The Progression of Technology in the U.S.A.

Pacific Rim International Conference on Technology Education

Technology Education Institute of Nanjing Normal

October 16-18, 2013

William E. Dugger, Jr.

Senior Fellow, International Technology and Engineering Educators Association

Emeritus Professor of Technology Education, Virginia Tech

Technology is as old as the human race and it is the foundation for how we as humans change, alter, or modify our natural world to satisfy many of our needs and wants (ITEA/ITEEA, 2000/2002/2007).

Technology’s roots as a discipline began over two and a third million years ago when our ancestors created stone tools that were used to kill and butcher animals for food and clothing (Leakey, 2012). For the first time in human prehistory, there is evidence that the toolmakers had a mental template of what they wanted to produce—that they were intentionally imposing its shape on the raw material they used. The implement that suggests this is the so-called hand-axe, a teardrop-shaped tool that required remarkable skill and patience to make. During this formative period in history, humans developed abilities that enabled them to become right-handed or left-handed. In working with their hands, prehistoric humans have provided historians with archeological artifacts that have documented the evolution of technology through periods in time by referring to them as the Stone Age, the Copper and Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. With the development of the alphabet (around the 27th century BC) and the base 10 numbering system (around 3000 BC), humans created the basis for languages and mathematics. Across the millennia, thousands of inventions and innovations stand out as significant to the development of the human race. Some of these were: the creation and manipulation of fire, the plow (about 8000 BC), the wheel (about 4000 BC), the abacus (2nd century BC), the clock (approximately 4000 BC), the bow and arrow (about 16,000 BC) and the crossbow (approximately 6th century BC), the compass (between the 2nd century BC and 1st century AD), gunpowder (9th century AD), papermaking (105 AD), and the moveable type printing press (around 1040 AD in China and about 1440 AD in Germany).

In the remaining half of the last millennium, humans in many parts of the world refined agriculture to a point where food and fiber are relatively plentiful. During the Renaissance period (14th to 17th centuries), cultural rebirth took place and yet many new technological ideas and innovations were made (mass

1 production of books, da Vinci’s flying machine and the establishment of the laws of linear perspective by Brunelleschi to mention a few). During that same time the Age of Exploration was taking place. Explorers, such as Zheng He, Columbus, Cook, da Gama, Magellan, and others traversed the world in hopes of finding new land, treasures, and cultures.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-18th century and was fueled by coal mining. The invention of the steam engine allowed steamboats and the locomotives to transport people and goods more quickly. By the mid-19th century the Industrial Revolution had spread to North America and Continental Europe, and since then it has spread to most of the rest of the world. The Industrial Revolution is defined by mass production, broadcasting, the rise of the nation state, electric power, modern medicine, and running water. While burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming and economic growth to ecological damage, the quality of human life has increased dramatically. Life expectancy today worldwide is more than twice as high as it was when the Industrial Revolution began.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, technology has escalated at an exponential rate. Some would refer to this period as the Information Age. While information or digital technologies hold a significant place in the overall spectrum of technology, they are not considered to be the totality of technology. Advances in medical technologies, agricultural and biotechnologies, energy and power technologies, transportation technologies, information and communication technologies, manufacturing technologies, and communication technologies, have all been responsible for the technological world that we all live in today. The development of technology has helped satisfy our basic needs and wants. A human need, or the object of a human need, is something people must have in order to live a good life. On the other hand, a want, or the object of a want, is something one desires to have, whether or not one needs it. These basic human needs and wants drive technology to help us to improve our health; to grow and process food and fiber better; to harness and use energy more efficiently; to communicate more effectively; to process data faster and accurately; to move people and things easier; to make products to enhance our lives; and to build structures that provide shelter and comfort (Dugger, 2011). When comparing this description with some related disciplines—science is the study of the natural world; mathematics deals with patterns and relationships; and engineering is involved with design under constraint. In simple terms, science deals with “what is” in the natural world while technology deals with “what can be” in the invented and innovated world. We all need to know that: technology is our content—what we teach. While technology education is the school subject that teaches about technology—to whom, where, when, why, and how we teach.

