National Policy on ICT in School Education

National Policy on “ICT in Education”

Call for Suggestions, Recommendations and Position
Papers

NATIONAL POLICY ON ICT IN EDUCATION
CALL FOR SUGGESTIONS/ RECOMMENDATIONS / POSITION PAPERS

1. Articulate a progressive vision, objectives, guidelines and promising directions for building the ICT in Education Policy Framework

Our submission intends to explore some key issues relating to national education in the context of the information society (IS) and considers some of the major critiques against present uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Rather than only proposing a revised curriculum for ICT teaching to ameliorate these shortcomings, we instead outline a framework for how ICTs can play a role in creating a more equitable education system and suggest some policies that may emerge from such a framework.

Who is the primary owner of ‘ICT for education’?

Too often, ICT in education becomes a process of attempting to force-fit existing technologies and applications into the school and the education process. This could be the inevitable consequence of having ‘ICT experts’ designing the application of ICTs to education.

Even in the business world, ICTs were meaningfully appropriated only when the ‘users’ or ‘domain experts’ started driving the vision and direction of ICT design and application. Software packages, which initially focused on the relatively trivial areas of financial accounting or payroll, moved to more value-added areas of Enterprise and Material Resource Planning on the users articulating their needs. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) gave up their role of directing the nature of ‘applications’ to the organisational or ‘line’ functions and took on the role of finding the required solutions within the ambit of technology.

Education tends to be both a complex and subtle process – hence people who ‘belong’ to the domain would provide better insight into how technology may be of help. The starting point in having the educationists ‘appropriate’ ICT for education is the very language that defines the vision for ICT in education.1 Hence a progressive vision that puts education at the centre is critical. Along the lines of Dewey's plea for public education as an imperative for a vibrant democracy, we would like to suggest the “active citizen of the information society2 as an educational ideal” that ‘ICT in education’ policy must strive for, in building the ‘information society’ with and through new ICTs. The ‘active citizen’ does not merely use existing solutions but decides the nature and scope of appropriation of ICT. This is a significant move from the notion of ‘access’ to ICT, which has its overtones of power hierarchies wherein some decide what others need as curriculum.

1 This is not to say that ICT experts have no role. Given the largely ‘black box’ nature of how ICT can be meaningfully appropriated by education, the direction will need to be an outcome of a dialectic between the two groups, nevertheless with the user being in the drivers seat taking on the role of design/appropriation. 2 http://www.itforchange.net/images/stories/files/LSE_for_GDISP.pdf page 8 has looked at how different authors have defined and explained the term information society. In “Gender and Governance in the IS - A Policy Approach” (draft - work in progress), Parminder Jeet Singh suggests, “An information society framework of analyzing contemporary social change attempts to abstract a socio-technical / techno-social context of change, which has specific ICT and information society aspects to it, and that may be generalised for different social domains and contexts. This framework is then posited in a contextual manner with respect to the substantive areas of change – governance, markets, society, or health, education, livelihoods and so on.” Submitted by IT for Change 2

As a key part of this creation of the active citizen who will appropriate ICT for education, we need to involve different groups of stakeholders. In the health system, it would be unthinkable to formulate public health policies based on advice of pharmaceutical production giants,3 while in the “ICT in education” sector, the key actors currently seem to be those who also have significant commercial interests in the same applications or platforms.

Localised Curriculum – Teacher and Learner as active citizens

The first part of being an active citizen, appropriating ICT as relevant and meaningful, must be to revitalise the basic education process of curriculum determination and design.

Traditionally in India, curriculum has been defined at national and state levels and implemented across vast and varied geographies. While the principle of district and local definitions of curriculum have found support in different texts including Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) program documents, National Curriculum Framework in 2005 (NCF), etc., the traditional methods of designing and producing texts (print literature) have been found so laborious as to keep print activity centralised at state and central levels. Two significant changes have taken place, first in printing process and technology (in itself a large reflection of new ICTs) and the second in the ability to digitise information and knowledge in newer forms, including audio and audio visual and the hyperlinked text.

