and lower order skills and the notion that each individual child has to master all aspects of a complex task in order to demonstrate competence. Rather, the authors "propose to admit many different first level activities into computer use in schools" (p. 208) on the assumption that what are usually thought to be 'lower order' skills can serve 'higher order' purposes depending on culturally and historically specific contextual conditions.
What we see here is an example of the kind of thinking characteristic of postmodernism, specifically, postmodernist practices of appropriation and 'recycling', salvaging icons, images and artifacts resurrected from within their original socio-historical context, and re-inserted into another, within which this 'detritus' can take on a new, significantly greater cultural value (Thompson, 1979; Ulmer, 1983). It is postmodernism's characteristic montage of previously unconnected events, its unprecedented and often unlikely juxtapositions of what, in its origins, might have been both scarce and highly valued with what, in its original context, might conversely have been at best commonplace, ordinary, seemingly without value, which we see instantiated in this pedagogic strategy. As cigarette cards, green glass coke bottles and those dreadful melmac plates and padded plastic covered tables and chairs in whose metal studded backs were the diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades of playing cards are today found in exclusive furniture stores at phenomenally inflated prices, so, conversely, prized and originally highly prized and costly commodities like turntables, or artifacts such as typewriters&endash;even, indeed especially, the self-correcting type, are today relegated to the trashcans of second hand stores and junk dealers.
In the Griffin and Cole project, students who had been identified as being in the bottom 20% of their elementary school population were provided with computer supports for engaging in literacy activities that included real-time electronic mail dialogues with Italian pen-pals, and written rap exchanges with same-age and adult interlocutors. The authors assert that problems that surfaced during the implementation of these activities, such as code-switching between English, Spanish, and Italian or dealing with time differences between San Diego and Pistoia, contributed to the students' active engagement in these exchanges and to their sense of authorship, or ownership of the discursive medium. They conclude by arguing that, "discord may be harnessed for growth", and that genres&endash;like rap&endash; which might traditionally be dismissed as 'street talk', can serve as valuable "beginning points that can be appropriated for the development of writing" (p. 229). Griffin and Cole conclude that this technology provides a means for reconstructing the division of labor in classroom tasks and for restructuring power relations between participants in educational contexts who typically occupy very unevenly positioned discursive roles in relation to power.
Even in what we are calling the 'postmodern tale', notwithstanding its avowed intents to disrupt traditional hierarchies of skill, of knowledge and of social/instructional power, there remains an implicit 'meta-narrative' of trials and failed attempts, illustrated in Griffin and Cole's study in their discussion of "low performance in a new mode". They report that, although children 'playfully' reversed the 'social power relations and discourse roles' between them and their adult interlocutor, "Nothing of substance was developed as a topic...." But what their study also showed, and what they might perhaps more profitably have emphasized and explored, were the ways in which the technology made equally possible new forms of resistances, made it possible for students to reverse intended reversals, to refuse, to evaluate and judge adult performance, to criticize the thinly veiled authoritarianism of both the agendas they were set, and the adult interlocutors charged with the responsibility of carrying these out. Griffin and Cole mention in passing that when the adult made designs by using non-alphabetic symbols (#:|%#), the children entered the activity with great fluency and invented non-modeled strings. They also initiated this kind of play without invitation or instruction or request from the adults. Interesting here is that it was only in response to an entirely meaningless set of coded symbols that students entered uninvited into the interaction, as if perhaps even educators' "implicit" meta-narratives remained all-too-obvious to these students. Whether this is an inevitable failing of any "postmodern pedagogy" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991) given its unavoidable subordination to traditional educational purposes of 'enlightenment' remains to be seen. Clearly, however, postmodern conceptions of the educative prospects of new technologies can effect a pedagogic variant of a Neitszchian "transvaluation of values" in a manner and to an extent nowhere considered with either technicist or critical accounts. If only for that reason, it seems a direction worth pursuing.
