Technology learning 2: Towards reawakening the technologists within primary teachers

We begin by setting out a view of learning as framework-building; enabling learners to shift their perspectives. For us, this expresses the essential unity of many human endeavours — in particular, for our purposes, children's learning, teachers' theory-building and the evolution of scientific understanding. We identify two frameworks which, we contend, are currently limiting the vision of teachers in fundamental ways and with serious consequences for their students. One is a transmission perspective on learning (in which New South Wales schooling has traditionally been steeped) and the other, a limiting conception of and anxious approach to technology (significantly impeding its meaningful penetration into schools). To learn how to help teachers break free of these restraints, we provided an opportunity for our teachers to become learners themselves in a technological context based on developmentalist views of learning and teaching. Here they became self-directing, challenged and fulfilled, gaining feelings of control over the technology, and each developed a powerful and personal appreciation of another framework for learning and teaching. In what they did, we can identify approaches which enabled a plurality of epistemologies to flourish. In conclusion, we predict a key role for these kinds of technological contexts in learning.Mark Cosgrove teaches in teacher education programs in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. He studies the history and development of ideas in science and technology and their roles in cultures, and is exploring the notion that learning and technology are natural, biological phenomena. Lynette Schaverien is a research scholar investigating the learning and teaching of science and technology in primary schools. She is interested in developing teaching approaches which foster and sustain children's natural curiosity, and styles of mentoring which will regenerate teachers' powers to exploit that curiosity in classrooms.