Two questions from our
group stuck out to me and made me really think about how the two were connected
and also gets at the heart of critical theory. The first question was focused
from chapter 7 of the Feenberg book. In this chapter, Feeberg states that
“societies are not transformed by political events such as revolutions, but
evolve toward new forms in the spaces opened by those events.” The question brought to the group was if we
think this is true, and the answer is yes for the majority of the time. It
seems recently there has been revolutions that because of social injustices and
economic troubles have caused uprisings in the middle east known as the Arab
Spring. Outside of the middle east in the United States the statement holds true
and can be seen in today’s political landscape. Most changes do not occur
through revolution and political uprising, but through interest convergence
with the people in power, that causes changes to system. An example of this can
be seen, as I stated earlier, through the recent election and the aftermath of
the Republican presidential candidate. Over the next election cycle, there will
be a fundamental shift in the parties’ platform, or overt platform. The
demographics of the nation has shifted and has started to impact the elections
and will continue to impact elections. Republicans do not want to continue the
streak of losing the presidency based on these demographics so the people in
power will start to shift away from policies that alienate the demographics
that they intend to reach out too. This way they can still stay in power, but
they do have to shift their policies to account for the change in demographics.
This is not political revolution, but is based on interests of the people who
are voting. Once the people in power have a reason to listen in order to stay
in power then things will start to change. This occurs in daily life outside of
politics as well, and in educational settings interest around how to integrate
effective technology to help all students.
This goes along with
the second question that we each brought into for our group and that was what
does critical theory have to do with educational technology? I will build off
of my previous argument and that is that change does not unless there is
interest convergence. There has to be enough interest to cause the change or
change will not happen. Critical Theory looks to start the process or to point
out the inequalities that are occurring. For example, in educational technology
if we think technology is great and revolutionary, we will miss the unintended
consequences and we will miss the students who the technology is a hindrance on
their educational attainment. Critical theory seeks to bring attention to these
issue in order for people in the field and general public to be aware of
inequities. This develops interest and will hopefully spur change because as we
have seen change only occurs when enough interest is put on the topic. In
educational technology this is beneficial in that it seems everything that
comes a long is going to revolutionize education with little to no thought being given to if it helps
everyone or not.
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