PROLOGUE

On route to Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, I visited Uluru. This awesome monolith at the red heart of a vast country has been the ancestral home and symbolic meeting place of the Anangu people for tens of thousands of years. As I waited in the departure lounge of Ayres Rock airport I added finishing touches to this paper on a lap top computer. Through the window behind me, the Boeing 727 which was to take me on to Perth could be seen coming into land, but my attention was drawn to the opposite window. I watched as a small group of Aborigines strolled out of the bush: a young woman, a child on her hip, with a toddler walking cautiously behind her, followed by a lean dingo-like dog. With calm dignity they processed towards the airport's meeting point, where a young man jumped down from a battered four-track to greet them. The Aborigines walked as if the technological paraphernalia of modern living did not exist for them and my fellow passengers, intent on boarding cards, luggage and their own small charges, were oblivious of their passing by.

Each of us inhabits a world of striking contrasts and disparity of experience and opportunity, though most do not present themselves as strikingly as this. We do, however, teach many children whose expectations and prospects are very different from our own, while simultaneously setting down universal requirements for attainment defined from a particular cultural standpoint. It is therefore essential that from time to time we take stock of the changes that occur so rapidly around us and assess who has benefited or lost by them. In the following paper I shall describe how, while investigating the social and cultural differences which influence gendered attitudes to literacy, strong indications of other areas of inequality were found which require detailed investigation.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COMPUTER LITERACY

Uses of ICT are now firmly embedded in the transactions of contemporary academia, influencing the communications of all but the most passionate technophobe. Further, in our schools computers are becoming integral to the literacy pratices of both teachers and pupils. This is evidenced in the Summer 1997 edition of English and Education, the professional journal of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) which is dedicated entirely to what its editor calls 'Electronic English' (Andrews, 1997). It has become essential that children are provided with access to technology and its uses in order to achieve both understanding and proficiency. Each day, it seems, brings new possibilities for extending learning through the use of CD ROM and ever expanding computer networks, yet pupils' access to these important tools are currently determined through socio-economic factors, closely linked to gender, class and race. The influence of the first two of these are the subject of the following paper.

ICT AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Before describing the differences of access to opportunity disclosed by the research programme it is necessary to consider the place ICT occupies in the present school curriculum. Its inclusion as a core subject of the British National Curriculum has created the need for all schools to include the use of computers in their learning environment. This might be taken to suggest that access to the new communication networks which facilitate rapid and cost effective connections to multiple sources of information have been assured for all pupils. However, the history of the subject, and` in particular its roots in the maths and technology departments of the secondary school system, have left a mark on the implementation of ICT policies in school. The result is that many secondary school pupils are taught more about computers and computing, than are given experience of using them on authentic learning tasks. When this is coupled to prevailing cultural and social factors which make effective home computing available only to those with a comfortable income, and even then, less accessible to girls -it can be seen that the access currently created for pupils is far short of a democratic ideal.

A previous study of the literacy practices which influenced the reading habits and narrative preferences of Y7 pupils (Millard, 1997) included an investigation of leisure time competition with reading. The study found that more boys reported spending time on computers as their most favoured home activity and this time was largely dedicated to computer gaming. Over half of the boys surveyed then, reported that they used a computer for longer than one hour each day, a further third of them played on computers regularly, while less than a sixth reported having no computer access in the home. In addition, many of the latter gained some regular access through visiting friends' homes. In contrast, just over half the girls in the study either made no use of a computer at all or described themselves as very infrequent computer users (Millard, 1997: 69-70). There was also very little evidence of girls sharing computer games with each other. These findings lend support to earlier speculations that boys are able to make more use of computers in school because of an expertise acquired through greater access in the home (Hannon & Wooler, 1985). Further, we know that parents tend to buy computers for their sons and in general give more encouragement to boys' interest in technology. In a recent MEd dissertation which discussed young children's use of ICT in the nursery, Solomou (1996) found that parents of young boys were most concerned to learn about their child's progress on the nursery's computers and fathers in particular asked more questions and showed more interest in work in ICT than did mothers.

