Resistance to Technological Change: Unused Calculators

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Part One:
The circumstances confronting Ms. Figueroa in her quest to have the calculators widely used at the American School for the Deaf is that the use of calculators for teaching math and science was turned down by her colleagues and her supervisor. Her senior faculty and supervisor attended a presentation made by her but none of the individuals who came to the meeting discussed the technology. The senior professors simply were interested in the extent to which she had mastered the American Sign Language. The key interest of the teaching staff and her supervisor was the extent to which Ms. Figueroa had become a part of the deaf community. When Ms. Figueroa used the new calculator in the classroom, she was first discouraged, and later was told not to use the calculator. The calculator TI Nspire was made by Texas Instruments and it was a significant improvement over the simple graphing calculators currently in use at the ASD. Ms. Figueroa wanted to introduce the calculators' capabilities to her colleagues and get the calculator widely used in ASD. What surprised Ms. Figueroa was that the response from the faculty was discouraging. The faculty and her supervisor seemed entirely uninterested in the new technology and did not want superior technology to be introduced to ASD classrooms. From the perspective of Ms. Figueroa, she was rebuffed and later told clearly by the supervisor that she should not use the TI-Nispire calculator in the classroom. Ms. Figueroa had several thoughts about her situation. She suspected that she was being rebuffed because she was not deaf. She surmised that every faculty expected that her position is filled up by someone who is deaf. Moreover, Ms. Figueroa felt that the senior faculty had recruited her not because of her teaching skills and her knowledge of the latest technology but because she was a Latin American and her name on the faculty list would make the staff more diverse. Ms. Figueroa was finding it difficult to understand why her peers were turning down new technology. Students could share files and compare their work with that of others and see alternate solutions (a). The students would not have to exchange calculators or trade problems, they could view the problems on the TI Nspire. However, Ms. Figueroa was perturbed that her role had been reduced to a classroom teacher and not using the latest technology to teach math and science better.

Part Two
The key individual stakeholders include Ms. Figueroa, her peers, and her supervisor. Other stakeholders are the students, the Deaf community, and Texas Instruments.
At the ...