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A New Role in Facilitating School Reform:
The Case of the Educational Technologist by Judith Davidson - 2003School reform advocates have been frustrated over the slow pace of integrating
proposed school improvements, hypothesizing that the resiliency of established roles
contributes much to the conserving tendencies of educational institutions. In seeking
to understand this issue, the school reform movement has paid close attention to
established roles, such as teachers and principals, and the issues these individuals face
as they seek to address change. They have paid relatively little attention, however, to
the emergence of new roles. The educational technologist (ET) is a role that is
growing rapidly within schools in conjunction with the widespread adoption of
networked technology. Looking back over 6 years of research data from a qualitative
research study of networked technology integration in one K–12 system, the author
examines the emergence of the ET role from the classical sociological perspectives of
social structure, space, and time and its relationship to the cluster of core positions.
This study demonstrates the importance of role to school reform issues, indicating that
it can be used as a critical lens for understanding the progress of reform and the
nature of technology integration.To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Judith Davidson
University of Massachusetts at Lowell
E-mail Author
JUDITH DAVIDSON is an assistant professor in the Leadership in
Schooling Program of the Graduate School of Education at the University
of Massachusetts at Lowell. She is a qualitative researcher with interest in
the ways educators manage change in varying educational settings. The
author of Living Reading: Exploring the Lives of Reading Teachers, an
ethnographic study of reading teachers and the ways they construct literacy
within their professional organizations, she has recently completed research
that focuses on technology integration K–12 as systemic reform. Using data
from this study, the Hessen Model School Partnership, in ‘‘A New Role in
Facilitating School Reform: The Case of the Educational Technologist’’
Davidson uses the classical sociological tools of role, time, and space to
examine the ways that a new school role is formed (the educational
technologist) and the impact that the process of formation has on the
traditional structure of school roles. In this article the author demonstrates
the critical nature of role formation processes in school reform initiatives
and suggests that a richer understanding of these processes would have
benefit to those engaged with reform implementation, as well as those
concerned with measuring the penetration of reform initiatives.
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