In previous studies, Loyd et al. (1987) and Levin and Gordon, 1989 had found similar differences in ownership of computers and concluded that increased access in the home was related directly to a positive attitude towards computing. However, Harvey and Wilson (1985) suggested that differences in positive attitudes towards computers were closely linked to 'owners' and 'non-ownership' rather than gender differences themselves. It was aspects of the inter-relationship of access with attitude which had appeared to be of a significance in my earlier study and which required further exploration.

A project was therefore set up in four comprehensive schools in a large Northern city to further investigate these differences in pupil attitudes related to computer ownership in more detail. The study comprised a survey of Y7 and Y9 pupils in each school, followed by interviews with a range of pupils in each class to discover patterns of computer use in the home. Later, an additional school in a more affluent suburb was added to the survey to investigate further the differences indicated by the socio-economic status of the schools' catchment areas.

This paper addresses the issues of access arising from the contrasts found between the most and least privileged schools, chosen to reflect different communities. Two of them (LS), are situated in prosperous suburbs, favoured by parents from academic and business communities. The first has a racially mixed community, the second, located close to the Derbyshire peak District caters principally for white professional, rural families. The second pair(IC) are located on the north east of Sheffield, close to the Don Valley and the remaining rump of the steel works. One of these has a multi-cultural intake, but, in contrast to the first school, draws from older estates in a largely working class area, which include large pockets of high unemployment. The fourth school is located in a mixed area of cheaper private housing and late sixties council estates and has a largely white population.

The initial analysis of the data was focused on gender differences in the patterns of access to and uses of technology among the 100 boys and 90 girls who completed questionnaires. The main differences are shown in the table printed below, the bar charts are expressed as percentages of the total number.

Table 1. Boys' and girls' access to computer technology

USE AND ACCESS          GIRLS (n=90)   BOYS (n=100)                   

owns a computer         89%            91%                            

games machine           50%            58%                            

PC                      39%            33%                            

no machine              11%            9%                             

situated in own room    22%            56%            p<0.001         

used for homework       37%            29%                            

There is very little difference in the overall access to computers provided for boys and girls in the home, although girls' more limited access to technology, through family PCs rather than a personal games machines, may paradoxically create the conditions for their increased use of computers for homework related tasks. What is of note however, is that almost twice as many boys as girls claim to have access to some kind of computer located in their own room.

Following on from this as the next table shows that more boys than girls describe themselves as using the computer 'a lot'. When this was followed up at interview this was explained by boys' willingness to play computer games for long periods of time- up to three hours in some cases- whereas girls lost interest much more quickly when playing computer games.

Table 2. Comparison of boys' and girls' time spent using computers.

TIME            GIRLS            BOYS             
                (n=90)           (n=100)          

lot             27%              44%              

some            34%              27%              

little          23%              18%              

none            16%              11%              

Table 3. Boys' and girls' estimation of their computer competence.

PROFICIENCY     GIRLS            BOYS             
                (n=90)           (n=100)          

very good        8%              40%              

good            43%              35%              

OK              38%              21%              

poor            11%               4%              

One boy explained it like this:

Dad's bought the PC for me and its mine, and I play on it when I want and say who goes on and who doesn't. My sister can go on it, play for fifteen minutes and then she's off.

Another boy stated even more bluntly that at nine his sister could not be trusted to use his machine because she wouldn't know what to do and would 'destroy' it. Significantly, both these boys came from the city schools where computers are more often bought to be used for game playing by the young male members of the family.

Far fewer girls described themselves as being good with computers with only 8 per cent of them claiming to be 'very good' compared with over a third of the boys surveyed (40 per cent) rating their abilities very highly. Gender can therefore be said to have some significance in determining these pupils' orientation to computers and their confidence in using them.

The data provided even stronger evidence of class difference. Just as a recent Mori survey prepared for Motorola (1996) showed strong class differences were marked in the adult population in access to all aspects of new technology, with access to modems and the Internet being rare among lower socio-economic groups (C,D, E). so too this study found similar differences in the use pupils made of computers in the home. In the following charts the access of children from schools in the two more affluent areas are compared with that of the children from the two schools located in poorer socio-economic communities.

Table 4 Comparison of use and access by class.

