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Computers & Education xxx (2009) xxx–xxx

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Computers & Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu

Can the grammar of schooling be changed?

Asunción Martínez Arbelaiz a,*, José Miguel Correa Gorospe b
a
University Studies Abroad Consortium, Plaza Elhuyar 1, 20.018 San Sebastian, Guipuzcoa, Spain
b
Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Oñati Plaza 3, 20.018 San Sebastián, Guipuzcoa, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this article we propose that the grammar of schooling [Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). The ‘‘grammar” of
Received 8 October 2007 schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479.] is
Received in revised form 10 December 2008 responsible not only for the well-known and world-wide difficulties in integrating ICT into formal edu-
Accepted 22 December 2008
cational settings, but also for the replication of traditional models when this integration occurs. In clear
Available online xxxx
contrast with this domain, in out-of-school projects ICT is integrated in innovative and truly ‘‘disruptive”
[Blin, F., & Munro, M. (2008). Why hasńt technology disrupted academicś teaching practices. Understand-
Keywords:
ing resistance to change through the lens of activity theory. Computers and Education, 50(2), 475–490.]
ICT integration
Out-school programs
ways. To exemplify this integration, we have selected and described two successful, although different
Grammar of schooling in nature, out-of-school projects. The first one, Pincel y Ratón, seeks to develop creativity in children
and to educate them to use ICT in a reflexive and useful manner. The second project, Menosca, pursues
children’s understanding of their historical and social environment through the use of GPSs, digital pho-
tography and web-page design. Both experiences underscore the multiple and varied possibilities that
ICT affords for meaningful learning when the constraints inherent to the school setting do not seem to
apply. By contrasting the formal and the out-of-school experiences, it is possible to unveil and bring to
consciousness the principles and rules of the ‘‘grammar of schooling”. We propose that becoming aware
of the features of this grammar, i.e., philosophy, course design, time and place, tasks, resources, outcomes
and products and assessment, is the first step toward change.
! 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

One of the most valued benefits that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) affords over traditional teaching practices is its
capacity to extend the student’s learning beyond the actual limitations of the classroom. This enhancement of the student’s learning refers
not only to the place, but also to the time and people that are involved in the process. Research studies suggest that ICT supports project-
based authentic learning (Means & Olson, 1994), collaborative learning, community building, critical thinking and interdisciplinary teach-
ing and learning. In pioneer classrooms around the world, students complete projects involving ICT that very often relate to aspects of real
life (Schneiderman, 2002; Chapter 6), eliminating the boundaries between the classroom and the world ‘‘out-there”. In addition, thanks to
ICT, students can take virtual trips and thus, ‘‘visit” foreign countries, ‘‘see” different places and get in contact with other realities outside
their classroom walls (Bergin, Mitchell, Korper, Curley, & Rottmann, 2007; LeLoup & Ponterio, 2000).
ICT can also extend the learning process beyond the school time limit. The effort invested in developing the skills and knowledge nec-
essary to perform in complex and ever-changing situations that the incorporation of ICT entails, pays off once the compulsory years of
schooling end. It is assumed that students’ conceptual knowledge will fade with time but ICT-related knowledge and skills will probably
continue evolving. Thus, one of the main and lasting benefits of teaching and learning with ICT is that it can develop strategies and skills
that accompany life-long learning.
Several projects have reported that ICT promotes exchanges and interactions with people outside the classroom, which helps the devel-
opment of not only linguistic competence, but also of intercultural competence (Furstenberg, Levet, English, & Maillet, 2001; Liaw, 2006;
Liaw & Johnson, 2001). The processes and products of both students and teachers are now visible and shared with people outside the class-
room and, consequently, can receive feedback from experts and non-experts. Sometimes unexpected comments and new ideas arise during
this interaction, thus enhancing the meaning and value of these practices.

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 943015352.