Surveying the vast array of literature that is available today on the topic of educational technology reveals that there is a great deal more disagreement than consensus concerning the optimal purposes and uses of computers in educational contexts. This conflictual intellectual terrain, it turns out, poses significant problems for both researchers and for practitioners. Their respective problems, though rather different, are importantly related. Setting up a horse-race between the "truth value" of competing accounts of the likely educational impact of educational computing and of the appropriate relations between computers and learners does not seem a particularly promising undertaking. Nor can differences in pedagogical methods or implementation strategies that issue from these various accounts be resolved by recourse to the kinds of empirical contrasts provided by traditional positivistic experimental studies. Rather, we have argued here that the divisive playing field of educational technology is populated by various teams who are telling altogether different "true stories", each having quite different settings, characters and plots, with very different impacts for both 'educational outcomes' and for 'appropriate relations'. But they are telling these very different stories, it is essential to note, about the very same technology. Thus, it becomes important to discover which tales are told in which classrooms, and how student computer use is accordingly delimited, as much as it is important to discern what is&endash;and dangerously so&endash;common to all these accounts. As Foucault (1980) suggested, the purpose of theorizing is not to answer questions about truth and rightness, but, rather, to ask how things could have come to be this way, and to try to discover, at any given moment, wherein lie the greatest dangers within the various discourses which are accepted and made to function as 'true'.
We have suggested here that there is no "master narrative" to be found or made in educational discourses about educational computing. There is no 'true story', no 'grand synthesis'. There is instead a set of stories, each with its distinctive scope and limits, each of which imposes, in different ways, a different system of constraints, prescriptions and prohibitions, a different set of 'limit situations' defining the boundaries beyond which teachers and learners cannot go. If it is indeed, as we've supposed, principally the constraints imposed upon educational technology by the stories that are told about it, and only secondarily the capacities and limitations inherent within the technology itself which define and delimit how such technologies are used, then it follows that the 'greatest danger' in research practice in educational computing is the danger of setting arbitrary limits, imposing premature closure, on what can be done; it is in, that is to say, 'normativising' any one particular account as 'the account' and prescribing any particular set of practices as 'the practices' appropriate to the educational use of computers. What is essential here is the recognition of the centrality of stories in contemporary discourses, both academic and practical, on educational technology. What we argue, therefore, is that it is the very fact of the unreflexive and uncritical telling of the tales themselves, whether told in school by teachers and learners, or out of school by policy makers and researchers, that confronts us with the 'greatest danger'. And that this is precisely because the efficacy and rhetorical appeal of the 'true stories' told in relation to "solving" longstanding "educational problems" seem precisely to be those aspects which conceal the tales' constitutive effects behind the emphatically present, visible, and seductive, corpus of the technology itself.
What are the implications, then, of our 'tale' for a reconstruction of the role of the 'externally-located' (Goodson & Mangan, 1991) researcher whose uniquely privileged role 'in the field' of educational computing is defined in terms of the provision of resources in exchange for a normatively-determined form of accountability&endash;perhaps most importantly, the provision of the exclusive authority to construct definitive accounts? We have argued that the researcher is not to compose, like Sheherezade in her 'ivory tower', endless stories of how educational technology ought to work&endash;a thinly veiled activity of intellectual self-justification which in the end serves only to preconstrain and to limit what she is able to see. Especially, for that reason, it is not to believe, herself, the "true stories" that she recounts. But admitting of the diversity, contingincy, and constructedness of tales told about educational computing does not, it is important to note here, imply a kind of relativistic "separate but equal" notion that any old story will do. This is an explicit argument for rhetorical responsibility in the weaving of tales- an ethics of narration with the focus squarely on the possibilities for agency and equity as these are enabled and constrained within particular "emplotments" (White, 1973).
Nor should researchers expect that teachers' or students' own stories correspond with theirs, and this in turn requires that researchers pay explicit and serious attention to which stories are accepted/acceptable by various groups within the educational field&endash;teachers, administrators, journal editors, univerrsity-based tenure/propmotions committees, boards and ministries of education&endash; and which are denied, overlooked, prohibited. As researchers, we need first of all to understand what it is that participants in educational settings are attempting to do, before we can attempt to study how they are doing it. We need, that is to say, to become privy to their understandings and their intentions, as these shape&endash;necessarily&endash;the actual 'public' practices and outcomes which are accessible to and observable by the researcher. In the process of our own research, what has hitherto confounded our attempts to 'make sense' of what we were seeing in classrooms and hearing from teachers has been the disparity between and among accounts, a disparity which this analytic device of implicit, embedded 'stories' is gradually enabling us to understand and to work with.
