"Dont kid yourself lass, it's ICT": Generational attitudes towards Computing

I was recently talking to a family friend, a 7-year-old girl, the conversation turned to my occupation and she had to guess what I taught. It took her a while, guessing English, Science, Maths before me giving her a hint by acting out typing on a keyboard and using a mouse. Straight away she shouted “Computing!” When this happened, I paused to think about the difference between generations and what they label my subject.

We know that changes to the national curriculum have resulted in ICT changing to Computing. Computing is the study of the science behind computers, how they work, how to program and the components that constitute a computer. This is a change from ICT: a subject where one studies how to use a computer and the different software on a computer. Both are important, this is not a post about why one is better than the other, they both have their benefits and drawbacks. What I want to focus upon is how, as a teacher of Computer Science (as on my job description) I feel like a snob. I have had experiences where I have been talking to people from older generations and when they talk or discuss my subject they always refer to it as “ICT”. I have even had an experience where a cover teacher asked what I taught, when I stated Computing, they replied with something along the lines of “don’t kid yourself lass, it’s ICT”. As a socially polite young “lass” I just laughed this off, but it made me think about how the title teacher of Computing sounds to different generations. To the cover teacher, it was snobby and perhaps trying to be something that it is not. To the 7-year-old girl it was the subject she was studying in primary school. Either way both of these can be linked to socialisation. The cover teacher must have been socialised in the 2000s era where ICT and OCR Nationals were rife: ICT was screenshotting how you created that bar chart in Excel and creating PowerPoints with far too many animations and transitions. On the other hand, The 7-year-old girl is part of the current generation at the receiving end of the changes to the national curriculum: the focus on coding, Scratch being the favourite at primary school [and sometimes secondary school] level. Myself on the other hand, I am caught between the two, having experienced ICT within my own education, but being trained and teaching Computing.

Teachers teaching teachers, is there pedagogy for that?

So far in my teaching career, I have attended two training sessions both with the aims of aiding the teacher with knowledge of how to teach pupils with English as an Additional Language (EAL). After attending one of these sessions at a Computing at School conference today, I began reflecting on the actual pedagogy behind teaching teachers about these matters. Both sessions began with the session leader conducting the training in another language: in one the session leader began talking to us in Spanish (although I can speak Spanish), and the other gave us an activity written entirely in Polish. I thought that this was a very useful method to get teachers to reflect upon their lessons and the language that we take for granted. Putting ourselves in the pupils shoes is often difficult when we already know the knowledge we are trying to convey, but if we do not know a language it is easier to empathise with EAL learners. This is often one thing that I am guilty of forgetting, I will ensure that when planning lessons for EAL pupils I think about it from a non-English speaking point of view and invoke the use of sound and pictures to convey the meaning.

However, this got me thinking about the overall teaching of teachers. Who trains these teachers to teach teachers? Is there a pedagogy that trainers must understand to teach pedagogy to teachers? It would be very interesting to research into this and find results, watch this space.