Around 30 years ago I threw my rattle out of the pram, on three separate occasions. Trawling through the Freedman archives I’ve found two of these articles. Although they are about different topics, the underlying message is the same: why do people assume that teachers don’t know anything, or at least don’t know enough to be involved in discussions?
The three topics covered were as follows, but only the first two are included in the links below. Are these points still relevant today? Yes. If you don’t believe me, just check the letters page of ,your daily newspaper once or twice a week (assuming you read one).
Topics I discussed
Internet training
Someone who started up an internet café said they were offering free training to teachers in how to access the internet. I wrote an article saying that as a token of our gratitude, the IT teachers organisation in which I was active at the time was going to offer free training in café management.
Perhaps the offer was meant well, but it shows a marked lack of understanding of the sort of thing a teacher might want or need to learn. Not just the nuts and bolts of accessing the internet, but how to manage a class of thirty kids all accessing the internet at the same time, e-safety matters, being able to identify good and bad information sources, and so on. It would have been nice, not to mention respectful, had the café people consulted with teachers first.
Teaching IT
But then, why should they, given that Naace, which was an organisation for advisors of computing in education at the time, produced a document showing how to do it as a result of a one day conference. In my article SuperNaace to the rescue (included in one of the pdfs below) I was somewhat robust about what I thought of as the arrogance underlying this.
The article seemed to make the top brass at Naace incandescent with rage. I did apologise some time later, not for the sentiments expressed, but the rather sarcastic way in which I did so.
However, reading the article again after all these years, I note that I said there was a lot to agree with in what they’d advocated. My beef was not with what they’d written, but the fact that they didn’t include us (the representative body of those who were actually doing the job day in and day out) in their consultations.
Teaching IT through other subjects
Having become increasingly fed up with teachers of other subjects basically dumbing down my subject, I enlisted my alter ego Lance Sharpe to write a diatribe about it. That’s also included in a pdf linked to below.
One of the few good things about the emphasis on ‘coding’ now is that as most people acknowledge that they know nothing about it, they leave the people teaching it in peace.
You might also be interested in this article: Beware the ultracrepidarians.
I’ve also posted this article to the Digital Education Supplement area, with the two files below merged into one for convenience. To access this, subscribe to the Digital Education newsletter for free.