Reflections on teaching, technology, and human agency in China
I have been teaching in China for the past 2 weeks – providing English for Special Purposes courses on English for Healthcare and Intercultural Communication in Nursing Contexts. I will be here for three more weeks.
One of the great privileges of teaching internationally is the opportunity to encounter assumptions about education that differ from our own. Sometimes those differences are readily apparent: the organization of a classroom, the relationship between teachers and students, or expectations surrounding participation and assessment. At other times, they are more subtle, revealing themselves in ordinary practices we might otherwise take for granted.
During my current teaching assignment in China, I have been reflecting on the relationship between students, digital technology, and learning. I am interested not simply in how frequently students use technology, or whether they are particularly proficient with it, but in the way technology mediates our encounters with information, with one another, and ultimately with ourselves. What might students’ everyday relationships with digital tools reveal about their understanding of learning itself? The question extends well beyond China, and the more I consider it, the more I suspect that something larger is at stake than our methods of teaching and learning.
Technology Is No Longer Merely a Tool
We ordinarily think of technology as a collection of instruments designed to help us accomplish particular tasks. A smartphone allows us to communicate; a translation application helps us understand another language; artificial intelligence provides information, generates explanations, and assists us in producing increasingly sophisticated work. In this understanding, technology remains subordinate to human purposes. We decide what we wish to accomplish and select the appropriate instrument to help us achieve it. But there is something inadequate about this description.
In contemporary China, digital technology is integrated into everyday life in ways that are difficult to overlook. Mobile applications facilitate communication, transportation, shopping, payment, and an extraordinary range of other activities. Technology is not simply something we reach for when we encounter a problem. It has become part of the environment within which our problems, possibilities, and expectations emerge. A tool is something we employ within an environment; an environment is something within which we learn to understand the world. Environments do more than enable particular activities: they help establish the conditions under which certain activities appear natural, desirable, or even necessary. Technology may therefore influence not only how we accomplish the things we value, but how we decide what is valuable in the first place.
The Difference Between Having an Answer and Understanding It
Consider learning a second language. A student encountering an unfamiliar English expression can consult a translation application and receive an immediate answer. Artificial intelligence can explain grammatical structures, generate appropriate responses, and produce polished paragraphs that might otherwise require considerable effort. These are remarkable educational resources. In my teaching, I am particularly interested in helping students develop the English-language competencies required for professional communication. A pharmacy technician, for example, must learn how to welcome a patient, gather information, explain basic procedures, and recognize when a question should be referred to a pharmacist.
The practical advantages of technology are obvious: a student can access vocabulary, rehearse unfamiliar expressions, and clarify misunderstandings almost instantaneously. But producing an appropriate sentence is not necessarily the same as participating competently in a conversation. An encounter with another person requires listening, interpretation, judgment, and responsiveness to circumstances that may not conform to our expectations. It also involves vulnerability. A student attempting to communicate without knowing exactly how to express an idea must risk misunderstanding, hesitation, and error. Such moments are not necessarily failures of learning; they may be among the experiences through which learning occurs. Technology can supply a correct answer, while the struggle toward an answer may develop capacities that cannot be acquired simply by receiving it.
Efficiency Is Not Effectiveness
We regularly praise technology for making our lives more efficient. We can complete tasks more quickly, reduce unnecessary effort, and produce impressive results with fewer resources. Efficiency has become one of the defining ideals of modern organizational life, but efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing. Interestingly, the two words share a common ancestry. Both ultimately derive from the Latin efficere, meaning to bring about, accomplish, or make something happen, from ex- (out) and facere (to make or do). Historically, efficiency referred to the capacity to produce an effect; later, especially through mechanics and industrial production, it acquired its familiar association with useful output relative to the resources expended. Effectiveness, meanwhile, emphasizes the successful accomplishment of an intended purpose. Efficiency concerns the economy of our efforts; effectiveness concerns whether those efforts accomplish what we intended.
Related distinctions appear in other languages. French distinguishes efficience from efficacité, commonly separating economical resource use from the attainment of desired results. German offers Effizienz and Effektivität, alongside Wirksamkeit, which directs attention to the actual effect or influence something produces. Thai differentiates ประสิทธิภาพ (prasitthiphap), commonly used for efficiency, from ประสิทธิผล (prasitthiphon), which emphasizes effectiveness or achievement of results; the element phon means result or fruit. Korean similarly distinguishes 효율성 (hyoyulseong), associated with the relationship between input and output, from 효과성 (hyogwaseong), concerned with effect or outcome. These terms are not interchangeable in every context, nor do the distinctions operate identically across languages. Yet they invite a useful question: are we producing results economically, or are we producing the results we actually intend?
Imagine a student completing an assignment with artificial intelligence. If a task that once took two hours now takes ten minutes, this is an impressive improvement in efficiency. But was the student effective? If the task was merely to produce an accurate document, perhaps so. If it was to develop the capacity to reason, interpret information, formulate arguments, or communicate independently, the answer is less obvious. The technology may have improved the efficiency of the task while undermining its educational effectiveness. The reverse is also possible: a student using digital tools for feedback, practice, or access may become more capable precisely because of that assistance. The real question is whether technological use serves the educational purpose.
