Dr. Jason McDonald visited the show on episode 101 Ed Tech & Opportunity Makers to discuss his recent paper on how research in educational technology has become too detached from the human experience in classrooms, and that researchers need to “entangle” themselves with the communities they strive to serve in order to produce meaningful results.
MR 2:21
For our first segment we read, “Is education better because of us, how Ed Tech can answer the call to produce research that matters.”
LW
This was written by Jason K McDonald and Bernice Ventura.
MR
This was published in the Journal of computing and higher education in 2025. Educational technology research often treats both tools and studies as a means to an end, people as resources to optimize. The authors argue for research entanglement involving immersion that necessarily changes researchers and participants. The move can allow us to address significant educational issues, rather than a treadmill of studies on each trendy, new tech product. And we are fortunate to be joined by lead author, Dr McDonald on the show right now. Thanks for joining us.
Jason McDonald
Absolutely thrilled to be here, both of you. Thank you.
MR
Dr Jason McDonald is a professor in the David O McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University. He believes we need to re-enchant education to increase student wonder and mystery. I was searching for papers to follow up on a segment we did a couple months ago around Ed Tech Research, because I wanted something more out of the paper that we had read and the discussion that we had about the impact of educational technologies, and I discovered your paper and the provocative title and sort of the philosophical approach to what we should be doing and studying education research, and so I snatched it up so that we could have a conversation. And so I’m so excited that we did. Can you tell me a little bit about your work in educational technology and how you came to this this position?
JM
Yeah, thank you for first for that kind reaction to the paper. So I’ve been in the Ed Tech and instructional design space for about 25 years now, pursued both a master and doctorate early part of the 20th century. Then I went and had a career in the educational technology, online learning, instructional design space. Did that for about a decade or so, and then about nine years ago, came back to teach full time. I had taught a little bit off and on during that decade abroad, but that came back when a position to open up, like I said, about nine, nine or 10 years ago. Now,
JM 4:29
part of my interest has always been that when I’ve engaged in research, whether that be formal research or whether that be professional research, you know, for a project, an E learning project or an online education project,
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I was never fully satisfied with the methodologies or the what sometimes seemed to be the appearance of rigor without the substance of rigor. And I’ve always had this itch in the back of my head to try to.
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Understand that a little bit better, if anything, was kind of the birthing grounds for this project that my student, that I want to acknowledge, Berenice and I did. It was just that sense that no matter how hard we were trying, it seemed like we were missing something really, really fundamental about educational research and what it should be accomplishing or could accomplish. And again, that’s where we came up with let’s just examine this a little more carefully and see if we can’t put some thoughts to our our angst, and see if we can maybe offer some thoughts about a possibly better way.
LW 5:36
It was a refreshing read because it was not the paper that I thought it was going to be, and it took me on a journey that I didn’t expect, ongoing, but I really liked it, and it started very early, in a comfortable place.
LW 5:51
I just like it. You know, to see a statement, you know, that viewing school as a means to prepare students to contribute to a national economy might not be the healthiest way to go about, to conceptualize school, and just to like, start with that, I was like, oh yeah, this, you know, he’s on, he’s on my he’s on my team here. And I was heavily shaped by in my teacher education program, by some of the writing of Neil Postman. And it was like a nice reminder, philosophically, that we do not teach for the propagation of systems. That’s not what we’re doing this. We are people, and we are teaching for the sake of people. And so just very early, I’m like, okay, flag planted. Yeah, flag planted, and I’m here for this. So that’s how I felt as we started off.
MR
The argument that you’re making about a researcher being embedded in the systems they strive to understand is something that is really, really important to me as a researcher who teaches, as a researcher, who has a podcast talking with one of his very good friends, who is a teacher and strives to advocate for effective practices and systems in teaching. It’s just something that really connects very deeply to what I personally want to be doing in my research. And you would you can read my papers and tell me if I’m succeeding, but I think the the
MR 7:15
explicit argument for the importance of being intertwined with those educational systems was just really, really gave me some words to describe something that had been important to me for for a long time. And I’m curious what was it like for you, kind of crafting this argument, as you say, putting words to some of the angst. What? What was their process of building this sort of argument that you did with your with your co author?
