Abstract
Amongst educators, there is a consensus that constructivist forms of learning where teachers and students actively interact to co-create knowledge is valued over instructional forms, which prioritize the transmission of information from teacher to learner. Across the world, ICTs have been applied toward enhancing learning outcomes for school children. This paper analyses an ICT intervention in rural India to assess whether ICT interventions can improve interactions in the classroom towards constructivist learning. Our study of a teacher-focused ICT intervention finds that teachers working in a resource-constrained environment use ICTs as a time and effort saving commodity resulting in little change to classroom interaction. We also find that ICTs are used passively by teachers, without unlocking their interactive potential, as they lack the ICT capacity to do so. Students continue to have minimal say in the pace and outcome of classes. Future design of ICT interventions must strike a balance between addressing teacher’s constraints and providing students and teachers features that spark interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
Name of the intervention, organization and that of participants have been changed to preserve anonymity. Sampoorna Kali is a pseudonym for the intervention in Kannada which translates to complete learning. Kannada is the state language of the south Indian state of Karnataka.
- 2.
Taluka is an administrative division equivalent to a sub-district.
- 3.
Head Teacher is a teacher who doubles as the school’s Principal; they shoulder teaching responsibilities while also managing the school’s administration.
- 4.
Facilitators refers to EdIndia employees who worked with schools towards adoption and integration of the Sampoorna Kali program.
- 5.
In a combined class, students from different classes (for example, classes 6, 7 and 8) are brought together in one classroom. The teacher tries to engage this combined class by either assigning work for some and teaching the rest or conducts common lessons for this combined class - often choosing topics that would be comprehensible to all the students of the combined class.
- 6.
In HS, teachers largely do not allow facilitators to teach, relying on them only for technical support and assistance with conducting events.
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Taduri, P., Chandhiramowuli, S., Prakash, A. (2020). ICT and Interactivity in the Classroom: A Case Study of an ICT Intervention in Indian Rural Public Schools. In: Junio, D., Koopman, C. (eds) Evolving Perspectives on ICTs in Global Souths. IDIA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1236. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52014-4_2
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