We have found in our own research that, to this end, one useful exercise involves paying particular attention to accounts which (a) detail what has 'failed' about educational innovation, and/or (b) are deemed by teachers and/or administrators to be "educationally irrelevant", "unsound", "nonsense", "inconceivable", "extreme", "biased", and the like. For to a large extent this process of recognizing and rewarding only a sub-set of activities or accounts tells us at the same time both how 'success' is defined, and why such definitions are arbitrary. What will count as 'failure' from within a given story, tells us, for example, what that story will exclude in terms of the prospective uses of that technology. And, perhaps most importantly, here it is that we see how educational technologies can become 'technologies of normalization', and at what educational cost such normalization is achieved.
We suggest, then, that probably the most important job for researchers concerned to understand the scope and limits of the educational uses of technology is to seek out those stories that are not being circulated, to stop 'making sense', to look for educational technology's version of Foucault's 'subjugated knowledges' within which the complications, contradictions and complexities of this new educational domain are most likely and most productively to be discerned. For it will most likely be in these tales, we suspect, that radically innovative possibilities for the transformation of hegemonic practices might best be found. But we will have to leave that story for another day... Perhaps novelist Jeanette Winterson (cited in Suleiman, 1990, p. 191) put it best when she wrote that, "The vital thing is to have an alternative so that people will realize that there is no such thing as a true story."
Apple, M., & Jungk, S. (1990). "You don't have to be a teacher to teach in this unit": Teaching, technology, and gender in the classroom. American Educational Research Journal, 27, 227-251. Aronowitz, S., & Giroux, H. (1991). Postmodern education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, R. (1977). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Richard Howard, trans.). New York, NY: Hill & Wang.
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations (Paul Foss, Paul Patton, & Philip Beitchman, trans.). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Belenky, A., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women's ways of knowing. New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc.
Blanchard, M. (1980). Description: Sign, self, desire. The Hague: Mouton Publishers.
Bordo, S. (1990). Feminism, postmodernism, and gender-scepticism. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Bowers, C. (1988). The cultural dimensions of educational computing. New York, NY: Teacher's College Press.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Boyd, G. (1988). The impact of society on educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology, 19, 114-122.
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (1990). Supporting learning: Understanding and assessing the progress of children in the Primary program. Victoria, BC: Ministry of Education.
Broughton, J.M. (1984). The surrender of control: Computer literacy as political socialization of the child. In D. Sloan (Ed.), The computer in education: A critical perspective. New York, NY: Teacher's College Press.
Brown, J.S. (1985). Process versus product: A perspective on tools for communal and informal electronic learning. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 1(2), 179-201.
Bruner, J. (1985). Narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought. In E. Eisner (Ed.), Learning and teaching the ways of knowing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bryson, M. (1993). New technologies/New Practices?: Teachers, machines, and the cultures of primary schooling. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia.
Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (in pressa). So we've got a chip on our shoulder?: Sexing the texts of educational technology. In J. Gaskell & J. Willinsky (Eds.). Gender in/forms curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.
Bryson, M., & de Castell, S. (in pressb). En/Gendering equity. Educational Theory.
Carter, K. (1993). The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. Educational Researcher, 22, 5-12.
Chafe, W. (1990). Some things that narrative tells us about the mind. In B. Britton & A. Pellegrini (Eds.), Narrative thought and narrative language. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Clandinin, J., & Connelly, M. (1992). Teacher as curriculum maker. In P. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum. New York: Macmillan.
Cohen, D. (1987). Educational technology, policy, and practice. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9(2), 153-170.
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Damarin, S. (1993). School and situated knowledge: Travel or tourism. Educational Technology, 33, 27-32.
De Lacy, J. (1989). The sexy computer. In T. Forester (Ed.), Computers in the human context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference (Alan Bass, trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297-324.
Emihovich, C., & Miller, G. (1988). Effects of LOGO and CAI on black first graders' achievement, reflectivity, and self-esteem. The Elementary School Journal, 88(5), 473-487.
Foster, T. (Ed.). (1989). Computers in the human context. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction (Robert Hurley, trans.). New York: Random House.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1983). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermaneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Harper and Row.