E-mail address: marti298@terra.es (A. Martínez Arbelaiz)

0360-1315/$ - see front matter ! 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.016

Please cite this article in press as: Martínez Arbelaiz, A., & Correa Gorospe, J. M. Can the grammar of schooling be changed? Computers &
Education (2009), doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.016
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2 A. Martínez Arbelaiz, J.M. Correa Gorospe / Computers & Education xxx (2009) xxx–xxx

Summarizing, ICT has the capacity to extend student’s learning beyond the limits of space and time, affording multiple and significant
connections that may facilitate the development of skills and knowledge relevant to pupils of the 21st century. Nevertheless, despite these
commonly acknowledged learning possibilities that ICT facilitates, similar comments arise from different parts of the globe: there is a gen-
eral and world-wide consensus that ICT has not had a significant impact on teaching or learning. In higher education in developed countries
like the US, technology is seriously underutilized (Salinas, 2008). The same conclusion can be drawn for primary education in the US, UK
(Turvey, 2006), Turkey (Gülbahar, 2007) and in the European Union (Balanskat, Blamire, & Kefala, 2006), among others. In the following
section we describe the alleged reasons or barriers that hamper the integration of ICT in academic domains.

2. Barriers for ICT integration

The ICT impact report in European schools gathered by Balanskat et al. (2006) classifies the potential barriers for ICT integration into
three categories: teacher-level barriers, school-level barriers and system-level barriers. According to this report, the first barriers are tea-
cher-related and refer to the teachers’ lack of ICT skills and their lack of motivation and confidence in using these new technologies, which
in many cases may be due to inappropriate teacher training.
The second type of barrier relates to school resources. Even after receiving adequate training, some teachers cannot put their training
into practice because of school-level barriers, such as the absence or the poor quality of the ICT infrastructure. Other school-level barriers
include limited access to ICT equipment, the school’s limited project-related experience, their lack of experience in project-based learning
and the absence of ICT mainstreaming into school strategies.
Finally, the last type of barrier occurs at the system-level. Balanskat, Blamire and Kefala equate these system-level barriers to the assess-
ment and evaluation methods, such as the ones currently in place in different European countries, which are not designed to measure pro-
gress in ICT rich schools. Teachers and parents alike seem to have doubts about the capacity of these innovative procedures to provide the
same results on national exams and fear that the students may not obtain similar results with ICT-involving methodologies (Ramboll Man-
agement, 2004). The three types of barriers are closely related to one another and are in relation of implication, i.e., the last level implicates
all the rest.
The main question is whether and how we can overcome those barriers. Starting from the bottom, teacher-related barriers could be
eliminated, according to the report, with proper training and support. Perhaps here we should keep in mind that the changes proposed
have to be congruent with the teachers’ views of their praxis, i.e. with whether or not the teachers share the same ideas in regards to what
proper teaching and learning could be. Secondly, on the one hand school-related barriers have to do with infrastructure but, on the other
hand, they also deal with becoming familiar with project-based methodologies. The technological infrastructures are the first barrier and
perhaps they are the easiest to overcome with access to technology, given that the required economic conditions can be met. The second
one, however, falls into what we argue, is the ‘‘grammar of schooling”. As we will see in the next section, the project-based methodologies,
which usually accompany ICT, do not exactly conform to traditional school practices. Finally, the ‘‘system-level barriers” or the rigid struc-
ture of the traditional schooling system, mainly exam-based, can be subsumed under the ‘‘grammar of schooling”.

