A TechnoEthical Framework for Teachers

Abstract

ABSTRACTA TechnoEthical Framework for Teachers (TEFT) is introduced to aid educators in selecting and employing educational technologies in ethically sound and pedagogical sensitive ways in their classrooms. TEFT views technology through three key technoethical lenses or perspectives: instrumental, sociomaterial and existential. The instrumental lens is most familiar to teachers and focuses on the policies and laws governing teachers’ and students’ uses of technology. The sociomaterial perspective attends to technology’s built-in biases and how it translates behaviour in prescribed or circumscribed ways. The existential lens considers how students’ and teachers’ entanglements with technology condition how they experience the world and transform their ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming. Taken together, these three approaches provide teachers with a theoretically robust view of the ethical implications of using technology in the classroom.KEYWORDS: Technology biaseducational technologyposthumanteacher ethicsK-12 education Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The classroom examples are selected from a postphenomenological study of elementary school teachers using ClassDojo in several Western Canadian urban centres (Yuen Citation2021) and supervised by one of the authors (Adams).2 CommonSense Privacy Program (Citation2022) recently gave ClassDojo a rating of 82% or ‘Warning’ for its privacy and data protection policies. CommonSense routinely assesses and scores popular educational applications across multiple ‘concern categories’ including child safety, privacy and data security. It also rates an app’s compliance with key statutes and regulations such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by a Vargo Teaching Chair grant, University of Alberta.