Conflict, risk, authority: Female faculty’s stories of change

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Campbell, Katherine

• Most studies of gender and information technology have investigated gender differences in the relationships between education and achievement, and attitudes towards and use of computers. Few have explored gendered experiences of faculty members using learning technologies in higher education. The study on which this article is based explored the experiences of 47 Canadian female faculty members integrating information and communications technologies (ICTs) into the higher education learning environment. The stories they told suggest that learning to use ICT in ways coherent with their values may be an intensely personal process of cognitive and cultural change for these women, in which beliefs and values may be examined and even “realigned” as they develop personal, moral authority. When faculty members explicitly contextualize the process as social, relational learning, it has the potential to be transformative at personal and societal (institutional) levels. The interrelated theoretical constructs of transformative or action learning, the development of authority-into-agency, and technology issues related to feminist pedagogy frame the three illustrative narratives of experience presented. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

• Date created

  2005-10-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Women Faculty
  • Foreign Countries
  • Higher education
  • Technology integration
  • Gender differences
  • Information technology
  • Personal Narratives
  • Womens Education
  • Phenomenology
  • Computer Uses in Education
  • Experiential learning
  • Womens Studies

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3WP9TN8J

• License

  © 2005 Technology, Pedagogy and Education. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.