3. The grammar of schooling and the grammar of natural languages

Administrators, teachers, parents and students usually have an unconscious underlying knowledge of what the ‘‘real school” consists of
and consequently, any innovation or teaching changes that deviate from that internalized model, hardly if ever, succeed. Tyack and Tobin
(1994) coined the metaphor of the ‘‘grammar of schooling” to explain why deep and meaningful changes in the education system seldom
take place. They defined it in the following way: ‘‘the regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction. Here we have in
mind, for example, standardized organizational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students, allocating them to classrooms,
and splintering knowledge into ‘‘subjects” ” (p. 454). They also point out that ‘‘[p]eriodically innovators have challenged the structures
and rules that constitute the grammar of schooling, perceiving them not as the reforms they once were but as straitjackets (. . .). Typically
these innovations have not lasted for long.” (p. 455)
Tyack and Tobińs concept of the ‘‘grammar of schooling” is a very powerful metaphor that can help explain why ICT integration is sel-
dom successful. We propose that this rigid set of structures and rules are lecture-type sessions, which include, among other defining fea-
tures: exams, a clear division between subjects, standards for different topics, etc. This rigidity in turn prevents ICT from being significantly
integrated into school practices and holds innovation back, since it tends to block ICT possibilities. This idea has been partially articulated
before. Some of the school-level barriers, i.e. those related to project-based experience and the system-level barriers identified by the Euro-
pean commission can be subsumed under the ‘‘grammar of schooling”. What we want to add is that, in clear parallel with grammar, the
educational systems, i.e., primary and secondary education schools and universities have rules and principles which are unconscious and
shared by all their members. In the same way speakers cannot spell out the actual shape of their grammatical rules but can distinguish
between grammatically correct and incorrect sentences without any doubt, administrators, and particularly teachers can distinguish be-
tween practices that they deeply believe are conducive to proper learning and practices that they believe are not. In both cases they are
unaware of the criteria underlying the distinction.
This conceptualization of grammar has clear reminiscences of Chomsky’s (1965) early work where the dichotomies of competence and
performance, deep and surface structures, were introduced and have proven to be a useful tool to understand the ‘‘grammar of schooling”.
Nevertheless, we are aware that current generative versions of language have shifted their view of language as a ‘‘biological organ”, shared
among humans and in crucial aspects unique to them (Chomsky, 2007, p. 1). We do not want to adopt this biolinguistic perspective of nat-
ural languages, but rather, we are interested in the conceptualization of grammar as a socially legitimized way of speaking, in contrast with
other grammars that are stigmatized. There is one set of principles or rules, the ones of the so called ‘‘standard grammar”, which normally
coexists with other sets of other ways of speaking or linguistic varieties (Hudson, 1980). According to Bourdieu (1985), the acceptance of
the standard language is a long and slow process of acquisition that goes unnoticed through the actions of the linguistic market and the
school plays a crucial role in stigmatizing varieties that deviate from the official or standard one.

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In the same way communities accept a given grammar as the ‘‘standard” one (Hock, 1991, p. 463), they also accept a set of principles
and rules in the educational institution and refuse or even stigmatize others. In this sense, the sociolinguistic perspective of grammar
becomes useful in order to develop the metaphoric relation between the grammar of a given language or a variety and the ‘‘grammar of
schooling”.
A number of similarities between the two types of grammars can be established: first, there is a grammar, the so called standard gram-
mar, which gradually displaces or at least coexists with the grammars of other varieties and is considered the prestigious one. At the same
time, the other grammars are stigmatized. In this sense, the ‘‘grammar of schooling” corresponds to the ‘‘standard” grammar and other
types of organization within the schools are regarded as deviant. Second, standard grammars are less likely to change than grammars that
are not codified, and those are usually the grammars of non-standard varieties. In the same vein, innovations in schools seldom succeed.
Third, as we have already mentioned, in types of grammars, their rules and principles tend to be unconscious for their users. The parallel-
isms between natural language grammars and the ‘‘grammar of schooling” help us to understand the nature of the resistance to change by
educational institutions and can be useful to counteract it.
There have been some instances of disruption of the ever-present ‘‘grammar of schooling”. For example, Nespor (2000) claims that ‘‘field
trips, which traditionally move students off school grounds, are disruptions in the standard grammar” (p. 29). He points out that teachers
merge their classes for their trips and these activities are not usually graded. Another domain where students of different ages are together
and their activities are not graded nor commonly assessed is the so called out-of-school or after-school programs. It is precisely in this
domain where ICT finds fertile ground in which to grow and to afford non-standard innovative practices. The out-of-school domain, we
claim, is not governed by this particular ‘‘standard” grammar, although we could say that alternative non-standard grammars may rule.
We propose that this domain fosters ‘‘disruptive” experiences where ICT can play an alternative and central role. In the following section
we describe the key components of two out-of-school experiences, which illustrate the possibilities of ICT, once the rules and structures of
the school do not govern.

