Transforming teaching and learning: embedding ICT into everyday classroom practices

Transforming teaching and learning: embeddingICT into everyday classroom practicesR. Sutherland�, V. Armstrong�, S. Barnes�, R. Brawn�, N. Breeze�, M. Gall�, S. Matthewman�,F. Olivero�, A. Taylor�, P. Triggs�, J. Wishart� & P. Johnw�Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

wFaculty of Education, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

Abstract Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper describes how teams of teachers and researchers

have developed ways of embedding information and communications technology (ICT) into

everyday classroom practices to enhance learning. The focus is on teaching and learning

across a range of subjects: English, history, geography, mathematics, modern foreign lan-

guages, music and science. The influence of young people’s out-of-school uses of ICT on in-

school learning is discussed. The creative tension between idiosyncratic and institutional

knowledge construction is emphasised and we argue that this is exacerbated by the use of

ICT in the classroom.

Keywords: culture, ICT, learning, subject knowledge, teaching

Introduction

This paper focuses on teaching and learning with in-

formation and communications technology (ICT)

across a range of subjects, drawing on the research of

the InterActive Education Project.1 Teachers and re-

searchers have worked together within the project to

develop and evaluate learning initiatives that focus on

particular areas of the curriculum that students might

normally find difficult and where a particular use of

ICT could enhance learning. The idea is to use ICT

that is readily available in schools and yet under-uti-

lised. The project was predicated on the view that ICT

alone does not enhance learning. How ICT is in-

corporated into learning activities is what is important.

In our original research proposal we stated that:

Despite three decades of government initiatives andacademic research, the use of information and com-munications technology (ICT) in teaching and learningremains only partially understood by educationalists

and inconsistently practised in schools (Goldstein1997). Alongside the government’s current d1billioncommitment to increasing educational use of ICT(DfEE 1997) has come stringent criticism that there isnot enough rigorous research evidence to support thecurrent massive investment in new technologies inschools (Lynch 1999) and, that practitioners are notdrawing on research evidence when it does exist. It isthese two fundamental concerns of educational ICT thatthe InterActive Education Project has aimed to address.(Sutherland et al. 1999).

We also argued that although there is an extensive

research base on teaching and learning ‘without ICT’

which could inform teaching and learning ‘with ICT’,

(for example Greeno et al. 1996; Bransford et al.

1999), such research has not systematically been

drawn upon by policy makers when developing cur-

ricula and guidelines for teachers on how to use ICT in

the classroom. There is a tendency to think that ICT is

so ‘new’ that its use will be accompanied by ‘new’

pedagogies that will somehow transform teaching and

learning. This utopian vision often leads policy makers

and practitioners to ignore general theoretical per-

spectives about teaching and learning, which in

our view are central to all learning, with or without

ICT.

Correspondence: R. Sutherland, Graduate School of Education,

University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

Accepted: 10 August 2004

1http://www.interactiveeducation.ac.uk

& Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20, pp413–425 413

SPECIAL SECTION

The project has five strands that as we weave them

together are making a complex picture of ICT in

education. Each strand looks at ICT in relation to a

specific aspect: teaching and learning, policy and

management, subject cultures, professional develop-

ment and learners’ out-of-school uses of ICT. This

paper reports on the teaching and learning strand of

the project with other papers in this volume reporting

on policy and management (Dale et al. 2004), pro-

fessional development and learners’ (Triggs & John

2004) out-of-school uses of ICT (Kent & Facer 2004).

We conjectured from the outset that subject

knowledge was likely to be an inextricable part of the

situated and mediated aspect of learning, and for this

reason organised the project around the following

subject areas: English, modern foreign languages,

music, science, mathematics, history and geography.

This has enabled us to compare the embedding of ICT

across a range of school subjects. For each subject,

teams of researchers and teachers worked together to

design learning initiatives,2 with the English, music

and mathematics teams working across the primary and

secondary sectors, and the other teams working within

the secondary sector only. The subject design teams

(referred to as SDTs) worked together as whole groups

at the University and in smaller teacher–researcher

pairings (usually within a teacher’s school). Teachers

were funded for 15 days over a period of 2 years to

work within the project. Additionally, six of the 54

teachers were successful in obtaining teacher–re-

searcher scholarships that enabled them to devote more

than the allocated 15 days to working within the project.

Each teacher, working within their subject design

team, developed a subject design initiative (referred to

as SDIs) that focused on embedding ICT into a small

area of the curriculum. Design was informed by the-

ory, research-based evidence, teacher’s craft knowl-

edge and feedback from members of the subject

design team. A key aspect of this work involved an

iterative process of design and re-design. Feedback on

student learning was provided by digital video re-

cordings of classroom interactions, together with stu-

dents’ work and interviews with students. This data

allowed us to tease out the ways in which the parti-

cular ICT environments used by the teacher and stu-

dents enhanced or detracted from the intended

learning.3 Teachers were involved in the process of

viewing the video data and in some cases teachers also

became involved in the analysis and writing up of the

research. This process of working together has been

documented more fully in Triggs and John (2004).

We begin with a brief discussion of the socio-cul-

tural theory that framed the work of the teaching and

learning strand of the project. We then expand this

framework by focusing in more detail on classroom

cultures and out-of-school informal learning with ICT.

We highlight how effective teaching and learning with

ICT involves finding ways of building bridges be-

tween ‘individual and idiosyncratic’ and ‘institutional’

knowledge, following this with examples drawn from

the project data. Finally, we conclude by discussing

the relative roles of digital and non-digital tools in

teaching and learning.