USE AND ACCESS     Suburban pupils        Inner city                         
                   (n=111)                pupils                             
                                          (n=79)                             

owns a computer    93%                    86%                                

games              41%                    73%                                

PC                 52%                    13%              p<0.001           

no computer         7%                    14%                                

own room           31%                    66%                                

homework           50%                    14%              p<0.001           

A strong class related difference between the more affluent suburbs and the inner city schools is clearly shown by the marked contrast in access to PCs which are suitable for word-processing and other forms of literacy activities, such as accessing new information from CD ROM or the Internet.

Differences in access are also a major factor in the use of the computer for homework tasks, an opportunity almost entirely dependent on whether the computer in the home is a PC or a games machine, such as Spectrum, Atari or Megadrive. Later interviews confirmed that where girls were given home access to personal computers and had been supported in their use of ICT, usually by a parent, they were equally, if not more, enthusiastic about their use to support school work. Girls' access was also much more strongly influenced by class, as middle class homes are far more likely to have a shared family machine, whereas in many working class homes the computer was the personal property of boys in the family.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PUPILS WHO USE COMPUTERS FOR SCHOOLWORK

In order to investigate further the effects of home access on pupils' attitude to ICT and its use, I undertook a series of individualised follow-up interviews of six Y7 pupils in each of the four schools. These pupils had been identified by their English teacher as making regular use of ICT in completing work at home without being asked to do so. Most of the computer assisted work which had been submitted to teachers involved word processing, but significantly, in one class, a project on promoting a holiday cruise abroad had been supplemented by several pupils with material taken from the Encarta CD ROM. In one case a pupil had used images down- loaded from sites on the World Wide Web to illustrate a piece of media writing on his favourite films.

The interviews were based on a set of questions presented to the subjects in a semi-structured format of about 20-30 minutes duration and conducted during periods of English teaching. Each interview began with a comment on the homework in which ICT had been used and a follow up question about the family's use of computers in the home. Interviews showed that most of the pupils making regular use of technology for schoolwork had at least one parent who used ICT at home for their own work, most of these being professionals who also had access to computer technology at work.

The following examples taken from the interviews provide evidence of the range of experience open to the more privileged pupils which are beyond the means of the families in the city schools. Darren's family own a PC, an Omega 1200, a Nintendo play station and two further games machines which he shares with two brothers. The PC belongs, he says, to all the family but is used most frequently by his mother, an English teacher, who uses the machine to prepare work for her classes. He and his mother share access. He uses the machine in the early evening with her support and she does her own work at night. He likes the standard of presentation he can achieve using computers:

If its like projects that we do in English, I often type up on the computer because it looks neater. And I use it when I have to find out facts and stuff, 'cos we've got this atlas and for designing my cruise I used that a lot. I can get pictures and information about places to visit.

He also describes his younger sister's programme called 'Story Book B' which he sometimes uses for story writing:

You can make a title page on it, and then its got different backgrounds and you can have half a page of pictures and then the story. Often I just use the story-writing bit.

Two boys who regularly used the computer for completing writing, explained that they found it difficult to keep their handwriting tidy and that a computer was helpful both for presentation and for checking spelling. Greater provision for using word processing in lessons would provide both support and motivation for this category of pupil to increase their writing ability as poor handwriting is very difficult to remedy in secondary school pupils and often proves a major stumbling block to progress.

Sara's mother offered her similar support with the computer by setting up a special folder for her work on the hard drive and showing her how to produce tables and charts. She is an Educational psychologist who, Sara reports, uses the home computer to complete 'reports and papers and stuff for work'. Sara's father, however, never uses the computer at home because, as Sara explained, he has a secretary who prepares all his paper at work for him.

Cathy uses her family's PC to access the Internet and is thrilled by its possibilities:

'cos its exciting to think, gosh, somebody else is half way across the world from you and is sat at their computer at the same time and they are like speaking to you- its weird.

During a session on using the INTERNET run by the her teacher and myself at the university she was able to help others find popular web sites with confidence. She has also been given less powerful PC of her own at home and has found a special use for it, as she explains:

My mum and dad went through a really bad patch where they were shouting at each other and he wasn't very well, me dad. (She had explained earlier that her father had a serious heart complaint which made her very anxious). So I used to go upstairs and I used to shut my door and go on the computer. It was like a way of getting out of this world and just like writing how I felt without other people coming up and going, 'Oh, what are you writing?' I found I couldn't write like this at school because if someone read it they'd think I were silly.

