Teaching, Tech, and Justice: Reflections on Week 1

In Week 1 of my sophomore class, I faced the intersection of multiple pressures: managing a class of 62 students, teaching content in English to multilingual learners, designing my own materials, and integrating technology. Despite my background in educational technology, I approach classroom design in an on-the-job (OTJ) learning style—figuring things out in real time, reflecting, and adjusting.

When I asked students to submit homework via Google Forms with audio or video files, I encountered predictable technical problems: some students lacked Google accounts, video files exceeded upload limits, and a few submissions were essentially unusable. These issues revealed digital literacy gaps that persist even among university students (Helsper & Eynon, 2010). But they also highlighted something deeper: the unequal distribution of cognitive and material resources in my classroom. Students who were less confident with English or technology were disproportionately affected, and I was, in effect, asking them to learn alongside me.

From a pedagogical standpoint, this raises a critical question: what am I modeling for students when I scaffold technology use in real time? The answer is ambivalent. On one hand, I model resilience, problem-solving, and adaptive learning—valuable skills for professional and civic life (Bower, 2019). On the other hand, I risk normalizing a learning environment where students are subject to the limitations of corporate platforms whose design prioritizes data collection over pedagogical transparency. As Selwyn (2016) cautions, ed-tech is not neutral; the infrastructures we adopt carry ethical and social consequences.

Furthermore, these dynamics intersect with equity and justice concerns central to my teaching philosophy. Social justice education emphasizes that learning environments should challenge structural inequities rather than reproduce them (Freire, 1970; Mitchell, 2008). By requiring students to navigate proprietary technology, even with scaffolding, I unintentionally place some students at a disadvantage. The pedagogical labor of troubleshooting and supporting students is compounded by the hidden labor imposed on them.

Yet there is a productive tension here. By foregrounding OTJ learning, I can model critical engagement with technology, not just technical compliance. I can make visible the work involved in using these tools thoughtfully and ethically. This mirrors translanguaging and multimodal pedagogies in language education, where the teacher constructs meaning collaboratively with students rather than imposing a rigid model (García & Wei, 2014; Jewitt, 2008). In this way, technology becomes both a site of learning and critique, an object of reflection as well as practice.

Week 1 taught me that integrating technology at scale is inherently political, pedagogical, and ethical. It is not enough to provide instructions or fix glitches. The challenge is to design tasks that respect student agency, scaffold diverse competencies, and expose the complexities of digital literacy. These tensions are uncomfortable but necessary; they illuminate the work we ask students to do, the inequities they navigate, and the professional judgment required to lead ethically in a digital, multilingual classroom.

References

  • Bower, M. (2019). Design of Technology-Enhanced Learning: Integrating Research and Practice. Emerald Publishing.

  • Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

  • García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Helsper, E. J., & Eynon, R. (2010). Digital natives: Where is the evidence? British Educational Research Journal, 36(3), 503–520.

  • Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education, 32(1), 241–267.

  • Mitchell, T. D. (2008). Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 50–65.

  • Selwyn, N. (2016). Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

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