Effective for What?
It is tempting to suppose that effectiveness provides the final standard for evaluating education. If something accomplishes its intended purpose, what more could we demand? Yet that assumes the purpose itself is worthwhile. An educational practice might be wonderfully efficient and entirely effective while serving a mistaken conception of what education should accomplish. A system optimized for standardized examinations might generate excellent test scores while neglecting intellectual curiosity or ethical judgment. An institution might prepare students admirably for immediate labour-market demands while failing to cultivate their capacity to question the expectations placed upon them. Success at an intended end does not establish the worth of that end.
Efficiency asks whether we are using our resources well. Effectiveness asks whether we are achieving our objectives. Wisdom asks whether those objectives deserve to be pursued. This third question becomes particularly urgent when we think of technology not merely as an instrument but as an environment. What if the environment in which we pursue our goals is also influencing our understanding of which goals matter?
When Technology Begins to Shape Our Purposes
If technology were simply a tool, we could identify our educational purposes and choose the instruments that best served them. But what if our technological environment has already helped form those purposes? What if our emphasis on speed, convenience, measurable performance, and immediate results is not simply the expression of independently chosen values, but is partly cultivated by the systems through which we work and learn? The philosopher Martin Heidegger raised a related concern when he argued that modern technology is not adequately understood as a collection of devices. It also represents a way of revealing the world, one that encourages us to see things as resources available for calculation, ordering, and use. We need not accept his entire account to take the warning seriously.
When technological systems become the environment within which we live, they may influence not only what receives our attention but also what appears worthy of attention. That is a deeper issue than the familiar complaint that smartphones distract students. Distraction concerns the direction of attention; the more fundamental concern is the formation of purpose. If learning comes to mean the rapid acquisition of correct answers, the efficient completion of assignments, or the production of demonstrable outputs, this conception can become so ordinary that we cease to notice it is one conception among others. The danger is not necessarily that students lose the capacity to think. It is that they may come to understand thinking primarily as a means of producing useful results. Technology may not simply capture our attention; it may begin to shape our understanding of what a human being is for.
Education and the Formation of Human Agency
My understanding of education begins with the conviction that learning is a fundamentally social achievement. We develop capacities through relationships with other people. Teachers invite us to attempt things we may not yet believe ourselves capable of accomplishing; classmates challenge our assumptions, offer encouragement, and help us recognize possibilities beyond our existing understanding. Through these encounters, we become more than repositories of information. We become increasingly capable of judgment, participation, responsibility, and independent action.
This is what I understand by the development of human agency. Agency is not merely the ability to select among available options or use sophisticated instruments to accomplish predetermined tasks. It includes the capacity to examine our purposes, recognize obligations, respond to others, and determine what deserves our attention and commitment. Such capacities often develop through experiences that look inefficient: a student struggles to articulate an idea; a group works through misunderstanding; a learner hesitates before asking a question that might reveal uncertainty. These are not necessarily impediments to education. They may be occasions in which learners discover themselves as capable participants in a shared world. Technology can support these experiences, but the most efficient route to an answer is not always the most effective route to understanding it.
What My Students in China Are Teaching Me
Teaching in China has given me an opportunity to reconsider my own assumptions about education. It would be easy to treat the use of technology simply as a cultural difference, comparing students’ practices here with those I have encountered in Canada, Korea, Thailand, or elsewhere. Such comparisons can illuminate, but they can also obscure. The important question is not whether Chinese learners are unusually dependent upon technology, or whether Canadian learners are somehow more independent. It is how all of us increasingly inhabit environments in which technology mediates significant portions of human activity.
What happens to our understanding of competence when assistance is continuously available? What happens to learning when answers can be generated almost instantly? What happens to relationships when communication is increasingly mediated by systems organized around convenience, prediction, and responsiveness? Most importantly, what happens when technological measures of success displace reflection on the human purposes that make success meaningful? These are questions for teachers, institutions, employers, and societies, not simply for students in one country.
The Human Purpose of Education
I do not believe education should resist technological innovation simply because it challenges familiar practice. Nor do I think that unnecessary difficulty is inherently virtuous. Sometimes better tools free us to devote attention to more worthwhile things, and technology can genuinely expand human agency. But this possibility depends on our willingness to distinguish the formation of human capacities from the mere production of desired outcomes. We should care about efficiency because time, resources, and effort matter. We should care about effectiveness because educational practices ought to accomplish their purposes. Neither measure, however, can tell us whether the purposes themselves are worthy.
For that, we must return to questions about human beings: What does it mean to become capable? What forms of understanding deserve cultivation? What responsibilities do we have toward one another? What kind of freedom should education make possible, and what sort of people are we hoping our students will become? Technology cannot finally answer such questions on our behalf. They require judgment, reflection, and a willingness to revisit assumptions so familiar that they no longer appear to be assumptions. Perhaps the greatest educational challenge of our technological age is not learning to use increasingly powerful instruments, but preserving our capacity to ask what those instruments are for. Beneath that question lies another: Are we becoming the kinds of human beings who can determine wisely what is worth doing? Technology can make us more efficient, and it can help us become more effective. But the question of what makes a human life worth living remains ours to answer.