Cathy's experience supports an impression I formed while analysing the data from the earlier questionnaire survey that, when allowed free access to technology, girls do not find the culture of the machine alienating but adapt it to their own purposes and interests.

Some pupils without home access but who valued technology as a tool for improving the appearance and standard of their work explained to me that they sought access by visiting friend's homes or other members of their family such as aunts, uncles or parents living apart. Ashley, for example explained that he regularly visited his uncle to use his CD ROM for history which is his 'second best lesson'. He said he had looked up 'how to use a Bunsen burner and things about the middle ages on Encarta'.

My interview data supports the evidence from the questionnaires that orientation towards educational and personal development through computers is more dependent on access and adult modelling of opportunity, than on established gender preference. In this aspect a parallel may be drawn with the ORIM model developed by Hannon in relation to early literacy progress, where significant adults are described as performing four distinct roles in scaffolding the learner at home. First they provide many opportunities for the development of literacy and recognise children's achievement in this area; they create opportunities for interaction which supports understanding and use and finally provide a model of proficiency in each aspect of literacy. (Hannon, 1995,52-4 )

In this study, the existence of family shared machines and a computer literate parent who already used some computer programs for work, were shown to provide many more opportunities for both interaction and modelling in middle class homes when compared to the less affluent households. However, a gender differences in the ownership and control of machines may still be a significant factor. The next table shows the disadvantage working class girls suffer in being given less opportunity for access and practice because in their homes computers are more likely to be sited in their brothers' rooms.

Table 5. Comparison of access to computers by gender and class

                Girls      Boys        Girls       Boys         
                suburbs    suburbs     inner city  inner city   
                (n= 53)    (n=58)      (n=37)      (n=42)       

LOCATION                                                        

own room        15%        45%         22%         72%          

family          64%        50%         32%         14%          

sibling's room  11%        0%          30%         0%           

none            10%        5%          16%         14%          

In contrast, the existence in their homes of more computers which are located in rooms shared by other members of the family gives middle class pupils greater opportunity to interact with adults when using them.

DISCUSSION

It has been suggested to me by their teachers that it is pupils' own attitudes to ICT, particularly the disinterest of many girls, which frustrate attempts to provide equal access to these new forms of learning. In an ideal teaching environment ICT would be integrated seamlessly into everyday practice, as it is in the best primary class rooms. In my experience, however, this is very seldom the case in the secondary school. Often ICT is time-tabled in computer studies based departments to ensure that attainment levels for the National Curriculum are 'covered'. Even more significantly, as I have argued previously, pupils bring with them to school firm ideas on what aspects of literacy are most appropriate to themselves. These views are gendered and more intractable among boys than girls (Millard, 1997). Commentators such as Papert have suggested that computer studies teachers in particular, reinforce 'scientific' attitudes to computer use through what he describes as a 'supervaluation of the abstract' and an emphasis on 'abstract-formal knowledge' (Papert, 1993:148). He argues, however, that work with computers does not have to be abstract but can be firmly based in concrete experience. This present study also suggests that in contexts where ICT is presented in a way which is more concrete and therefore of practical use and appropriate to the work patterns of both sexes, girls are as eager as boys to experiment. Moreover, given adequate access, they are often more interested in using computers to support various aspects of their learning and in some cases to expand their personal writing from page to screen.

The indicators in school are that ICT is less threatening to the inexperienced when it is properly integrated into the everyday practice of each subject. Sadly, an increase in the common requirements for ICT, coupled to pressure from examination classes has often made access to computers in the secondary school even more technologically biased and consequently frequently male dominated. The English teachers in the current project all report having a struggle to gain a fraction of the time they would like to spend with their classes on working with desk top publishing and word processing for composing and editing texts.