Theoretical framework

The work of the InterActive Education Project is si-

tuated within a theoretical perspective on teaching and

learning that draws mainly from socio-cultural the-

ories of learning (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1991;

Wertsch et al. 2003). An important aspect of socio-

cultural theory is the claim that all human action is

mediated by tools. We interpret the idea of tool to

incorporate a wide range of artefacts (for example pen,

paper, book, computer), semiotic systems (for ex-

ample language, graphs, diagrams), social interaction

(for example group work) and institutional structures

2The following table presents an overview of the number of teachers and

researchers working within each subject design team:

No. of

researchers

No. of

teachers

English 3 6 (primary) 8 (secondary)

Mathematics 3 3 (primary) 9 (secondary)

Modern Foreign Languages 1 9 (secondary)

History 2 5 (secondary)

Music 2 2 (primary) 4 (secondary)

Science 3 8 (secondary)

3Authors of this paper have been responsible for detailed analysis of

video and interview data from specific design initiatives that were car-

ried out with partner teachers. This has involved viewing and analysing

video data from multiple perspectives that relate to the overall aims and

theoretical orientation of the project. The paper was written as a colla-

borative online process with electronic drafts of the paper being circu-

lated to all authors and critical feedback being incorporated into the

paper in an ongoing process.

414 R. Sutherland et al.

& Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20, pp413–425

(for example national educational policy). Within this

context, the ‘master tool’ is natural language that is

central to all human activity (Cole & Engestrom

1993). Within this framework, the idea of person-

acting-with-mediational-means (Wertsch 1991) both

expands the view of what a person can do and also

suggests that a person might be constrained by their

situated and mediated action.

Socio-cultural theory (as the name suggests) fore-

grounds the cultural aspects of human action. There

are several aspects of culture that are important to take

into account. Firstly, the teacher and students work

within a local classroom culture that is influenced by

both national and global factors (Dale et al. 2004).

Within this context, students bring to the classroom a

history of learning experiences that relate to their

previous cultures of learning both inside and outside

schools. This is particularly important when ICT is

being used in the classroom because there is increas-

ing evidence that the ways in which young people (and

teachers) use ICT at school are influenced by out-of-

school cultures of use (Facer et al. 2003; Kent & Facer

2004). Secondly, any technological tool has been de-

veloped within a particular socio-cultural setting and

carries with it the provenance of this culture. PowerPoint,

for instance, was developed primarily for use within a

business context and the preset templates can push wri-

ters towards business genres of presentation. However,

ICT tools are not static and continue to be re-designed as

their use within different communities evolves.

Socio-cultural theory also emphasises the fact that

students actively construct knowledge drawing on

what they already know and believe (Vygotsky 1978).

From this point of view students (and teachers) bring

implicit theories and perspectives to any new learning

situation and these influence what they pay attention to

and thus the knowledge they construct. Within this

context, the teacher has an important role in that

‘appropriately arranged contrasts can help people no-

tice new features that previously escaped their atten-

tion and learn which features are relevant or irrelevant

to a new concept’ (Bransford et al. 1999, p. 48).

Classroom cultures

Within the project, we recognised from the outset that

learning events in school are situated within a set of

overlapping cultures, which relate to both top-down

and bottom-up influences. Top-down influences tend

to be formalised and normative and include the school

culture, subject culture, the National Curriculum and

the national assessment structure that in turn are being

influenced by more global factors such as the OECD4

(Dale et al. 2004). Bottom-up influences are more

informal and include young people outside school

cultures (Facer et al. 2003; Kent & Facer 2004), their

personal histories of learning and the teacher’s own

personal history of learning (Triggs & John 2004). For

example, from our ongoing analysis of data it is clear

that the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies in

England and Wales5 had a significant influence on the

thinking and practice of the mathematics and English

teachers. Observation and analysis of data indicate

that these teachers worked within the strategy frame-

work that consisted broadly of opening plenary, in-

dividual/group work and final plenary (see for

example Mills 2004). This structured episodic ap-

proach was adopted in the face of the dominant

espoused ethos of individualised and small group work

patterns that were prevalent in English and mathe-

matics classrooms prior to the introduction of the

National Strategies. The move to more template-style

lessons also brought with it an emphasis on the

teaching of basic mathematical skills, while in English

lessons there was a similar shift in emphasis away

from the development of individual writing processes

to a stronger emphasis on teaching the rules of

grammar and the understanding of genres.

Our theoretical perspective has given us the capa-

city to re-conceptualise these National Strategies as

mediating tools that can constrain or enhance (or both)

a teacher’s way of working. For example, some

teachers worked very creatively with the National

Strategy (person-acting-with-mediational-means) to

develop SDIs that incorporated the use of ICT in ways

that enhanced students’ learning. These teachers ten-

ded to adapt the particular strategy so as to follow a

rhythm of whole-class and individual work which

fitted their own tacit understandings of student learn-

ing; this process enabled them to integrate ICT into

4Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (http://

www.oecd.org).

5For information on the National Numeracy Strategy see http://

www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/numeracy/, for information on the National

Literacy Strategy see http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/

Transforming teaching and learning 415


their pedagogical practice so that it supported learn-

ing. Other teachers, however, were more constrained

by the strategies and were more compliant. As a result,

whole-class and individual work became more for-

mulaic and many teachers were not able to respond

contingently to student learning opportunities.

Whereas within any particular school similar local,

national and international cultures may be influencing

what happens in the classroom, we have increasingly

become aware that different subject cultures impact

differently on how ICT is used in the classroom

(Goodson & Mangen 1995; John & La Velle in press).

