Tensions between resource perspectives and trends in the design and dissemination of digital resources

International audienceTeachers are increasingly using digital resources to design lessons. We describe three perspectives for describing teachers' interactions with digital resources, perspectives that denote different assumptions with respect to teacher agency and the connections between capacity development and resource use. This paper examines the tensions between these conceptions of teachers' interactions with digital resources and the ways other actors-including policy makers, curriculum developers, and purveyors of online content-frame the purpose for and development of digital resources. Our analysis suggests that the assumed role of the teacher differs across different sets of actors and different visions related to the design and development of digital curriculum resources. The implications relate to the opportunities for teachers to transform digital resources to suit their purposes and to develop and grow professionally as a result. Teaching is design work: Teachers actively interpret and mobilize resources to attain pedagogic and curricular goals. Moreover, teachers increasingly use, and are expected to use, digital resources to design lessons. However, there are tensions between education technology discourses, curriculum design trends, education policies, and the work teachers do with digital resources. As a case in point, in Sweden a public/private partnership endeavor created a repository of resources and lessons for teachers that was little used because the design of the repository did not take into account how teachers actually take up digital resources, illustrating the lack of alignment between teachers' professional practices, education policy, and the design of instructional resources (CERI, 2009). As Remillard (2012) notes, teachers do not simply interpret authors' intentions as they engage with curriculum resources, they engage with the artifact itself (p. 114). Given that teachers' work with resources can promote teachers' professional development and meaningful experiences for students, it is important to understand how tensions between teachers' practices and the assumptions about teaching and teachers embedded in digital resources potentially constrain teachers' opportunities to develop design capacity. To illustrate how digital resource design and dissemination limit teachers' agency-and thus their roles as designers-we examined tensions between conceptions of teachers' interactions with digital resources and the ways other actors-including policy makers, curriculum developers, and purveyors of online content (commercial publishers, large philanthropies)-frame the purpose for and development of digital resources. These actors constitute the largest source of resources and information regarding digital resources and thus their influence merits attention from the research community. The ways digital resources are framed and promoted by policy makers and other actors may be at odds with the actual work teachers do and the needs of their students