JM
Yeah, well, maybe this is a good time. Just to summarize for some listeners, the core argument as well, which really, if I had to get it down to a sentence or two, is that typically, we go about research as if we’re trying to develop a bag of tricks, right? That when we get into a situation, we can just reach into our bag and pull out the right trick. And my argument is that educational research, first and foremost, should be changing us. That if we are not leaving the research situation more sensitive to what our students need, more aware of the possibilities, more committed to the educational cause in the specific flavor that that research project is bringing about. We we’ve missed the opportunity. Education research, first and foremost, is about developing our capacities as educators, because, at the end of the day, it’s teachers who educate, not a bag of tricks, right? This specific form of the argument. I mean, I’m highly influenced by the people. I kind of develop an argument based on the work of another researcher, Martin Packer. I’m highly influenced by his work. I’m highly interest or influenced by philosophers like Mark Wrathall, who’s at Oxford, and Ian Thompson, who’s at the University of New Mexico, who talk about education really as being a project of changing people before preparing them for economic systems. That’s what Laurence said that he liked the most. And and these philosophers and thinkers, Geert Vista being another one out of the UK,
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when they have developed their argument about education being about human flourishing first and foremost,
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as I just mold over that in my mind, it started to occur to me, well, that really does have some important implications for the research project itself. Right? I mean, if we’re if we’re teaching first and foremost for students to flourish, for people to flourish, maybe we ought to be first and foremost researching for people to flourish. And if we’re researching in a way to help people flourish, that probably includes the researchers themselves, we need to be flourishing more and in the context of the work, it comes back around to what I said the purpose of the paper was, is, “Are we
JM 10:00
being more inspired?” Are we becoming more committed? Are we being lifted, you know, to this higher plane, if you will, of existence? I’ll use the church language again for you there. Are we being lifted to a higher plane of existence as educators? to do these things more committedly, more wholeheartedly,
JM 10:21
and most importantly, I think, with the end in mind of the students themselves, having the absolute best experience that they can.
LW
One of the statements that was in the paper, tools do not make a demand on us, so we can leave an instrumentalist approach behind whenever we want. I think the idea behind that statement is that we aren’t tied to this instrumentalist philosophy when we are looking at something. And I entirely agree and support with that claim. But I do kind of I think that tools do make demands on us, and I think that they do so implicitly, and so that you know, if you have a hammer and you have a nail gun, then you think about, what can you do with with nails to solve the problem? When there are Japanese joinery techniques that don’t require a hammer at all. And so, like we limit ourselves to to a way of thinking. So a new product comes out in education, and then we go to, Oh, great. A new product came out. I can use all of these techniques I know to write another paper. I can do some more research to write another paper, because those are the techniques that we that are in our toolbox, and so they shape how we look at the issue. So I do think tools make a demand on us, and they do so implicitly. But the spirit of the paper is to say, let us reject that those implicit demands. Let’s, let’s do away with the idea that, you know, commercial opportunities are our driving force for for education research and and look at the people and ask questions about the people’s experience and and find out more information about the people in their experience so that we can make better decisions in education.
JM
You’re exactly right. I think that
JM 12:04
our tools absolutely make demands of us. They make an instrumental demand of us, though, right? And I think that’s the distinction. The tools or techniques we use don’t make an existentialist demand on us in the sense that they demand that we become a better version or a different version of ourselves, in fact, at their best, at their best, when those instrumentalist tools or techniques are working right, we as human beings are essentially interchangeable. We could, in theory, drop out any one of us as researchers and put in any other researcher in our place and get essentially the same results. That’s, I mean, that doesn’t work in practice, right? Because,
JM 12:48
just as…, because we’re human, right? I mean, as that’s part of the point of my paper, is we’re pursuing goals that we can’t do as human beings, but that certainly is the impulse of these tools or techniques or research methodologies, right? I mean, the idea of a research methodology is we want to get we’re going to do research where the things that don’t matter to our research about the people we sample are irrelevant to our research, right? We’re going to use sampling techniques or qualitative selection techniques to make sure that what makes them human are irrelevant to our research. Why would we do that when what makes them human is what makes them human and don’t we want to draw on those things for the purpose of helping us all engage in education more deeply, we want to draw on the specifics that people bring that are uniquely theirs, not just as representatives of a population, or representatives of a of a role, or representatives of an institution, or so on.
MR
I think the so something else in this conversation that has led me to, I’m trying to sort of operationalize this sort of discussion within the context of educational technology tools specifically, and how would I approach studying a new service or solving a problem, a particular human problem, in a classroom, depending on your instrumentalist or not orientation. And I think one of the things that it makes me think of is the distinction in which question we’re asking first. I see a lot of for the tools that have any research you have this question of, does this service increase student creativity, and they’ll maybe there might be some numbers that suggest that it it’s higher by some measure or other. And that’s sort of a one off. Either you are you, you critique that very directly in your paper. Of there’s a whole mountain of singular studies that speak to singular products that are up or down. And we they kind of come and go with the trends in the in the technology world, but I think being entangled leads us to asking the question in the other direction, but leads to very different answers. If you are in relationship with a group of classroom teachers, and you say,
MR 14:52
how are you working on increasing student creativity, rather than starting from the assumption of the tool, starting from the importance of the question.