For instance, many of the science teachers in the

project appeared to be working in a particular cultural

context that militated against the integration of ICT

into the teaching and learning of science. It is im-

portant to understand these phenomena within the

overall context of school science in England (no at-

tempt to generalise to school science in other countries

is made). Science lessons in England have for many

years been structured around core activities that are

often practical in nature. This relates both to the idea

that an experimental approach promotes ‘discovery

learning’ and that developing an experimental ap-

proach is at the core of what it means to ‘do science’.

These approaches were built from the curricular re-

form movements of the 1970s that blended con-

structivism and particular scientific epistemologies.

From the late 1980s onwards, however, this commit-

ment to practical discovery was increasingly being

bound to a new curriculum content as the National

Curriculum and its assessment structures began to take

shape. Finally the ingrained focus on student safety in

science also appeared to inhibit the creative use of

ICT, which requires a flexible approach for success.

The melding of these issues has led to a series of

questions that surround the teaching of science and its

relationship to ICT. Most notably, should the science

teacher bring experimental equipment into the com-

puter room or move computers into the lab? How

might science teachers monitor both the use of ICT

and experimental equipment with a typical class of 30

students? Some have argued that such problems may

ease with the increased uses of mobile, wireless

computers or hand-held computers. However, we be-

lieve there is a real tension between integrating ICT

into the teaching and learning of science when the

only technology available is the desktop computer,

particularly when these are organised in a computer

suite that is shared with other subjects.

In contrast, the majority of project mathematics

teachers were able to incorporate ICT more smoothly

into the teaching and learning of mathematics (for

example, Godwin & Sutherland 2004; Mills 2004;

Sutherland et al. 2004) with many of them choosing to

use hand-held or otherwise portable technologies ra-

ther than make use of a computer suite. Software for

learning mathematics has been developed over a re-

latively long period in contrast to other subjects and

there is a wealth of research and development on the

use of ICT for learning mathematics.6 So although it is

still the case that the vast majority of mathematics

teachers in the UK are not integrating ICT into their

teaching (Somekh et al. 2002), the project mathe-

matics teachers were supported by a legacy of use that

enabled them to be more confident in their design

experiments. In other subjects, these technological

legacies varied from the more techno-phobic histor-

ians to the more techno-positive musicians. However,

across the project there was a diversity of activity.

Many of the English teachers (Triggs & Scott-Cook

2002; Matthewman et al. 2004; Sutch 2004), music

teachers (Gall & Breeze 2003) and modern foreign

language teachers (Taylor & Cole 2002) all developed

productive ways of integrating ICT into their subject

teaching. While the work in history and geography

was more patchy (Morgan & Tidmarsh 2004).

The results of the project also highlighted a number

of similarities and differences in the culture of teach-

ing and learning between primary and secondary

schools. The majority of project primary teachers were

able to create communities of inquiry where students

and teachers used a range of ICT tools to co-construct

knowledge. This might be due in part to the view that

primary teachers do not see themselves as experts in a

particular subject domain and so are more likely to

favour a co-construction of knowledge approach.

However, as we discuss later in the paper, the im-

portance of subject-knowledge expertise should not be

underestimated, particularly in the ways in which

teachers are able to use their knowledge to lead stu-

dents into increasingly sophisticated knowledge do-

6See for example the journal Micromath (http://mcs.open.ac.uk/cme/

Micromath/) that is written for teachers, and The International Journal of

Computers for Mathematical Learning (http://www.kluweronline.com).



mains, for example, data handling and statistics (Mills

2004), and spelling and language (Sutch 2004).

Whereas some secondary teachers (Weeden 2002)

also worked in this way, there were other instances

where secondary teachers appeared to feel the pressure

of being knowledge providers as opposed to being a

knowledgeable resource within a broader community

of learners. We conjecture that this may be linked to

the curricular content and coverage demand being

made on secondary teachers combined with traditional

subject sub-cultural attitudes.

In one history SDI, for instance, the teacher despite

being technologically able had problems breaking

from a particular conception of the subject. At the

outset he asserted that he was ‘good at talking to kids

and telling a story’. This appeared to be somewhat at

odds with his extensive work with computers, a con-

text that tends to reduce the levels of teacher talk. He

reconciled these two views by spending time at the

beginning of each of his lessons with computers ad-

dressing the whole class, away from the machines. He

was, however, concerned about the use of ICT in

teaching history, identifying it as the ‘the tail wagging

the teaching dog’. He questioned whether or not

learning, which he defined as ‘involving the brain’,

might be inhibited by ICT which he thought might

encourage a ‘by-passing of the brain’. In the lessons

observed, the teacher therefore tended to expose the

students to instructions and content, but gave little or

no help in how to manage the collaborative and his-

tory-related aspect of the work. It may have been that

an assumption was made that the computer would act

as the third voice, the ersatz teacher, and that some-

how when working with computers, students would

either know what to do, or would be motivated to find

out. This SDI revealed that for some subject areas and

for some teachers, ICT was a Trojan Horse, secretly

bringing in new approaches to learning that conflicted

with the deep grammar of the subject.

In the vignettes above, we have tried to highlight the

complexity of the cultural influences that impact on

teaching and learning with ICT in the classroom. We

suggest that these dynamic influences have to be un-

derstood in order to begin to develop adequate policy

for integrating ICT into subject teaching. In the next

section we introduce another factor that impacts on

learning with ICT in the classroom, namely out-of-

school informal learning with ICT.

Out-of-school informal learning with ICT

An important aspect of any dynamic classroom culture

is the multi-cultural influences that each individual

student and teacher brings to the classroom. This has

been particularly evident in English classrooms where

young people are increasingly influenced by their out-

of-school production of multi-media texts. For ex-

ample, when students were producing websites at John

Cabot City Technology College (Matthewman et al.