4. Out-of-school programs and ICT

Alexander and Wade (2000, p. 3), in their review of a number of out-of-school initiatives, underscore that the students’ engagement and
investment are rarely viewed during school hours. The authors attribute this engagement to such motivational factors as the participantś
self-determination, freedom of choice, opportunities for collaboration, and interest. They point out however, that in many ways, it is dif-
ficult to perceive how programs based on wilful participation can be anything but motivating when compared to the traditional classroom
setting where attendance is mandatory, where tasks are assigned, and where their completion is required. To explain the differences be-
tween these programs and regular classroom programs, we propose that the ‘‘grammar of schooling” does not apply in these domains and
thus, the venues for ICT integration together with their innovative practices are barrier free.
In more than ten years of experience in various ICT integration projects, in Berril@b (http://www.sc.ehu.es/topcogoj/Berril@b/in-
dex.htm) we have observed that the two most well rounded projects so far have been two out-of-school programs. The first project de-
scribed here, Pincel y Ratón, is a totally voluntarily art workshop that aims at developing children’s creativity. The second, Menosca, is a
program grounded in the principles of m-learning (Winters, 2006) and contrary to the Pincel y Ratón project, studentś participation is oblig-
atory because it is partially done in class. We have developed close ties with the two projects, analyzing the actual contexts where ICT is
integrated and comparing them with other formal contexts, such as primary education where we have also collaborated in research pro-
jects. By contrasting these two contexts, the hypothesis of the ‘‘grammar of schooling” emerges and its role in this changing process be-
comes evident.
In Pincel y Ratón we have used different sources of data and information. Besides the narrative interview (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Hol-
stein & Gubrium, 2005), which has allowed us to give sense to its pedagogical value and identify key factors and features of the project, we
have used the analysis of internal documents, such as the philosophy of the centre and evaluation reports, as well as the evaluation of the
actual products or the creative output crafted by the participants and the didactic resources available to them.
In the art and history museum of Zarautz, where the Menosca project has its centre, we have gathered not only the evaluation reports,
including observations, questionnaires on the acquisition of concepts, analysis of evidence, focus group with teachers and participants, self-
evaluation questionnaires, but also the narrative interviews. All these data allow us to say that the role of ICT has changed the traditional
way of teaching and learning in substantial ways. Next, we provide a detailed description of the two mentioned out-of-school projects as
well as their overall assessment.

4.1. Pincel y Ratón

The creative resource laboratory Pincel y Ratón (http://www.pincelyraton.com/) is an educational and cultural after-school service for
children aiming to interweave traditional visual arts, such as drawing, painting and, sculpting with the use of ICT, e.g. electronic drawing,
photography and digital video, 3D design and animation. The target users are young people between the ages of two and fifteen, and occa-
sionally older teenagers, as well as mentally handicapped adults.
This workshop is located in the city centre of Logroño (Spain) and features participants from different socioeconomic backgrounds,
including immigrant and gypsy children. In the past five years Pincel y Ratón has gradually opened itself to other participants and settings.
The pedagogical proposal has activity, game and creativity at its core and the actions take place inside as well as outside the building. This
is an art workshop where we can find clay, watercolors, and other traditional material for artistic creation, together with computers, print-
ers and digital blackboards. In addition to tables where children draw and paint, there are other spaces where they can make digital record-
ings, audiovisual projects and there is an open patio where they can work.
This distribution of space allows the children to develop projects with different resources, material and technologies, free from the con-
straints of school and in a space designed for creation. The child is the protagonist, author, artist, and creator, the one who identifies and
defines the task, which usually entails the experimentation with plastic resources, the digital treatment of their drawing, self-portraits or
the crafting of new pieces.

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The goal of this workshop is to stimulate creativity and imagination through music, images, poetry and games in a setting without walls
that separate these activities from the public life of the city. This space allows the development of projects inside and outside the centre
and the creation of different artistic productions ranging from cartoons, to sculptures to puppets. An example of this type of work is the
visit to exhibitions of contemporary artists, such as Richard Serra at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao; or the production of a movie, such
as ‘‘El viaje de Doré” or ‘‘Doré’s trip”, where the trip that the illustrator Gustavo Doré took around Spain in the 19th century is recreated.
Children design the stages, outfits, sound track and act in their own film. Other examples are the paintings of outdoors sculptures around
the city or places with symbolic value that capture the children’s attention. In addition to these projects, Pincel y Raton features an on-line
gallery of paintings and child creations by digitalizing their productions.
In summary, in Pincel y Ratón children find everything they are interested in: books, games, drawings, paintings, models, computers,
cameras, music, videos etc. This new service lays out new challenges, requires new methodologies that innovate and go into depth
about quality child content. In the past five years, Pincel y Ratón, has had, as its main objective, the integration of ICT into the daily
lives of children, in a natural and humanistic way, while enriching their free time. Parents have been particularly sensitive to this is-
sue, since they are familiar with other services where there is more tool than method, more machine than service and more software
than content. They also know that when children have access to ICT, they can grow up too quickly by being exposed to inappropriate
material.
The goal of Pincel y Ratón is the enhancement of children’s creativity, originality, enterprising initiative, development of learning meth-
ods where critical thinking, disagreement and debate are promoted. Learning is based on the observation and study of complex realities
and experiences with a systematic and global understanding of these realities helping the learners to elaborate bold hypotheses that evolve
with time. In other words, this methodology aims at enhancing forms of thought absolutely necessary in today’s world and that will cru-
cially act upon their future development.