MR 15:00
And how do we increase student creativity? You say, Well, gosh, they’re going to give me all sorts of answers. Isn’t that kind of the point is, you’re going to hear what’s important to them and what they’re working on, and what they know from their wisdom and experience working with those students in that context. But it’s going to lead you to much more meaningful answers than if you start with the presupposition that here is a tool that has to be the point, and then see if it increases or decreases some sort of number. Am I anywhere in the ballpark for the distinction? Here
JM 15:29
you are exactly in the Yeah, that’s exactly, I think, the distinction I’m trying to make. And then this just to tie, then, uh, tie it to the end of the paper. The conclusion I’m drawing is that when you hear those things from those teachers, aren’t you more excited yourself to get back in the classroom and help students develop creativity, and if we can do a great job of writing up those findings, aren’t potentially 1000s of others readers of our research more excited to Go back into the classroom and more
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more invested in paying close attention to their own situations and their own students, to see if, maybe not all the techniques of those teachers that we studied work in a particular classroom. But maybe as we get into the classroom, we can see a few of them. As we pay very close attention to our students, we see a few of those things we learned from the research might have some potential, and we don’t implement them in a technical sense. We very carefully and lovingly try them out, because we’ve built this relational bridge between the teachers we studied us as a researcher, the readers of the research back now into the classroom with the students. There’s almost like this bridge of loving relationships all the way across that, I think, qualitatively changes how we try out the research findings. We’re not just implementing them. We’re not just experimenting with them. We’ve learned something from someone who invested something for us, and how can that help but qualitatively change how we put
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them into practice in our own classroom settings.
LW 17:06
This paper highlights concretely, highlights a lot of things that I liked about our paper last, last episode, Dr Herricks, paper that
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talked about using local data sets as a means to explore climate change with students. So it’s widely available to get you know global data for climate change and then show that to the students and ask them to analyze it and interpret it, and how do they feel about that data, but the the experience changes widely when you are able to connect that information with data local to their community
LW 17:51
of a wide variety of options, because there’s a wide variety of communities with different connections to their environment, levels of rural or urban development. And so for a researcher to develop a data set for the community, they have to be in touch with that community. And so they’re they’re gonna and in the examples that she gave, they were both places that she had lived and worked at, right? So she had that personal experience from which she could cooperate with those local teachers to develop things that worked for those local students. And so it’s an example of what you’re talking about in this paper. She was living it.
JM 18:36
I think that’s a wonderful example. I love that anything, anytime, anytime we can get local, anytime we can get proximate to people and their concerns. I think we’re on firmer ground than if we’re trying to implement these abstract, vague, broad, generalized abilities, whether that be in like the content of a lesson like you just described, or whether it be in a technique, right? I I personally not a fan of the term best practice, because it kind of implies that we know what to do before we even pay attention to the students. We’re doing it too.
JM 19:15
But so often our research or our attempts at teaching are searching for these magical best practices that we can be assured that we’re going to be successful before we try it out. And I’m sorry, but that’s just not the nature of life, nor do I want it to be the risk.
JM 19:35
But then the beauty of it working out is what makes it worth trying.
MR
So I’m curious, so I’m thinking through some of this challenge. Because one of the things that, again, to reference last month’s segment that having those that local data is great, but for a district who does have an author like Dr Herrick, there are 10 districts who do not have an author like Dr Herrick, and so they may say, as Laurence said on tape, but I don’t have those.
MR 20:00
Local Data right now, like, where do I get those resources? Or perhaps in an educational technology setting, to say that’s fine, but we have problems we need to solve, and I, as an administrator, may not be able to, may not have the capacity to go in and be entangled in my classrooms for every problem along every axis of consideration. And so from a from a practical decision making standpoint, What recommendations would you have from somebody who is perhaps acknowledges your argument, but also is not sure how they can map that onto their realistic decision making context?
JM 20:35
Yeah, that’s a really, really important question. I appreciate you bringing it up. And it kind of goes back to something I firmly believe, which is the greatest heroes in education are the local people trying to make it work, sometimes against insurmountable odds, some of which you’ve just described, you know, a lack of material resources, a lack of time, a lack of community support. I mean, there’s all kinds of things right now that get in our way. And so those people should be acknowledged. Whatever they do is heroes work right and and part of the luxury of being a researcher is being able to lay out an ideal situation and then asking other people to put it into practice in circumstances that are always less than ideal. With that as a preface, maybe I could say just a couple of things. One is, there’s a spirit of entanglement that I think matters more than practices of entanglement, right? And in our paper, in the paper, I use an example of a pretty rich ethnography and an ethnographical project that took two or three years to complete.
JM 21:41
I don’t know any teacher or educational researcher who has that kind of time, but there’s a spirit about how that person went about their work that I think matters more than the length of time or the number of times they visited the you know, the site that they were, that they were studying,
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an administrator may not have time to sit in every classroom in this in the schools that he or she oversees, but
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when that administrator has an opportunity to interact with a teacher or student, they have they have choices about how they care about those interactions. Are they going to be just attached hands off, kind of overseer, authority? Or are they going to embrace the people that they’re with and see them for who they are, and have an encounter with them that that exemplifies the ethical stance that they in their hearts want to take towards those people? Administration being the authority being the, you know, the one who says yes or no because of the rules can harden us, right? And so I would encourage administrators, teachers, whoever, to let to kind of shake off that, that crusty out exterior and the spirit of entanglement is embracing the people in the situation. I’m with.
LW
Dr McDonald, if our listeners have found your ideas valuable, where can they hear more about your work?
JM
Yeah, so my website. JK, McDonald, that’s j k, m, c, d, o, n, a, l, D. JKmacdonald.com. I catalog all my papers there, and that’s a good place. They can get a hold of me as well there, if they would like to learn more.