2004), they drew on both the ideas being presented by

their teachers and their out-of-school experiences. One

group produced a website about their favourite band,

working on this out-of-lessons and out-of-school and

then presenting their website to the teacher in class time.

Another group benefited from a particular student’s

prior experience in website design that enabled them to

manage and select the images and information they had

researched independently. Importantly, all the students

were familiar with managing files, downloading images,

using e-mail and word processing; however, it was not

just the experience of producing multi-media texts that

was significant. It became apparent that outside school,

students are immersed in a visual culture (Goodwyn

2000; Kress 2000) and interviews with students taking

part in this particular design initiative indicate that their

extensive experience of browsing the Web was brought

to bear on their in-class Web designs.

In music also, students frequently come to the

classroom with a wealth of knowledge and awareness

of styles of music; in many cases exceeding their

teachers’ knowledge in particular areas. Some music

software packages (for example, Fruity Loops, Acids

Xpress and Dance eJayt) enabled students to com-

pose within various contemporary styles of music that

are clearly important in young peoples’ social and

cultural lives. The results of the music design in-

itiatives indicate that this can lead to increased moti-

vation and engagement in school. Some teachers

recognised the benefits of this exploratory style of

learning in music and viewed these classroom situa-

tions as opportunities for them to learn from the stu-

dents rather than vice versa. Others, however, were

more fearful believing that their own lack of knowl-

edge might become apparent to the students leading to

situations where they could not give adequate support.

In mathematics there was also evidence that out-of-

school uses of ICT were impacting on learning in the



classroom. For example, when Simon Mill’s Year 4

(age 8–9) class were investigating the distribution of

colours in packets of smarties, using Excel to represent

the data in both tabular and graphical form (Mills

2004), it soon became apparent that some of the stu-

dents in the class knew how to manipulate Excel,

although this had never been taught at school. Sub-

sequent interviews with students also revealed out-of-

school experience of using Excel.

Int: Do either of you use Excel at home (Alan shakeshead)?

Ray: Sometimes. My Dad uses it for his paper work.Int: And when you use it what do you use it for?Ray: Umm, he uses it, cos when he’s got paper cal-

culations and some are hard like for him, he putsit in Excel and then he puts, he circles it and thenpresses the equal button and it tells him what thesums are.

Int: What do you use it for?Ray: Maths homework.Alan:Cheat

Results of the teacher questionnaire administered to all

teachers in the project schools and interviews with

partner teachers indicate that the majority of teachers

are not aware of the nature and extent of students’

expertise that relates to their out-of-school uses of

ICT. For example in the 2003 questionnaire adminis-

tered to teachers in the project schools 79% of teachers

(n5 229) underestimated the computer ownership of

91% revealed by the student questionnaire. Teachers

also tend to be unaware of the knowledge students

have of curriculum areas and by default, the sorts of

input they might have in lessons. This is actually not a

new phenomenon but is arguably exacerbated by ICT.

We suggest that if teachers can find ways of draw-

ing upon the distributed expertise of all the students in

a class, then the learning of the whole class can be

enhanced. If, on the other hand, the use of ICT in the

classroom is accompanied by a focus on in-

dividualised learning, as advocated by many policy

makers, then this potential to turn a class into a

learning community where the whole is greater than

the sum of the parts could be lost.

Creative tensions: individual and common knowledge

Accompanying the introduction of computers into

schools there has always been an implicit assumption

that this investment in hardware will somehow be

accompanied by a reduction in expenditure on tea-

chers. This relates to the idea of individualised

learning alluded to above, in which each student will

learn almost effortlessly through interaction with a

computer. Sutherland (2003) has argued that in the

case of mathematics education in the UK, computers

were often viewed as an extension of individualised

textbook learning schemes, by-passing the teacher

who was considered to be the cause rather than the

cure of students’ misconceptions in mathematics. This

view still prevails in many policy documents where

the rhetoric of individualised learning is still domi-

nant. There is strong evidence in the field of mathe-

matics education, at least, that such a vision leads to

the learning of individual and idiosyncratic knowledge

that cannot be used or communicated in more general

social situations. For example, within the InterActive

Education Project when 10–11 year-old primary stu-

dents were learning about the properties of quad-

rilaterals through interacting with a dynamic geometry

environment, all of the students initially wrote ‘in-

formal properties’ on the screen as the following ex-

ample illustrates: it has four sides, they are like a train

track, they are parallel, they are equal, it does not have

any right angles, it is the colour turquoise, and it

cannot be a diamond. This could have been predicted

in advance from our theoretical perspective and relates

to students’ previous experiences and lives. We also

know that this is likely to be the case in science

learning (Leach & Scott 2003) with or without ICT. It

is all the more remarkable therefore that developments

in simulation software in science do not appear to be

taking into account this perspective on learning. As

Jewitt (2003) has convincingly shown there are many

ways of reading computer-based simulations of sci-

ence experiments and a lack of understanding of the

‘informal’ readings that students are likely to bring

from their out-of-school uses of game software will

lead to poorly designed science software that could

provoke students to develop alternative frameworks

from those intended by a science teacher. As we

continue to analyse the video data from the project

we are investigating the nature and extent of the gap

between students’ initial informal perspectives devel-

oped through interaction with an ICT environment and

what a teacher considers to be an appropriate perspec-

tive from a subject knowledge point of view. Con-

structivist theories of learning emphasise the importance



of drawing on this informal knowledge, but suggest that

the shift from informal to more formal ways of knowing

will happen almost spontaneously. Socio-cultural the-

ories of learning also emphasise the importance of

drawing on this informal knowing but point to the role

of more-knowledgeable-others in this respect.

