“A New Way of Teaching and a New Way of Reaching Students”: Building Critical Awareness About Technology Through a Practitioner Inquiry Community

Abstract

The growing presence of technology in Adult Foundational Education (AFE) represents affordances as well as challenges for marginalized student populations. Utilizing technologies in ways that foster and support AFE students’ agency requires opportunities for practitioners to reflect on problems of practice in their classrooms and make connections to broader structural issues in the field. This qualitative study explored the experiences of AFE practitioners from a large Northeast U.S. city during an 18-month professional development initiative focused on technology integration. Findings explore the practitioners’ range of social practices during the project, including adaptiveness and vulnerability, re-framing students’ digital literacies, and questioning normative assumptions about technology platforms. Understanding how these social practices emerged over time can spark efforts in AFE and other adult education contexts to engage in critically oriented explorations of students’ engagements with technology, ultimately supporting more asset-based approaches to using digital platforms.