The following is typical of the conditions they reported:

It's difficult… you know, we've got more computers than we've ever had before, but booking now, block access is difficult. So like for the media studies class it goes on at the same time as the ICT option so the rooms are usually booked

One female teacher described the environment of the computer studies suite in her school, where access was regulated by the head of computer studies, as so alienating, that despite being herself a proficient user, she strongly disliked taking her classes there and there was no access elsewhere in the school. In fact only one of the five schools involved in this project could offer direct access to information and retrieval systems from a network which was easily accessible to pupils within their English classrooms.

Although the computer has been hailed by educationalists as 'the children's machine' (Papert,1993) there is a weight of evidence which shows such marked differences in boys' and girls' orientation to the new technology that leads me to conclude that computers are still often seen by both parents and children as 'toys for the boys' (Wilder et al.,1985; Hoyles, 1988). A recent international comparative study of Japanese and Swedish sixteen year olds by Makrakis and Sawada (1996) showed that, in each country, males reported higher scores of usefulness, aptitude and liking for computers. They suggest that the persistence of gender differences in attitudes to computers, despite a general rise in computer awareness in these countries, indicates a failure in the way gender issues are being addressed and tackled in schools.

However, other causes of the persisting differences in expressed levels of interest and competence can be traced to the different levels of access to computer technology in the pupils' home environments. We already know that those with better access at home also secure for themselves better access at school. Although the numbers involved in this project are currently too small to provide conclusive evidence, they suggest that access at home rather than at school plays the more significant role in orienting pupils to learning in this field. Given adequate access, girls seem more ready to adapt to the new opportunities for working provided by computers. It is the 'boy's toys' aspect, as reflected most vividly in commercial games that is less appealing and far less relevant to their interests. Boys in general show less interest in school work and some do not make use of existing opportunities provided by their access to technology to support it. The attitude is best represented by the response of the boy in one of the more affluent suburb schools, with access to two powerful PCs at home, each with modem and CD ROM facility, who replied to the questionnaire enquiry, 'Do you use a computer to help with school work? -'No- because school work is boring'.

CONCLUSIONS

I return now to my opening image of starkly contrasted cultures -of two peoples inhabiting the same geographical space but experiencing very different worlds which allow separate opportunities and distinct destinies. The evidence I have gathered so far in this research project suggests that while technology is clearly present in the lives of even the poorest British children, many live in family situations which allow them few opportunities to understand or control its potential for learning. The frequency of some access to computer machines in these poorer households has to be set against the almost exclusive use of them for the consumption of the products of mass entertainment, which provide very limited opportunities for creative interaction or learning. The poor are consumers-albeit very economically constrained ones- of technology rather than its controllers and current provision in schools is unlikely to make any real difference to this disadvantage.

AUTHENTICITY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND COMMUNICATION

One response to problems of computer access from those concerned with the development of a more critical and authentic literacy built upon prior experience might be to reject it as an early tool for learning. Habermas could be invoked (1984) to support an argument that the spread of technological means of communication serves only a repressive function in legitimising even further technical and scientific aspects of society. Indeed, although many English teachers now welcome their departments increasing access to technology (Goodwyn et al. 1997). others resolutely promote the superiority of book culture (Davies, 1996). The latter group's answer to technological inequality is to more conventionally humanistic textual encounters, attending more fully to the areas of communication where access is not restricted by income and where the symbolic structures of what Habermas calls. 'the lifeworld' are reproduced more easily (1984;331).

However, this approach can serve only to reinforce the monopolisation of powerful communication networks by the more privileged members of society who will continue to transmit their understanding to their own children in a technological version of the middle-class desire for 'banking education' described by Freire (1972, 46). It also ignores the real possibility for exchanging understandings as well as information in and between schools which has been opened up through free access to global highways.

The task for educational planners and policy makers at both local and national levels is rather, to take account of home experience when formulating policies related to technological advancement. It is equally important as when working with books and print to start from a knowledge of pupils' current experiences, understandings and needs, while providing better access for whole communities to computer communication and education. The millennium fund missed a splendid opportunity for securing wider public access to these new technologies when it turned down a request for funding to wire all public libraries to the Internet. Initiatives for taking new literacies into every community are badly needed and until they are better established schools require greater sensitivity to the needs of parents, as well as those of children. in creating opportunities for new forms of shared authentic literacies to be established.

REFERENCES

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This document was added to the Education-line database 03 November 1997