There is a paradox here, because it is individual

engagement with ICT that energises students. But it is

also this individual engagement that is likely to lead to

idiosyncratic knowledge construction. Interestingly,

this seems to be the case whether the software is more

open-ended and exploratory or more closed and con-

tent-driven and this relates to humans as constructors

(and not receivers) of knowledge. For example, in a

science classroom when the teachers and students

were working with rather content-focused simulation

software, created principally as a teaching, rather than

a learning tool, students engaged by moving between

different simulations and topics, as opposed to focusing

on one simulation. We suggest that this exploratory

practice is likely to have drawn on young people’s out-

of-school practices of using ICT and in particular their

use of games software. We also suggest that this ex-

ploratory practice is an important aspect of learning but

one that is at odds with the expectation of this particular

simulation software, where students were expected to

work in a more linear fashion.

Developing a balance of whole-class and in-

dividual/group work seems to be a key aspect of

productive integration of ICT into school subjects.

This was evident across all subjects. For example, at

Colstons Primary School, students used a simple se-

quencing package to produce a composition to fit a

given brief. While much of the time was spent work-

ing in pairs at separate computers, the students were

encouraged to talk to nearby classmates and allowed

to move to view others as they worked. This not only

enabled students to learn new composition ideas but

also to get help with technical issues. Furthermore,

many opportunities were provided for sharing work in

progress: at various points in the lesson the teacher

included plenary sessions in which students regrouped

near a specific computer to listen to work and offer

ideas for further development.

What seems to be emerging is the importance of

finding mechanisms for students to present their work

for critical feedback from others as a way of shifting

emphasis from individual knowledge to collective and

shared knowledge. Some subjects, music for example,

have more of a tradition of such a practice. In music,

students are often offered opportunities to share their

work, in process and as final performances, to the

whole class, at the end of a project. All the music

teachers in the project SDIs continued this practice

within their work, even when they were using com-

puters for the first time. Many of the English teachers

also incorporated an element of critical feedback from

students into their SDIs (Matthewman et al. 2004;

Sutch 2004). Some of the mathematics teachers within

the project also worked in this way.7 For example,

when Marnie Weeden worked with 13–14-year-old

students on learning about proof and geometry she

explicitly built a process of sharing ongoing work into

her SDI (Weeden 2002; Sutherland et al. 2004). This

impacted on learning as these mathematics students

explained when they were interviewed:

If I was just doing it, I probably wouldn’t have gotanywhere, but knowing that we had to present made medo it.

The fact that we were sharing, put in a competitionelement into the investigation plus we were able tocompare what we had found out. It was a group effortso when a group found out about something anothergroup could continue from there.

It kinda made you work more because you knew youhad to show something at the end of it. If you don’thave to show it, what’s the point of working hard at it?

This collective work brings to the forefront for critical

discussion by the whole-class key subject area ques-

tions: what constitutes adequate mathematics, ade-

quate science and adequate history? We argue that

collective and critical discussion supports students to

enter the ‘inner world’ of a school subject. It is clear in

the case of mathematical proof, for instance, that

students are unlikely to discover spontaneously what

constitutes this very particular practice through their

own informal investigations. Rather, they have to be

inducted into this practice. Within each subject there

7Some of the project mathematics teachers have been influenced by the

work of Hungarian mathematics teachers, For example teachers at John

Cabot City Technology College use MEP mathematics (http://

www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/mep). Marnie Weedon was trained on the University

of Bristol PGCE course (http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/programmes/

pgce/course/maths) and each year PGCE students exchange visits with

Hungarian mathematics teachers.



will also be different and possibly competing views

about what constitutes ‘the subject’. All teachers bring

to the classroom a view about this – views that are

often tacit, historical and experiential. These implicit

theories of their subject may be influenced, in part, by

what is specified in the National Curriculum but are

more likely to be affected by each teacher’s ‘personal

curriculum’ (Gudmunsdotir 2000).

The interactive whiteboard has a potential role to

play in conjoining the teacher’s ‘personal curriculum’

to the knowledge of students in classroom settings.

This piece of technology was exploited successfully

by several teachers in the InterActive Project. Non-

digital whiteboards likewise have considerable po-

tential in this area (Godwin & Sutherland 2004).

Another way of constructing a ‘common knowledge

community’ is highlighted by the work of Simon Mills

at Teyfant School. He is experimenting with digital

photography and ways of incorporating such resources

into PowerPoint so that collective and whole-class

work can be better exhibited (Mills 2004).

Despite this reservoir of ‘common knowledge’ made

up as it is of teacher and student ideas and expertise,

students still perceive the teacher as the knowledge

provider because of the inherited traditions of school-

ing. However, within this pool of knowledge there are

likely to be some students who are actually more

knowledgeable about using software than the teacher.

The example of music sequencing software is a case in

point. In such instances, the creative teacher will always

find ways of drawing upon this pool of expertise.

How then can we conceptualise the role of the

teacher when integrating ICT into their subject

teaching? Much has been written about the use of ICT

in changing the role of the teacher from ‘teller’ to

‘facilitator’. We are particularly concerned about this

rather over-simplified polarisation of the teacher’s

role. We view the teacher’s role as involving a com-

plex shifting of perspectives from the ‘more-knowl-

edgeable-other’, to the co-constructor of knowledge,

to the vicarious participant. In this sense a teacher is

analogous to the first violin8 in an orchestra – some-

times leading, sometimes playing-with and sometimes

being silent. As discussed already, a socio-cultural

perspective recognises the fact that each student brings

their own personal history of learning to any new

learning situation. This diversity of student experience

might appear to be an almost impossible challenge for

the teacher, but as our research shows, ‘creative’ tea-

chers are experienced at bringing together these dif-

ferences to orchestrate a whole – one that is far greater

than the sum of its parts.