ICTs in education policy must at district, block, cluster and school levels influence educators, children and community members to record their own knowledge and make it available to both themselves and others, including as syllabi in the formal school system. In addition, ‘knowledge institutions’ such as District Institutes of Educational Training should be able to focus on bringing to use and life the knowledge available in the district's own culture and make it part of the curriculum and syllabi for the schools and educational institutions of that district. This principle should be activated even at the village level to realise the nai taleem model that Gandhiji advocated. Given the sea change in audio and video technologies as well as in more traditional printing and publishing technologies, this is quite within the realm of possibilities and policy must actively push for such decentralisation of curricular design and implementation. Local knowledge outputs in audio, video and print form will dramatically alter the nature of participation and ownership of education by the community. Of course, the teacher needs to have a central role in the design, creation and interpretation of such knowledge4.

Pedagogy of the oppressed

Poverty is a significant cause for the loss of local knowledge. Vimala Ramachandran5 mentions the case of children of poor families suffering from chronic scabies, not treating it because they could not access the relevant allopathic drugs, while the area in which they lived was full of neem trees. When the children were treated with neem leaves paste and water in which neem leaves were boiled, most of them were cured. The families then (dimly) recollected that this used

3 The equivalent would be of asking Novartis to formulate national drug patent policies 4 This will also have its own intrinsic impact on the perception of the profession of teaching in the eyes of society. 5 Vimala Ramachandran in the “Strategy Planning Workshop of the Feminist Network on Gender, Development and Information Society Policies” held in Bangalore, Oct. 5, 2007, see http://www.itforchange.net/advocacy/events_organised_by_itfc/GDISP_Strategy_Planning_workshop.html Submitted by IT for Change

to be the treatment that their earlier generations had used but had gone into disuse and out of communal memory. Lack of basic material well-being (development) in communities aggravates the loss of own knowledge by putting their basic survival needs at a level high enough to impoverish memory of local traditions. This is further aggravated by external ‘modernisation’ models that look down on local knowledge as essentially inferior and often standing in the way of ‘modernisation’. The frequent migration of the poor means their own knowledge resources are further depleted by depriving them of community strength.

Local folklore, drama and dance, especially those that inspire through their depictions of valour and struggle against oppression and tyranny, all need to become part of the local curriculum, as do practices of traditional medicine, agriculture and the crafts. This move would support the breaking down of the dichotomy between traditional literacy and functional literacy. People can find the knowledge and discourses they seek and value and would not have to make do with what is determined as curriculum because it is valued by the elite.

Lack of ‘local and relevant’ curriculum has been one of the biggest problems in Indian education and ICT has the potential (through appropriate policy) to breakthrough the current stalemate in this regard.

Curriculum – Global

Traditional knowledge processes have also made it difficult to access knowledge from diverse geographical sources, owing to geographical distances, language, etc. The creation of the networks of today means the easier movement of information across geographies. The spanning of curriculum from local to global and use of multiple media of recording and constructing knowledge also meets a critical educational goal of diversity of content and approach and supports ethno-relativism.6 A balance between local-global knowledge and curricula without essentialising or over-privileging one or the other can be made possible with ICTs.7

It is important to note that 80% of websites are in English, which is a language spoken by 10% of world population. Educationists recognise that language itself determines the nature of knowledge that is being disseminated. While connecting to this ‘mainstream’ knowledge, and also to the knowledges of other communities available through this ‘medium’ of English is vital, it is even more critical to be able to ‘upstream’ one's own local knowledge and make it available as global knowledge.

However the knowledge explosion should itself not become a reason for increasing the curricular load on education. The ability to navigate across local-global levels of information and to appropriate based on one's own understanding of one's requirements needs to be the response to the knowledge explosion process and this itself requires the agency of the ‘active citizen’.