Giroux, H. (1981). Ideology, culture and the process of schooling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Unviersity Press.
Graff, H.J. (1988). Whither the history of literacy? The future of the past. Communication, 11, 5-22.
Goodson, I., & Mangan, M. (1991). Qualitative educational research studies: Methodologies in transition (Vol. 1). RUCCUS Occasional Papers, London, Ont: Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario.
Griffin, S., & Cole, M. (1987). New technologies, basic skills, and the underside of education: What's to be done?. In J. Langer (Ed.), Language, literacy and culture. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Habermas, J. (1988). Lectures on the philospohical discourse of modernity. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Haraway, D. (1989). Primate visions. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1990). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge.
Heath, S. (1986). Ways with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hutcheon, L. (1989). The politics of postmodernism. New York, NY: Routledge.
Joram, E., Woodruff, E., Bryson, M., & Lindsay, P. (1992). The effects of revising with a word processor on writing composition. Research in the Teaching of English, 26, 167-192.
Kling, R. Value conflicts in computing developments. (1983). Telecommunications Policy, 7, 12-34.
Lather, P. (1990a). Staying dumb? Student resistance to liberatory curriculum. Paper presented at a meeting of AERA (American Educational Research Association), Boston.
Lather, P. (1990b). Postmodernism and the human sciences. The Humanistic Psychologist, 18(1), 64-84.
Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart. New York: Routledge.
Lawson, H. (1989). Stories about stories. In H. Lawson & L. Appignanesi (Eds.), Dismantling truth: Reality in the post-mdern world. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Leach, M., & Davies, B. (1990). Crossing the boundaries: Educational thought and gender equity. Educational Theory, 40, 321-332.
LCHC (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition). (1989). Kids and computers: A positive vision of the future. Harvard Educational Review, 59(1), 73-86.
Luke, C., & Gore, J. (1992). Feminisms and critical pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
McCorduck, P. (1985). The universal machine: Confessions of a technological optimist. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Motherwell, L. (1988). Gender and style differences in a LOGO-based environment. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Boston, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Means, B., & Knapp, M. (1990). Models for teaching advanced skills to educationally disadvantaged children. Unpublished paper, Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.
Noble, D. (in press). The classroom arsenal: Military research, information technologies and public education. London, UK: Falmer Press.
Norris, C. (1985). Contest of faculties: Philosophy amd theory after deconstruction.
Ogbu, J. (1983). Literacy and schooling in subordinate cultures: The case of black Americans. In D. Resnick (Ed.), Literacy in a historical perspective. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Papert, S. (1984). New theories for new learnings. School Psychology Review, 13(4), 422-428.
Persell, C.H., & Cookson, P. (1987). Microcomputers and elite boarding schools: Educational innovation and social reproduction. Sociology of Education, 60, 123-134.
Polkinghorne, D. (19). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: S.U.N.Y. Press.
Propp, V. (1958). Morphology of the folktale. Bloominsgton, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ragsdale, R. (1988). Permissable computing in education: Values, assumptions, and needs. New York: Praeger.
Richert, A. (1990). Using teacher cases for reflection and enhanced understanding. In A. Lieberman & L. Miller (Eds.), Teachers: Their world and their work. New York: Teachers College Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Shute, V., Glaser, R., & Resnick, P. (1986). Discovering and learning to discover: An intelligent microworld for economics. Paper presented at a meeting of AERA, San Francisco, CA.
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Suleiman, S. (1990). Subversive intent: Gender, politics, and the avant-garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sutton, R. (1991). Equity and computers in the schools: A decade of research. Review of Educational Research, 61, 475-503.
Thompson, M. (1979). Rubbish theory: The creation and destruction of value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Turing, A.M. (1964). Computing machinery and intelligence. In A.R. Anderson (Ed.), Minds and machines. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.
Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1990). Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16, 128-157.
Ulmer, G. (1983). The object of post-criticism. In Hal Fosks (Ed.), The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Seattle: The Bay Press.
Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). Mastery of reason. New York: Routledge.
Walkerdine, V. (1989). Difference, cognition and mathematics education. Unpublished paper, Birmingham Polytechnic, England.
Weiler, K. (1988). Women teaching for change. New York, NY: Bergin Garvey Publishers.
White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: The John's Hopkins University Press.