Integrating ICT into subject cultures

How then can teachers integrate ICT tools into their

everyday teaching to transform learning? We would

argue that it is important to understand and unpack the

inter-related cultural influences that both enhance and

constrain what is possible. We have started to explore

these issues in the previous sections of this paper and

can begin to see how important it is to consider both

the subject culture, the culture of the school sector and

to understand this within national educational cultures.

We also suggest that it is important to understand the

ways in which ICT can be productively integrated into

subject learning and will begin to tease out the char-

acteristics of constructive uses of ICT within the fol-

lowing section of the paper.

When ICT was effectively embedded within a

subject, project teachers embraced learning for them-

selves and used ICT tools to transform their own

knowledge of their subject areas and develop, expand

and adjust their teaching repertoire. This is illustrated

by the way in which Paul Taylor (from Cotham Sec-

ondary School) used Cubase VST 5.1 to enable a

mixed ability Year 9 class to explore the relationship

between film and music. He designed a template for

students to use, which contained prepared musical

cliches, that had to be synchronised with a film that

was placed on each computer so that it could be

8The metaphor of playing a violin could be extended to think about what

it means to be a person-acting-with-mediational-means ‘Take a string

instrument. You could analyse it by saying, my pinkie, when on the bow,

has this kind of pressure, and at the same time my thumb is doing this

and then each finger is kind of moving in an independent choreography,

etc. At some point when you’re learning the violin, you do isolate each

finger and the arm, but the reason the violin is so wonderful is it takes

these many, many different motions and weights and activities that can

all be integrated, are all coordinated. I mean, you’re moving this arm like

this. At the point that you play the violin, the last thing you want to do is

think about the arm separately. You learn little by little the way it feels to

have all of these actions coordinated, and in some magical way – well

it’s not so magical, it’s the way we do everything in the world – you

think about everything together. You don’t think about the angle of your

wrist and the pressure here and the speed there as being separate. You

can’t think of them separately.’ (Ted Machover, http://newmusicbox.

org/first-person/oct99/interview6.html).



viewed at the same time as the musical template. In

pairs students were asked not only to simply arrange

the fragments of music but also to cut, copy and paste

them appropriately. In addition, they were required to

compose their own sections to fit the film. In this in-

itiative, the ICT offered new possibilities for students

to compose within a new genre and with a wider range

of sounds than are normally available within a music

classroom. Another example of teachers engaging

with new genres and transforming their own knowl-

edge came from English. Chris Davies and Adrian

Blight (John Cabot City Technology College) ex-

perimented with hypertext as a way of enhancing

students’ literary understanding. Year 10 students

constructed a revision website about their examination

text Of Mice and Men. They were able to synthesise

class teaching, individual research and a variety of

textual resources through group collaboration. Stu-

dents reported enhanced understanding of the

text as well as satisfaction with the process of teaching

and learning. In a similar way Year 13 students pro-

duced a website about First World War literature.

This activity was designed to encourage students to

make links between contexts and texts and to

connect ideas and themes across texts. Analysis of

students’ essays after the SDI showed increased

instances of linking out to context and linking between

texts.

Within the successful cases, teachers used the re-

sources of the researcher and teacher-members of their

subject design team to generate ideas for embedding

ICT into teaching and learning and to scaffold their

classroom work. The following quote begins to ex-

plain why Ellie Coombs, a mathematics teacher from

John Cabot City Technology College, valued this way

of working with the University team.

I really enjoyed having the meeting with you two [re-searchers at the University], it gave me so many ideas.

[. . .] What did I enjoy? . . . not having the attention onme, but having the attention on my lesson and myplanning was just really nice.

And that was really nice to just be able to bounce ideasoff somebody else. Because I think you are quite iso-lated when you are a teacher, you are in the classroomon your own and you do your own things in a way, notthat in-depth because people don’t have time in school.And I really enjoyed that aspect of it. And just that youwere coming up with lots of new things thatI hadn’t thought of. And as well I really felt that yougave me a lot of confidence in trying out differentthings and you were just like ‘Yeah go ahead andjust do it’.

Successful cases capitalised on the potential of ICT to

provide rapid feedback that supports the construction

of knowledge. This is illustrated by the way in which

Ellie used a dynamic software package in mathematics

to support students to ‘see’ the effects of a negative

scale factor, a property that students would normally

find very difficult.

Sam and Nabil construct Fig. 1a in Cabri and startchanging the scale factor.

Nabil: Ehi Sam look at this! Sam, it turns around! (Fig. 1b)

Because it’s going minus isn’t it so it goes the other

way .. so it . . . if say .. if we . . . wow!

Sam: Move that one.

Nabil: This one?

Nabil changes the scale factor instead. The trans-

formed figure disappears from the screen.

Nabil: It’s running away Sam! It’s running away!

(Fig. 1c)

Ellie: Oh, it’s running away! That was an interesting thing.

What happens when you do a negative?

Nabil: It goes the opposite way.

Ellie: It goes the opposite way. Cool. Yes, when it’s ne-

gative. Do a negative again so that we can see it a bit

better. It turns upside down, doesn’t it?

So you can really comment on that. That’s what I

meant by orientation, because it does not stay the

same way around. Well done boys!

