Teachers as authorities and New Technologies: changes, challenges and chances

Abstract

The pedagogic relation has always been studied and thought about. When education went beyond the limits of family and became universal as a mass education, the connection between educational authority and democratic values turns problematic. With the coming of new information and communications technology (ICT) the scene changes again. The aim of this article is double: on the one hand, gaining insight into recent bibliography about the transformations that ICT introduces in pedagogical authority; on the other hand, checking these results with a field study. The last articles about educational authority and ICT have been examined by means of browsers like Google Scholar, Dialnet or Web of Science, prioritizing the more recent ones. The field study makes use of focus group technique, as well as a subsequent Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS), by means of the Atlas.ti.7 programme. As a result, far from destroying teacher’s authority, ICT strengthen it, but in a very different perspective from the traditional one; it takes place in a gradual process of adaptation in which the sense of authority is modified, from an imposing character to a demonstrative one. Therefore, the study of the recent literature lights up the impact of the networking society and ICT in educational task, something that it is checked in the field study. On the other hand, the size of the sample and its qualitative character are opened to the perspective about ICT as a reinforcement of teacher authority, as we suggest, instead of its cancellation, as most critical views point out.