2.5. Authenticity and enculturation in teaching technology

Technology is inherently a part of us (Barlex & Pitt 2000). Thus, the ideas of authenticity and enculturation are naturally applied to technology education. As has been demonstrated earlier, learning is understood to take part in a social context and it is part of the process of enculturation, where the learner increasingly participates in an authentic and context dependent activity (McCormick et al. 1996, Koulaidis & Tsatsaroni 1996, Wertsch & Toma 1995). In technology education this kind of activity can generate understanding and knowledge at procedural level, referring to the notion of ‘device knowledge’, which is related to action and inserted to objects within it (McCormick 1998). In Vygotskian theory, spontaneous, or everyday, knowledge is explained “in terms of perceptual or functional or contextual properties of its referent“ (Panofsky et al. 1990, p. 251)

In authoritative teaching methods (Wertsch 1991), whereby the teacher controls the social interaction and other classroom activities, the actions of many children are often in response to what they perceive to be the teacher"s expectations and traditional school evaluation in terms of examinations and tests (Edwards & Mercer 1987, Vygotsky 1997). In this kind of school setting children do not necessarily feel the teaching and its contents to be personally important or useful. This also militates against children"s collaborative construction of understanding and individual children may feel that they are outsiders in the learning activity. Nevertheless, personal interests and needs that arise from the learner have a great influence on the learning process. Moreover, it is essential to give children a sense of ownership over the problem (Savery & Duffy 1995). In this regard, von Glasersfeld (1995, p. 14) says aptly: “Problems are not solved by the retrieval of rote-learned ‘right’ answers. To solve a problem intelligently, one must first see it as one’s own problem”.

Excessively authoritative teaching methods can be regarded as unsuitable approaches especially in technology education. Actions of children should not be in response to the expectations of the teacher or traditional school evaluation practices, but rather, they should be in response to the emergent needs, wants and purposes preferably raising from the children’s own living environment. In technology, the outcomes are more or less appropriate solutions, not right answers, to emergent needs or/and wants (see Sparkes 1993, Layton 1993).

Problem solving should relate to the children’s real life, with the authentic environment (Schwarz 1996, Lehto 1998) allowing them to make appropriate and meaningful connections. Importantly, children should actually be supported to notice problems, even deficient features in their everyday environment. Moreover, they should be given chances to apply the technological knowledge and skills that they have acquired in subsequent problem solving (Adams 1991, Lindh 1997). In this regard, the question is about enculturating children through technology education to the constant process of modification of the environment created by ourselves.