Student and Teacher Roles in ICT-Supported Innovations

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we analyzed the case studies of innovation according to a rubric developed on the basis of a six-dimensions framework for rating pedagogical innovativeness. So that we could identify how and in what ways the innovations differed from traditional pedagogical practices, our focus was on the ecological niches that these innovations occupied. In this chapter, we focus on teacher and student roles. We consider these the two key dimensions (i.e., dependencies) in terms of the scalability of an innovation. In reality, in pedagogical practices in general, irrespective of whether a practice is an innovative or a traditional one, teachers design and engineer their practices across all six pedagogical dimensions. Nonetheless, because changes in teacher and student roles involve changes in teaching and learning as a social practice, these two sets of roles remain the critical dimensions. This supposition was confirmed by our earlier findings that teacher-role and student-role scores had the highest correlations with the other four dimensions. To gain a better understanding, from a social practice perspective, of teachers’ and students’ roles in the innovations, we examine in this chapter, through analysis of the SITES-M2 case studies, the activities they were engaging in, and from there endeavor to identify holistic and “concrete” activity patterns.