Unfortunately, a majority of people in the misunderstand technology today as documented by two International Technology Education Association (ITEA) Gallup Polls conducted in 2001 and 2004 (Rose et al, 2001 & 2004). In both polls, about two-thirds (68% in 2004 and 67% in 2001) of those surveyed in the United States responded to an open-ended question about “What is technology” and gave a very narrow answer of technology as being “computers” or the “Internet.” Furthermore, a majority (62% in 2004 and 59% in 2001) of respondents stated that technology was the same as science. However, it was encouraging in the two polls to find out that almost all (98% in 2004 and 97% in 2001) of the respondents thought that technology should be included in the school curriculum as an area of study.

In the U.S., education is primarily the responsibility of the state or local governments. The U.S. Department of Education has limited power and responsibility concerning education at the state or local level. With this in mind, there is no “national curriculum” for any subject even though most subjects now have nationally developed standards for what each student must know and be able to do in order

2 to be literate in that subject. Many of these standards were developed by educational associations, like the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association, or national agencies such as the National Research Council (NRC). The progression of the study of technology as a formal school course in the United States began in the last half of the 1800s as “Manual Arts Education.” This school course had its philosophical foundation primarily from the “Educational Sloyd” system in Finland (Cygnaeus, 2010) and Sweden (Salomon). The passage of the Morrill Act in the U.S. in 1862 established colleges and institutions in each state to educate people in agriculture, home economics, mechanical arts, and other professions.

The term “industrial arts” was coined by Charles Richards in 1904 as the official name for our school subject. Then in 1923, Bonser and Mossman, in their book: Industrial Arts in the Elementary School, defined industrial arts as “a study of the changes made by man in the forms of materials to increase their values, and of the problems of life related to these changes” (Bonser & Mossman, 1923, p. 5). This definition served well over the early years until “technology” became the predominant term used in our teaching and writings. The American Industrial Arts Association (AIAA) was founded in 1939 by Dr. William E. Warner, a professor at The Ohio State University. AIAA held its first national conference in 1947 in Columbus, Ohio with a theme of “A Curriculum to Reflect Technology.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were a number of federal- and state-funded curriculum projects in industrial arts in the U.S. The most prominent ones were the Industrial Arts Curriculum Project (IACP) at the Ohio State University from 1965 into the 1970s that developed The World of Manufacturing and The World of Construction. The directors of that project were doctors Donald Lux and Willis Ray. Also, the American Industry Project, directed by Professors Face and Flug at Stout State University in Wisconsin from 1966 to 1971, was significant in that it provided the first true study of industry to students. Another curriculum project having a major impact on the teaching of industrial arts education was The Maryland Plan under the leadership of Dr. Donald Maley at the University of Maryland. Maley’s work is significant in that it offered a curricular alternative to those industrial arts educators who were searching for a more student-centered approach to instruction (Herschbach, D.R. 1997).

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the industrial arts profession in the United States slowly moved away from teaching individual skills of industry (woodworking, metalworking, electricity, engineering and architectural drawing). After this took place in many schools, in the late 1980s and 1990s, industrial arts moved towards teaching larger clusters of technological content such as manufacturing, construction, energy and power, transportation, and communication. Today, the study of technology in the U.S. is an elective area in most states and localities with approximately 150,000 students and about 28,000 teachers.

The Standards for Industrial Arts Programs Project was funded by the U.S. Office of Education to the Industrial Arts Program at Virginia Tech from 1978 to 1981. This project completed a nationwide study of all the industrial arts programs in the U.S. along with developing and printing the first Standards for Industrial Arts Programs in 1981. The standards were revised in 1985 and retitled Standards for Technology Education Programs.

It is also important to recognize the work by the Jackson’s Mill Industrial Arts Curriculum Theory group in 1981. The leaders of this group were James A. Hales and James F. Snyder from West Virginia. The group was charged with putting the ideas and philosophies of both the industry proponents and the technology proponents together. The resulting publication discusses various elements that must be considered in the development of the industrial arts curriculum. These included society and culture,

3 human adaptive systems, the universal systems model, system processes, the role of schooling, and curriculum theory.

In 1985, the American Industrial Arts Association (AIAA) changed its name to the International Technology Education Association (ITEA). This was to reflect the profession’s desire to have a more broad content direction for teaching in the future.