4.2. Arazi or a company that offers educational services: Menosca

The second experience described here has been developed by a private company that plans and schedules activities aimed at under-
standing the physical environment and the archaeological sites of Roman influence along the Basque coastal region. This program is
one of the services that Arazi, an educational company, offers to schools and groups of young people. In collaboration with this company,
some researchers from Berril@b designed the LurQuest, which is a variant of the WebQuest. If during a WebQuest the students gather and
manipulate information available on the Web in order to complete a task, during the LurQuest, the information comes from multiple sce-
narios or from the territory, i.e. the ‘‘lur”, the Basque word for ‘‘land”. In order to complete the LurQuests, the students learn to interact with
nature and orient themselves. They look for information thanks to WiFi connections and do research by taking pictures, recording and writ-
ing. The activities performed on-site exhibit the key components of the sometimes elusive concept of mobile learning (Winters, 2006),
namely, they are cross-curricular activities, they make use of different languages, audiovisual and textual, to represent reality and to com-
municate with other peers and, above all, the devices used are best viewed as mediating tools in the learning process.
All these activities promote dialogue, creative thinking, reflection and production, with active development coming from their learning
roles on field trips and the writing of their subsequent papers. The main topics addressed in the LurQuest were the Romanization in the
province of Gipuzkoa, contemporary art and its public presence and, self-orientation in the field and learning with mobile technology.
These LurQuests or learning itineraries were designed to be completed in three phases: (1) Students in secondary education start working
on their LurQuest in the classroom by using the Internet and some computer programs. (2) During the field trip and with the support of
mobile technology, students develop a series of activities that force them to make observations, gather data and investigate the environ-
ment with the ultimate goal being to improve their understanding of the territory. (3) Students return to school where they have to edit
and organize the information gathered on-site in order to write up their research papers, later presenting them in front of their peers, pub-
lishing them on the Web and thus, using it as a disseminating mechanism.
The experience takes place mainly outside of school time, although whole classes are involved, as described in Correa Gorospe, Ibáñez
Etxeberria, and Jimenez de Aberasturi (2006) and Ibáñez Etxeberria, Correa Gorospe, and Asensio (2007). Unlike Pincel y Ratón, the Menosca
experience is not totally performed out-of-school and contents are both formal, e.g., Romanization and art, and informal, e.g., the self-ori-
entation in the field.
We conducted different evaluations of this experience (Correa Gorospe et al., 2006; Ibáñez Etxeberria et al., 2007), which were mea-
sured by questionnaires based on self-efficacy (Bandura, 2001), information management competence and overall satisfaction. Fifty-two
students from 4th grade in Educación Secundaria Obligatoria, attending the Lizardi high school in Zarautz, completed the three question-
naires. According to the data gathered, the students did not have any trouble in learning how to use the mobile devices and thought that
it was more stimulating to learn with them than regular classes. This shows that these mobile devices fulfill the function that
Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson (1995) called ‘‘the hook”, in the sense that it captures and stimulates the individual’s curiosity and keeps
studentś interest alive. Thus, ICT was a key component to the success of the experience, not just as an added gadget that did not change
studentś orientation towards learning. In addition, the studentś perception of self-efficiency improved from the beginning to the end of the
experience and at the end, they were capable of accomplishing tasks they thought they could not accomplish before. Finally, the students
acknowledged a high degree of satisfaction with respect to the experience.