6 The factors currently responsible for the creation of culture are largely ethnocentric, as the Western, dominant symbols of a growing consumer culture gain international recognition. However ICT networks have the potential to actively promote ethno-relativism as well, this however requires ‘uploading’ of local knowledge from all cultures/communities 7 E.g. UNESCO’s initiative ‘open training platform’ is also a useful addition, as promoting institutional forms of sharing knowledge on non-commercial open basis. Submitted by IT for Change

Constructivism

One of the fundamental principles of learning is that of ‘constructivism’, which inter-alia implies that a learner learns by ‘doing’. To ‘appropriate’ ICTs, the learner can no longer be a ‘user’ of ready-made applications and packages that offer knowledge on tap. Hence it is critical that the curriculum not be restricted to the current paradigm of learning ready-made software applications that were created to meet other needs, such as office automation, and should include the design and creation of platforms and applications. When education includes such active analysis and synthesis of ICT artifacts, whether hardware or software, it enables a deeper meaning of the technology to be constructed.

If the right models of technology appropriation are chosen for ICT and education instead of mere access to technology and technology skills; new approaches of ‘constructivism’ could result in the teacher-learner taking knowledge and understanding significantly to new realms.

The Network is the society - Parent and community members as active citizens

Computer networks have been often described as much as mechanisms of exclusion8 as of connectiig, including more 'valued' people and excluding those less 'valued'. ICT enables the creation of both highly centralised (with the central core directing and controlling activities at the hub) as well as highly decentralised networks of people. The modern transnational corporation is the result of such networks existing within and now increasingly outside the organisation as well. Lewis Mumford speaks of how in incorporating technology in social processes and systems, both a democratic and an authoritarian or centralising ‘technics’ may be seen.9 The objective of ICT and education policy must to be strengthen the democratic technics and minimise authoritarian technics.

Given that fostering of agency and autonomy is a critical aspect of the education ideal of the ‘active citizen’, ICT in education policy must encourage the creation of local information and communication networks within and amongst groups of teachers and parents and also professional networks transcending geographies. Such networks are conduits for shared reflections, building of relationships and re-appropriation of influencing abilities.

The government must invest significantly in creating such knowledge centres, which further social capital by acting as public spaces and hubs of these networks.10 This is unlikely to happen relying solely on private entrepreneurial energies. Current Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) paradigms strongly suggest that the role of the public authorities is limited to the regulation of private players. This can dangerously come close to abdication of state's responsibilities to its citizens under the logic of innovation and flexibility.

We already have examples of networks of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) workers who have developed ‘communities of learning’, building open source applications in a spirit of cooperation. This spirit of networking needs to be extended to other groups for their own purposes.

8 Manuel Castells (1996). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture 9 http://www.primitivism.com/mumford.htm 10 Switzerland is already planning to connect all schools using public education funds. Hence this has moved beyond the technical feasibility debates into the policy domain Submitted by IT for Change

Such networks can also be public spaces for fostering co-operation and co-construction. Currently, spending to stimulate consumerism (and through it, the spirit of competition / exclusion / stratification) is far more than resources that are spent on building ‘active citizenship’. These networks can be an effective complement and counter to the forces of the market and competition through their focus on revitalised public spaces that foster cooperation.

The network of the school and its community can become a mechanism of transparency and accountability, where each school can publish its own information and knowledge so that parents and other members are able to reflect and respond. Given that one of the biggest issues in the education system currently is the weak accountability of the school system to the community, this parent- and community-centred support and monitoring can make the public school system much stronger. In addition, this network will also record information / knowledge resources in the community and will increase community ownership over the school system.

Public funds for public knowledge

Thus education and ICT in education need to be appropriated and bought into by citizens. ICT has the nature of a public good – while all have need and use for it, no individual would find it possible or feasible to create the entire system of ICT. As more people benefit from it, society benefits and there is a larger than linear benefit to each individual.

