"Engines of educational power"
Creators: name: Muller, Jennifer
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2015

description: Our understanding of the tools used to teach in public school classrooms shape our understanding of the profession of teaching in the United States. This early history of technology used in education represents an under-explored subject in the history of school systems in the United States. The Lancasterian monitorial system (LMS) was an early nineteenth century educational technology, developed and promoted by an English schoolteacher (Joseph Lancaster, 1778-1838). Through a combination of devices such as sand tables and visual telegraphs, specially designed classroom spaces, and particular teaching practices, the LMS offered towns and cities in the United States a political possibility for establishing cheap, effective schools for their citizens. Part of the LMS’s particular appeal lay in its specification of the role of the teacher; teachers were routinely in charge of as many as 500 students in their classroom and the system included the use of student monitors to aid in instruction. Because of the economies of scale the LMS represented, opening a Lancasterian school was considered to be an inexpensive way to pursuing the goal of establishing publicly funded educational institutions. Consequently, Lancasterian schools quickly spread throughout the United States between 1806 and 1828.     This rapid adoption had particular consequences for the nascent profession of education. Teachers in Lancasterian schools were simultaneously operators of - and components within - the innovation that these schools represented – a new educational “engine of great power.” This new role produced a new problem: where were individuals trained to execute the specific operations of the system to be found? The lack of first-hand knowledge of Lancaster's methods in the United States caused the operators of the new schools to confront the issues of teacher preparedness early in the establishment of publicly funded education. Lancasterian school systems employed many surprising strategies to solve this problem, including creating the first public school teacher training facility, establishing early forms of teacher certification, and using the provision of teacher training as political leverage to protect their funding. This early period in the development of the public school systems in the eastern United States also represents a time of interpretive flexibility when the role of the teacher was being defined in the discourse between different stakeholders. This discourse concerning what qualities were important for teachers to possess was sparked by the newly available possibilities represented by the technology; some of these possibilities were embraced and some rejected. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how broadening our conception of the relationship between early teachers in the public schools and technology can inform our understanding of how teachers’ roles were and are shaped by technology adoption practices.    Increasing the profession’s understanding of how technology adoption practices, irrespective of the qualities of the particular technology, offer opportunities and dangers in the process of defining, or redefining, new systems and implementing roles.  Because of the advent of new formats of education, including online and blended education models, and the new expectations they create, this is an especially useful time to examine the processes and discourses that created our existing system.