Fig. 1 (a–c) Feedback from a mathematics software package concerning negative scaling.



Successful cases also supported students to engage for

sustained periods of time in activities that related to

what the teacher intended to teach. This is illustrated

by the way in which Elizabeth Lazarus and Ruth Cole

(Sir Bernard Lovell School) used ICT in German

lessons to transform students writing and to heighten

their awareness of grammar. These teachers used

drop-down menus in Word to construct writing

frames9 that enabled students to write within a pre-

designed template that both structured their writing

and allowed for creative writing within the free-space

textboxes (Taylor & Cole 2002). Another example of

the way in which students used word processors came

from history, where ICT slowly became incorporated

into the accepted subject culture. This was all the more

pertinent given the long-standing scepticism towards

technology that exists within the humanities. As Bar-

nett (1994) points out too often school curriculum

structures and traditions ‘confirm technology as a

ghetto for ingenious, specialist tinkerers, and the Hu-

manities as the natural home for anti-technologists.’

Within this SDI Alan Reid was slowly inducted into

the use of word processing techniques so that his Year

10 GCSE class might improve the quality of their

writing and analysis. Although the approach was what

Counsell (2003) terms ‘a low convergence’ activity it

did provide us with enough leverage to see whether

changes in Alan’s perception about the ‘environ-

mental’ conditions in the computer classroom, com-

bined with perceived improvements in his own levels

of confidence and competence with ICT, might shift

his practice. The results were encouraging and in-

dicated that the quality of writing produced by his

students improved markedly from that of earlier at-

tempts with more conventional forms of expression.

The ability to save and re-draft in an iterative way

allowed Alan to provide greater input into his stu-

dents’ substantive thinking about the topic under study

– ‘Prohibition in the 1920s in the USA’. Alan was also

astounded by the levels of interaction that were taking

place when his students were working with the on-

screen documents and the integrated websites. For the

lower ability students, the writing frames also proved to

be helpful, allowing them to construct their answers

within a more structured framework. He commented: ‘I

couldn’t believe the change in them, in class they take

ages to get started but to my surprise they really got into

it and brought in so many new sources that I couldn’t

get access to. Their writing seems to be better too. I’ve

marked their earlier stuff and this was much better

mainly I think because they were able to draft and edit

and that gave them confidence.’ In terms of his own

perception of the use of ICT Alan had also changed his

mind. He was suspicious of ICT early on, particularly

its ability to enhance learning within set examination

and institutional targets. He saw it as ‘something extra

we have to do’ rather than being integral to his work. At

the end of the SDI, however, he was more supportive

and thoughtful about its use and deployment. He

opined: ‘You know I wasn’t really into ICT and I had

some real doubts about it, with the sort of exams and

the pressure we have here, but I’ve really changed. It

wasn’t so disruptive and once I got more confident I

realised that history is still the same. In fact the kids

were excellent and their writing was so much better.

In many of the less successful cases of embedding

ICT into subject cultures, the teachers did not or-

chestrate a knowledge community, seemingly believ-

ing that somehow knowledge was embedded within

the software, that the technology would do the teach-

ing. We should not be surprised by this finding, be-

cause many teachers may have been persuaded by the

hype that is attached to the use of ICT in school that

ICT itself ‘causes’ learning. But as one of the project

teachers said ‘It’s just another tool – and it’s what you

can do with it that counts and not the tool itself’.

Other factors emerging as significant in less suc-

cessful cases were related to technical difficulties.

Sometimes it was literally just too difficult to get the

technology to work. For example in the case of music

in one school, the music teacher decided to modify a

current Year 8 scheme of work on composing Spanish

music to incorporate the use of composition software.

The four music computers had only been installed in

the classroom the week before, and therefore this was

the first time that students had used them. A number of

issues arose from this teacher’s work. With only four

music computers for work with a class of over 25, the

teacher had to support instrumental composition at

the same time as work on the computers; this is often

the case for music teachers, and is not easy because

students composing in groups with instruments need

different support to those composing at the computer.

9A writing frame is a template that structures writing by creating ‘gaps’

in text that students have to fill in for themselves.



It was only after teaching the initiative that the teacher

realised the necessity to completely reconsider the

structure of the scheme of work in order to incorporate

the use of ICT: it could not merely be ‘bolted on’.

When redesigning the initiative, after the project, she

developed computer musical templates (similar to

writing frames) to enable students to focus on specific

areas of work and this provided them with the support

they needed to become more successful in their out-

comes. She also had technological difficulties that the

general school technician could not support; students

lost so much time when the computers would not work

at all that the high attainers working on the computers

produced work of a much lower standard than usual

and were de-motivated.

Getting the technology to work adequately was also

a problem for one English teacher. Her design in-

volved students in making digital narratives. She

began by attempting to integrate the structure of the

national literacy strategy into her teaching within

the ICT suite. However, the mixture of whole-class

and individual work caused tensions as students

worked individually at different rates. Other pressures

included the lack of flexibility in booking the ICT

suite; the lack of a data projector to support whole-

class work and the teacher’s lack of confidence with

the ICT equipment and software. This combination of

factors meant that the focus was on management of the

class and class output rather than student learning.

Sometimes the support of the SDT scaffolded teachers

working within less than adequate technical support

systems to transcend local constraints. For example, in

one primary school the university researchers spent

considerable time making sure the software was loa-

ded onto the network before the SDI and arrived in

good time before each lesson to double-check that the

technical issues had been sorted.

As discussed already some secondary subject tea-

chers found it too constraining to take students to a

computer room at a fixed time, which did not fit with the

flow and rhythm of subject teaching. This was particu-

larly the case with science and history teachers.

