Sunday, November 11, 2012

Critical Theory Reflection


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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