5. Out-of-school experiences and the grammar of schooling

The two selected experiences are examples of good practices taking place outside the classroom walls, with a number of crucial features
that set them apart from other practices in regular schools that we have had the chance to observe: they are student-centered, they are not
meant to fulfill a closed syllabus or program, they are project-based, they promote children’s discovery skills, they take place mainly in
open spaces and finally, they entail crucial and central roles of ICT. In the case of Pincel y Ratón, ICT facilitates different multimedia and
digital languages, allows for different voices and, enhances the sources of expression and communication of its participants. In other words,
ICT multiplies children’s creativity through individual and group projects, escaping the standardization of their learning products. Menosca,

Please cite this article in press as: Martínez Arbelaiz, A., & Correa Gorospe, J. M. Can the grammar of schooling be changed? Computers &
Education (2009), doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.016
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A. Martínez Arbelaiz, J.M. Correa Gorospe / Computers & Education xxx (2009) xxx–xxx 5

as was described in Section 4.2, makes use of the mobile devices that bring up the opportunities for situated learning in an open space,
where learners are connected to multiple content subjects, and where the task at hand becomes truly interdisciplinary.
These types of alternative practices, nevertheless, may have an impact on the learning practices and processes in the traditional class-
room setting in the long run. In his exhaustive review of UK based out-of-school experiences and their role in children’s education, Sefton-
Green (2004, p. 32) states that ‘‘[t]here is a need for research which explores the holistic ecology of learning – if we can allow such a phrase
– in the way that, say, Tizard and Hughes (2002) can offer in respect of very young children”. In other words, one cannot forget that out-of-
school and formal learning interact in complex and unpredictable ways in the learnerś minds and lives and that it is the researcherś
responsibility to first describe and then evaluate the out-of-school practices and underscore their contribution to this ‘‘holistic ecology
of learning”. We understand that the formal and informal settings are a continuum where projects with both types of features are possible.
In this sense, the Pincel y Ratón experience is totally independent from the formal domain or school, but the Menosca experience is in the
middle of the continuum, since whole classes of high school students take part in it and some work is done in the regular classroom. Thus,
like in any natural or social environment within this ecological view of learning, the two domains of formal and informal learning are the
source of hybrid practices and will inevitably influence each other.
As Hernández and Sancho (2004) have already pointed out regarding the Spanish educational system, changes that come from above, or
in this case from the Ministry of Education, frequently clash with this internalized set of principles and rules that govern what are consid-
ered the proper teaching and learning practices. As we have described in the preceding section, in contrast to the school domain, the out-of-
school environment is a more suitable ground for innovations, especially those involving ICT. We have been able to observe this by iden-
tifying the main ‘‘disruptive” features of the two out-of-school projects described in Section 3.