The digital form of knowledge and its inherent ‘commons’ nature of being ‘non-rival’ makes for even a good economic argument of providing ICTs as a ‘public infrastructure’ with public content available to all through public access points using basic ‘public software’ and supported by public networks offering public connectivity. In other words, ICTs must be seen as a public good that requires public infrastructure for its availability. Such creation of public infrastructure has now become technically feasible and can no longer be subjected to the canon of financial viability, for public education has itself never been subject to such narrow basis for its existence. Public education is its own rationale and this is logically extensible to ICT networks functioning as knowledge network hubs.

Secondly, it must be explicitly stated that all knowledge produced or acquired with public funding will be public12 – available without conditions. Along the same lines, applications developed through public money must be freely available to all citizens to use and appropriate without restrictions. Today, the default copyright on content is ‘all rights reserved’, so even much of development and educational content becomes difficult for people to access, which runs counter to the very purpose of its production.

11 ICT enables the individual to act, at the same time recognising the collective - both real and virtual communities. 12 Interesting, while developing countries, including India, have pushed for public availability of publicly funded research in the North through what has come to be known as the ‘development agenda’ their own domestic polices are often different. Submitted by IT for Change

2. Identify challenges that must be addressed in the forthcoming Policy Document Monopolies

A key concern of education is diversity in learning – this means that content, as well as platforms and technologies, must be diverse too. Hence policy must consciously aim at providing the student with learning on multiple platforms and technologies. In many states, curriculum is defined in terms of a single technology platform and this can have negative educational value.

Mass media and ICTs also contribute to an ethnocentricity of curriculum, whereby certain languages and forms of knowledge are privileged over others, perpetuating hegemonistic models. (For example English = Global language; mathematics, language, science = knowledge; office automation = ICT knowledge; proprietary office applications = office applications).

Inhibitions to teacher-student relationship

One of the consequences of having ICT experts (many of who are IT business experts) deciding the vision and direction of ICT in education is the creation of ‘education packages’ that inhibit or restrict the scope of teacher interpretation and formation of teacher-student relationships. Learning in primary schools derives meaning from the building of close relationships between the teacher and the child. In its ability to create the virtual and drive out the ‘real’ or the ‘immediately physical’, technology can pose a real threat to developing and nurturing of such relationships. There are studies that show that increased exposure to TV and Internet can inhibit children's abilities to relate more meaningfully to the real and the social world. Addictions to such virtualisation leading to loss of human capacities can be more severe and damaging the younger the age at which they begin, and this should be a warning against initiating ICTs too early in the education process, and in inappropriate ways.

Centralisation

One of the biggest challenges would be the ability of ICT to encourage forces for centralized control through the creation of centralized databases that are used for ‘monitoring and control’. One such case can be the creation of large-scale learner assessment results across classes and schools that become available and analyzed to judge performance of teachers across large geographies as states, without factoring in context and history.13 Such judgments under the guise of assessment based reform are possible now with the abilities of large information databases that can centrally store large number of variables and records. These have the potential to distort autonomy and prescribe specific behaviors at local levels that may both narrow and inapt.

The opportunity here, would be to turn the power of information databases to support local autonomy by making relevant information available for local planning, which can be along the lines discussed earlier on ‘Curriculum’ section.

Gender

13 E.g., the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program in the USA Submitted by IT for Change

The issue of “education and information society” has strong special gender connotations - more teachers in the developed world and increasingly in the developing world, are women - as teaching gets constantly devalued as a profession and relative remuneration and work conditions go on the decline, it becomes increasingly a profession for women (like nursing). However most people in the decision-making spaces tend to be men. Policy must consciously seek to have more and more women in positions of curriculum determiners / designers and decision makers as well.