Mathematics teachers who also expressed concern about

such constraints were able to use portable graphics

calculators within their own ‘mathematics’ classroom.

What all these less successful cases suggest from

the perspective of person-acting-with-mediational

means is that the starting point for productive in-

tegration of ICT into subject teaching is that a teacher

has to be able to ‘adequately act’ with the particular

chosen ICT tool. The vast majority of project teachers

had not integrated ICT into their subject teaching be-

fore becoming members of the project. This suggests

that it is important to understand the nature and extent

of the support provided by the SDI as discussed by Pat

Triggs and Peter John in this issue. Can this model of

professional development be scaled up? We con-

jecture that it will be possible once we have developed

our understanding of the complex factors that enhance

and constrain the ways in which a teacher can innovate

with ICT in the classroom.

Some concluding remarks

The results of the InterActive Education Project have

led us to ask questions about the relative roles of digital

and non-digital tools in teaching and learning. We

suggest that within a particular knowledge domain it

may be important for young people to be able to work

with both digital and non-digital tools. For example, is

it important to be able to compose with a digital com-

position package and with a musical instrument, using

traditional notation? Is it important to write with paper

as well as with a word processor? Is it important to do

geometry on paper as well as with a dynamic geometry

package? Is it important to carry out science experi-

ments in the lab, as well as within a digital simulation?

How a teacher answers these questions will relate to

their own philosophical perspective on their subject.

For example, in music ‘traditionalists’ believe that it is

vital to gain instrumental and theoretical skills and

harmonic awareness, including notation skills, to

compose and that music ICT is an easy and ‘less mu-

sical’ option. Others also believe in the superiority of

traditional skills but recognise that sequencing software

broadens possibilities for composition. Others (and this

includes the authors of this paper Nick Beeze and

Marina Gall) believe that different skills are used with

digital approaches to composition.

We suggest that it is important for teachers

and policy makers to engage with these types of

discussions and not treat ICT tools as unproblematic

innovations that will somehow lead to enhanced

learning and that necessarily ‘replace’ older technol-

ogies. These discussions need to move beyond what is

needed for assessment (e.g. students need to write with

pen and paper alone and under pressure because that is



the dominant mode of assessment). In fact modes of

assessment should reflect what is important for the

world beyond school. We would argue that if policy

makers developing national assessment and teachers

developing formative assessment could take into ac-

count the idea of person-acting-with-mediational-

means, then we might begin to see different types of

assessment being produced.

More importantly students should also be engaging

in discussions about the relative merits of different

tools, so that they can become resourceful learners.

Here, as discussed in the beginning of this paper we

interpret the idea of tool broadly and so person-acting-

with-mediational-means could be person-acting-with-

another-person, person-acting-with-ICT, or person-

acting-with-particular knowledge. In this sense young

people could become aware, for example, of the re-

lative affordances of paper and pencil, a word pro-

cessor, PowerPoint, or discussion with a peer, when

communicating ideas.

Humans are expert at creating tools to transform

practices and knowledge. ICTs are part of this creative

production. Knowing how to use these tools to trans-

form learning in schools is not so straightforward. This

is because new ICT tools often challenge an existing

practice of teaching and threaten a well-established

knowledge domain. We have seen through the work of

the InterActive Education Project that teachers can

begin to develop ways of embedding ICT into their

subject teaching and that a good starting point is to

creatively exploit readily available software for

teaching and learning.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the work of the project ‘Inter-

Active Education: Teaching and Learning in the In-

formation Age’. This is a 4-year research and

development project funded from December 2000

until August 2004 by the UK Economic and Social

Research Council (ref; L139251060) as part of Phase

II of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme

(see http://www.tlrp.org). The project is directed by

Rosamund Sutherland (University of Bristol) and co-

directed by Susan Robertson (University of Bristol)

and Peter John (University of Plymouth). Other

members of the team are: Dele Aboudrin, David Ba-

dlan, Rebecca Ball, Sally Barnes, Richard Brawn,

Bryan Berry, Rob Beswetherick, Andrew Biggs, Chas

Blacker, Adrian Blight, Jan Bovill, Helena Brazier,

Nick Breeze, Linda Bridgeman, Natalie Butterworth,

Chris Carter, Ruth Cole, Ellie Coombs, Roger Dale,

Chris Davies, Tim Davies, Richard Eon, Keri Facer,

Fern Faux, Marina Gall, Alan George, Marie Gibbs,

Steve Godwin, Andrew Harman, Jo Heppinstall, Su-

zanne Houghton, Ben Houghton, Sally Jenkins, Judi

Johnston Hubbold, Peter John, Pam Kelly, Naomi

Kent, Linda Baggott LaVelle, Elisabeth Lazarus,

Kerry Manley, Ross Martland, Sasha Matthewman,

Angela McFarlane, Sam Mills, Simon Mills, Heidi

Moulder, Federica Olivero, Pat Peel, Richard Rees,

Sven Rees, Catherine Robertson, Susan Robertson,

Andrew Rome, Emma Scott-Cook, Joe Sharp, Tim

Shortis, Paul Stephens-Woods, Daniel Sutch, Rosa-

mund Sutherland, Alison Taylor, Paul Taylor, Ian

Thompson, Maria Thompson, Celia Tidmarsh, Neil

Todman, Pat Triggs, Toby Tyas, Nigel Varley, Marnie

Weeden, Paul Wilson, Rachel Yates and Rachel Zewde.

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Transforming teaching and learning: embedding ICT into everyday classroom practices