6. Conclusions

We started this article underscoring the alluring observation that ICT has the potential to extend learning beyond the physical limita-
tions of time, space and the actual people you have access to within the classroom walls setting. It is not a matter of chance that ICT, in
combination with the flexibility that the out-of-school domain affords, has the potential to change teaching and learning practices and
roles. As Tyack and Tobin (1994) observed, traditional schooling is a rigid organization with clear objectives, a closed curriculum and clas-
ses divided by content with traditional methodologies and evaluation systems. When ICT is integrated, it has to come to terms with this
‘‘grammar of schooling” and thus, is used to memorize and repeat information but not to create or investigate. ICT becomes a medium to
deliver the same content and to be able to present it in a different format instead of searching and building, as Blin and Munro (2008) con-
clude for the university setting.
Continuing with our metaphor of grammar, changes in the rules and principles of natural languages do take place and linguists have
provided different explanations on how languages change which may be useful to repeat here in order to understand changes and inno-
vation in the school. Once again, the initial Chomskyan conceptualization of the grammar of natural languages was a preliminary useful
step but does not totally parallel the grammar of schooling. Chomsky views grammars as sets of rules and principles innate to human
beings, abstracting away form variation and change. According to him, what varies and changes is not the core grammar or the abstract
underlying universal grammar and, consequently, its investigation is not the goal of his endeavour. Other subfields within linguistics
put their emphasis on how language change occurs and on explaining why it happens.
The sociolinguist Labov (1972) was the first to associate language change with social attitudes, claiming that when a given linguistic
feature or variable becomes a marker of group identification, it tends to spread out and is subsequently retained. His study of sound
change on the island of Marthás Vineyard, Massachusetts, opened a new trend in historical linguistics by bringing into play social moti-
vation as motors of linguistic change. Labov shows that certain linguistic changes are generalized when they constitute a marker of
group identification. In the same vein, it has been postulated that changes involving ICT take place on ‘‘islands” or with pioneer teachers
(Midoro & Admiraal, 2003). Whether these changes spread out or not has to do with their relative perception or conceptualization by the
students, teachers, administrators and society as a whole. And this is where educators and teachers can intervene, by showing that other
ways of organizing school tasks, time and space are as useful and effective as the traditional ones, if not more. Linguists and educators
(Moreno Cabrera, 2001) have been trying to eradicate the prejudice that speakers have of other varieties or ways of speaking by giving
them some presence in school. In a parallel fashion, other ways of organizing the time, the content and the efforts in schools should not
be regarded with suspicion but on the contrary, should be a welcomed alternative ‘‘grammar” that may help relativize the prevailing
position of the standard grammar.
We believe that ICT has the power to change these deeply rooted rules and principles, but as many researchers point out, they are usu-
ally integrated only to follow the ‘‘grammar of schooling”, not to subvert it in meaningful ways. We agree with Fisher, Higgins, and Loveless
(2006), when they say that ICT integration in school ‘‘might truly prove to be a renaissance, so that they would employ digital technologies
to understand, reflect, innovate and create, and through these, support their own learning in new ways”, but we have to unveil the hidden
mechanisms that rule school first.
Schools are facing new challenges given that the new social demands and their renovation clashes with a socially accepted set of prin-
ciples and rules that have been labeled the ‘‘grammar of schooling”. As was observed in other less clearly defined environments, such as the
described out-of-school Pincel y Ratón or on the field trips in the Menosca project, ICT is used and employed to its fullest without replicating
traditional models. In other words, these projects have managed to successfully integrate ICT, achieving meaningful changes in their prac-
tices and educational programs. In order to integrate ICT and profit from its innovative power, schools have all the limitations and none of the
advantages that other institutions that organize out-of-school programs have. It is not a matter of turning schools into amusement parks nor is
it a matter of avoiding their social responsibility; it is a matter of adopting a critical stance and becoming aware of the assimilating power
of the standard grammar.
More research on these out-of-school practices and their impact on the actors of formal learning, namely students and teachers, and on
the assessment of their potential to improve motivation and to contribute to learning is needed. Teachers from formal learning settings
should become familiar with what their students are doing in their spare time and by doing so will surely find many useful lessons while
observing and analyzing practices, such as the ones underscore in Section 3.

Please cite this article in press as: Martínez Arbelaiz, A., & Correa Gorospe, J. M. Can the grammar of schooling be changed? Computers &
Education (2009), doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.016
 ARTICLE IN PRESS

6 A. Martínez Arbelaiz, J.M. Correa Gorospe / Computers & Education xxx (2009) xxx–xxx

To answer our initial question, ‘‘can the grammar of schooling be changed?”, we should say that small and sporadic modifications of the
praxis can be occasionally observed not only outside the school, like the two experiences we have documented, but also inside the school. It
has been repeatedly mentioned that the use of ICT does not necessarily change the traditional ‘‘grammar of schooling”, but it can certainly
set the path for small gradual changes. We agree with Chomsky (2001), Giroux (2001) and Hernández (2007) in that school and society in
general need to be more critical with their own assumptions regarding the educational system. The first step towards change is to identify
and to challenge the ordinary way of proceeding within the school system or unveiling the internalized rules and principles in order to
bring them to consciousness. Lieberman and Milleŕs (2003) paradigm towards change, enhancing the teacherś inquiry and reflection, is
one way of going about it. With thorough inquiry and reflection and by contrasting our regular classes with other out-of-school practices,
such as the ones described here, the underlying principles and rules of the ‘‘grammar of schooling” can eventually be changed in order to
build an alternative school model more in line with the demands of today’s society.

Acknowledgments

This project was partially funded by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain, grant SEJ2006-12435-C05-02/EDUC. We would like
to thank the people involved in the two out-of-school projects for sharing with us their ideas, opinions, feelings and time in a very open and
generous manner. Words of appreciation must also go to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on preliminary ver-
sions of this article. We are grateful to the audience at the CAL‘07 Conference: ‘‘ Development, Disruption and Debate” in Dublin, March
2007, where the main ideas of this article were presented. Any and all errors in this paper remain ours.

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Education (2009), doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.016