Deskilling

The creation of software and other ICT packages that tout their ability to ‘teach’ and ‘complement’ (replace) the teacher or reduce the ‘skill’ requirements for teachers is another challenge. The authentic tradition of teaching is of the teacher interpreting content / curriculum in the classroom in an autonomous manner and providing an environment wherein children construct their own meaning from the experiences provided. Children in the same classroom are not identical; their needs and contexts are diverse. Their learning goals need too to be interpreted in a contextual manner. However this is increasingly being challenged by very specific instructions to teachers to transact, ostensibly to ensure ‘uniformity in learning’ or ‘ensure minimum levels / standards of quality’, but in reality converting teaching from a highly creative, autonomous professional job to that of a “minor technician”14 who will implement exactly what the administration decides. Teaching is increasingly deskilled into a set of simple detailed instructions that need to be uniformly and universally implemented, in which case, highly qualified individuals are not required and may even be a hindrance.

This process of ‘deskilling’ of teachers has in India gone along with massive recruitment of untrained, unskilled teachers who are poorly paid and have harsher terms of employment – the para teacher or the contract teachers are now the preferred mode of teacher recruitment in many states in India. Anyone with a modicum of pre-service training can handle a classroom, since classroom transactions and methodology have been specified in great detail. This process of deskilling has dangerous implications for the learning process.

In the same way, designating ICTs in education as equivalent to teaching children office automation applications, or even facilitating various ICT-based education packages, is also a significant deskilling process; it reduces learner to a mechanical user of applications. Viewing education from purely a vocational or economic opportunity sense is narrow, since education is to be seen as a broader critical requirement to the processes of democracy itself. In the same manner, viewing ICTs in education as only a means to acquire skills for livelihood opportunities takes away from its power to promote the identity of the active citizen.

Many of the assertions in this document could be far-reaching and may also appear to be a bit far in the future! However, as the building blocks of a new form of society – often termed as the emergence of an information society where new ICTs enable new social, institutional and organisational processes, and therefore transform most of our civilisational systems – it is important to engage with the polices that are laying the basic design of these transformations. In our early policy directions, ICT infrastructure has been pushed as a pre-dominantly business and commercial infrastructure. Even if it is to be used for development, revenue models and financial sustainability have been the first and foremost principle of every ICTD project, distorting all

14 Israel Scheffler in ‘Reason and Education’ Submitted by IT for Change

other development objectives. This thinking is now making some retreat, with the increasing understanding that ICTs are even more importantly a social infrastructure and they have such a fundamental role in many basic and valued social processes that their provision as public goods/ public infrastructure is something that policies should give serious attention to. Such a view of ICTs is obviously important in the area of education, which has for centuries been seen as a public good and a universal right and entitlement.

Conclusion

In our submission on “ICT in education”, we have consciously attempted bring in the ‘public-minded’ egalitarian ideals of education (the domain in question) to the ‘ICTs in education’ models, rather than the dominant private sector oriented and consumerist models of ICTs (which, though they are merely the ‘tools’ here, often determine the ideological basis of the arena).

In an ongoing research study, “Gender and Governance in the IS - A Policy Approach”, IT for Change has discussed the nature of information society policies that have progressive ideals:

“….ICTD polices should aim at providing access to basic ICTs – connectivity, software and content – as a right to all citizens, through public provisioning, without monopolising the sector. ICTs have applications beyond basic social and citizenship needs and rights, and private provisioning will continue to meet these needs. If IS cannot be cast in exclusively private sector market driven mode, it will be as dangerous to develop it in a statist model. IS provides some radically new models of citizenship ownership and control, and to develop these possibilities to their highest potential should be the most important imperative for IS policies.

Beyond the policy imperative to provide access to ICTs as right to all, it is important to focus on (1) enabling conditions – personal, social, cultural and institutional – that allow conversion of mere access to ICTs, to purposeful uses (2) develop corresponding systems of delivering citizen benefits and entitlements – in areas of health, education, governance, livelihood support etc and (3) develop facilities and spaces for community driven development of ICTs – as local applications, local content systems, local media, local information system, local connectivity models etc. Though provided through public funds, these are not prescriptive but facilitative systems representing participative spaces for exercising collective agency for shaping new techno-social constructs in the IS that help us move towards a more equal world.” Submitted by IT for Change 9