The United States began to embark on standards-based content for all subjects in the late 1980s. Standards are written statements about what is valued in education that can be used for making a judgment of quality. While most of these standards were developed at the national level, they had major implications for states and localities. The first set of standards was produced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in 1989 and titled Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. The next set of standards was produced in 1993 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and titled Benchmarks for Science . Another group working on science standards at this time was the National Research Council (NRC) at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). It produced National Standards in 1996. This gave the U.S. two sets of standards for science. In the discipline of technology education, the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) was granted funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to create a “Technology for All Americans Project (TfAAP)” to develop Standards for Technical Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (STL) in 2000. Additionally, about a dozen other school subjects developed standards in the 1990s. From these, educators in states and localities could use the content found in the standards and develop curriculum for their school subjects.

To provide more details about ITEA’s “Technology for All Americans Project,” the project was funded from 1994 to 2005 in three multi-year phases:

• In Phase 1 from 1994 to 1996, a Rationale and Structure for the Study of Technology (RS) was produced. This document provided the framework, or foundation, for what should be included as content in the technology standards. • In Phase 2 of the project (1996 to 2000), Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (STL) was produced. STL identifies content necessary for K-12 students (ages 5-18), including knowledge, abilities, and the capacity to apply both to the real world. The standards in STL were built around a cognitive base as well as a doing/activity base. They include assessment checkpoints at specific grade levels (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12). STL articulates what needs to be taught in K-12 laboratory-classrooms to enable all students to develop technological literacy. The goal is to meet all of the standards through the benchmarks that are included in STL. STL is NOT a curriculum. • In Phase 3 of the project (2000 to 2006), the Advancing Excellence in Technological Literacy: Student Assessment, Professional Development, and Program Standards (AETL) document was produced. AETL identifies the means for the implementation of STL in Grades K-12 laboratory- classrooms. AETL contains three separate, but interrelated, sets of standards: student assessment practices to be used by teachers, professional development to assure effective and continuous in-service and pre-service education for teachers of technology, and detailed program standards that delineate educational requirements used to promote the development of technological literacy.

4 There were additional accomplishments in Phase 3 of the project. These were the development of status reports of technology and in the United States. The first status study was completed in 2001 and the second was completed in 2004. After the project was over, the status studies were continued in 2007 and 2011. Also during Phase 3 of TfAAP, ITEA commissioned the Gallup Organization to conduct two separate surveys (2001 & 2004). Both surveys researched the question of what “Americans think about technological literacy.” In general, the results of both Gallup Polls indicated Americans think technological literacy is important and/or they supported the need for mandatory Technology Education in the U.S. Additionally in Phase 3, the project created four Addenda on how to use the standards titled "Promoting Technological Literacy for All." These were created to assist with programs, preparing teachers to use STL and AETL, assessing students, and developing standards-based curriculum.

ITEA has also prepared a new set of ten videos on one compact disk (CD) that does a great job of explaining Standards for Technological Literacy (STL), Advancing Excellence in Technological Literacy (AETL), the four Addenda publications to STL and AETL, and other topics relevant to the standards. The video series is called the “Technological Standards Briefings.”

Some recent facts about Standards for Technological Literacy include:

• Used in 41 U.S. states (ITEEA, Status Study, 2007.) • STL has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, German, and Estonian. AETL has been translated into Japanese. • National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) created a Technology and Engineering Assessment (starting in 2014) using STL as its framework. • In 2012, the State of Palestine adopted STL as the content organizer for its mandatory curriculum in Grades 5-10. • STL cites “engineering” 150+ times, “science” 60+ times, and “mathematics” 50+ times.

Standards are dynamic and need updating, especially those in technology education. Other major standards that have been revised or created into a second edition are:

• Mathematics: NCTM – 1989, revised in 2000. • Common Core Standards for English and Mathematics: Council of Chief State School Officers & National Governors Association, 2011. • Next Generation Science Standards: NRC – 2013. (This includes Engineering Design, Technology, and the Applications of Science as one of the four domains). • Technology: STL – In use now but needs revision. • Engineering - No standards have been developed. • STEM - No standards have been developed.

5 The International Technology and Engineering Educators Association's STEMCenter for Teaching and Learning™ has developed the only standards-based national curriculum model for Grades K-12 that delivers technological literacy in a STEM context. The model, Engineering byDesign™ is built on the Common Core State Standards (High School/, with Next Generation Science Standards coming soon), Standards for Technological Literacy (ITEEA); Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM); and Project 2061, Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS). Additionally, the Program K-12 has been mapped to the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges for Engineering. The ITEEA’s Engineering byDesign™ project has developed a comprehensive set of courses (and activities) from through grade 12 (ages 5-18).

The integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects is a growing effort in some countries such as the U.S. This curriculum design is referred to as STEM. It offers a chance for students to make sense of the world, rather than learn isolated bits and pieces of phenomena. There are a number of ways that STEM can be taught. One way is to teach the four individual subjects separately but by doing this there is very little, if any, integration of the subject matter. Generally, this way is not recommended. A second way is to teach one subject, for example science, and to integrate technology and engineering and mathematics into it. This is difficult because it is nearly impossible to get one teacher interested and well prepared in the four subject areas. The third way is to teach two subjects like science and mathematics and have technology and engineering integrated into both of them. The fourth way is probably the best. This involves four teachers, one in mathematics, one in technology, one in engineering, and one in science, who meet together and team-teach the integration of these four subjects.

In 2011, the members of the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) voted to change the name of the organization to the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA). This was as a result of engineers being needed more in the U.S. and the ability of K-12 STEM programs to be used as a recruiting ground for students to go into as engineering majors. Additionally, it is believed by many in the educational communities in the U.S. that all students need a solid educational background in technology and engineering.

In summary, this paper has provided a brief history of the progression of technology education in the United States. It has attempted to present early forms of technology over time that have evolved into modern-day technology. A respected definition of technology in the U.S. was presented, along with a discussion of technology and science. The evolution of the subject matter for manual arts education to industrial arts education to technology education was presented, along with some of the major events and people involved. The standards-based movement was discussed in the U.S. Additionally, the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into a school offering called STEM was presented.

The power and promise of the future lies not in technology alone, but in people’s ability to use, manage, and understand it (ITEEA, 2006).

REFERENCES

Anderson, H. A., & Oldstad, H. (1971). American industry: A new direction for industrial arts. Man/Society/Technology, 30(8), 246–267.

6 Bame, E.A., Pinder, C.A., Miller, C.D., & Dugger, W.E. (1981), Standards for industrial arts programs, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Bonser, F. G., & Mossman, L. C. (1924). Industrial arts for elementary schools. : Macmillan.

Dugger, W. E. (2010), “Uno Cygnaeus: The Finnish Visionary Who Changed Education Forever.” A Keynote Paper Presented at Uno Cygnaeus 200th Anniversary Symposium, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, Oct 12-13, 2010, Reston, VA, ITEEA. http://www.iteea.org/Resources/PressRoom/CygnaeusFinlandPaper.pdf

Dugger, W. E. (2011). STEM: Some basic definitions – a compilation. Reston, VA, ITEEA. http://www.iteea.org/Resources/PressRoom/STEMDefinition.pdf.

Hales, J. A., & Snyder, J. F. (1982). Jackson’s Mill industrial arts curriculum theory: A base for curriculum conceptualization. Man/Society/Technology, 41(2), 6–10; 41(3), 6–8.

Herschbach, D. R. (1997). From Industrial Arts to Technology Education: The Search for Direction, Journal of Technological Studies, Winter-Spring, 1997.

ITEEA. (2003). Addenda for STL and AETL. Reston, VA: Author. ITEEA. (2003-4). http://www.iteea.org/TAA/Publications/TAA_Publications.html.

ITEEA. (1996 & 2006). Technology for all: a rationale and structure for the study of technology. Reston, VA: Author.

ITEEA. (2003). Advancing excellence in technological literacy: student assessment, professional development, and program standards. Reston, VA: Author.

ITEEA. (2000/2002/2007). Standards for technological literacy: Content for the study of technology. Reston, VA: Author.

Leakey, R. (2012). “Bones of Turkana,” A Public Broadcasting System documentary, Washington, DC. National Geographic Television. http://www.pbs.org/programs/bones-turkana

Rose, L. C., & Dugger, W. E. (2001). ITEA/Gallup poll reveals what Americans think about technology. The Technology Teacher, 61(6). (http://www.iteea.org/TAA/Publications/TAA_Gallup.html).

Rose, L. C., Gallup, A. M., Dugger, W. E., & Starkweather, K. N. (2004). The second installment of the ITEA/Gallup poll and what it reveals as to how Americans think about technology. The Technology Teacher, 64(1). (http://www.iteea.org/TAA/Publications/TAA_Gallup.html).

The industrial arts curriculum project, a progress report. (1969). The Journal of Industrial Arts Education, 29(2), 10–40.

The author of this paper wished to give credit to Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), which was a valuable source in providing information about the historical lineage of technology.

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