Editorial introduction

Abstract

Some time ago, it was commonplace to hear that classrooms and teaching, unlike many other aspects of daily life, had remained largely unchanged throughout the twentieth century: teachers at the front, with chalk (later markers), talking to students sitting in rows, transmitting information they would later be expected to regurgitate. Freire (1999) does not hesitate to name this the ‘banking’ concept of education, predicated on the assumption of the fundamentally passive and didactic nature of teaching and learning in classrooms. By receiving, filing, and storing deposits of information and withdrawing them later, students are considered to perform their duties. How much that has changed is, of course, still subject to debate, but the turn of the 21st century has seen computers and other digital devices progressively taking up more space in classrooms (and, metaphorically, in syllabi, assignments, and teachers’ and students’ lives). Perhaps more significantly, the large-scale entry some might say intrusion of digital communication technologies into classrooms at all levels of instruction has introduced new dynamics, and particularly challenges to magisterial authority. Law professors’ interpretations may be questioned by googling students, and high school teachers must deal with students’ surreptitious in-class texting and gaming. Freire argues that if we believe that knowledge emerges through invention and reinvention, our view of knowledge as ‘motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable (p. 67)’ needs to be challenged. He claims, instead, that knowledge is ‘restless, impatient and continuing (p. 68)’, which new technologies have enormous potential to supply to classrooms (Freire & Macedo, 1998). For example, the advent of networked technologies, accessible to millions of people, and the availability of information on a scale surpassing any library in history, have set the stage for a dispersed wave of unprecedented curricular innovation, away from the historic centres of industrial and colonial power. The rapid pace of technological change has also left many educators lagging far behind their students’ abilities to learn and utilise though not necessarily take the best advantage of the latest devices and applications. Classroom teachers around the world will attest to the difficulties these developments present to teaching, as it was known throughout most of the past century.