By SIMON COLLINS science reporter
A third of New Zealand's high-school technical teachers are not happy with the way they are teaching the new subject of technology.
A national survey has found that almost half believe the subject is not being adequately funded, many are unhappy with their own training, and many believe the subject is too academic.
The survey, carried out by Waikato University for the Ministry of Education, comes as many high schools introduce more practical trade training courses as an alternative to technology in Years 11 to 13 (fifth, sixth and seventh forms).
The secretary of the Auckland Technology Teachers' Association, David Redwood, said what used to be workshop technology had become academic and "feminised".
"As the curriculum has become more and more feminised, boys have become more and more loutish," he said.
The subject became compulsory for Years 1 to 10 (primer one to fourth form) in 1999, but many schools extended it to Year 11 (fifth form) only this year. Few have extended it to the last two years.
The survey has found that 63 per cent of primary and intermediate school teachers are happy with the way they are implementing the new technology curriculum, and only 20 to 26 per cent are unhappy.
But only 52 per cent of high-school teachers were happy and just 39 per cent in schools teaching from Years 7 to 13 (forms one to seven). A third of high-school teachers, and 53 per cent of Year 7 to 13 teachers, were unhappy.
Their biggest concern was their lack of training in the subject, which spans modern technologies from engineering to biotechnology as well as traditional areas such as woodwork and cooking. Almost half the high-school teachers said it was not adequately funded (43 per cent) or not funded at all (3 per cent).
Teachers wanted to make the subject simpler and some "berated the loss of skill instruction".
One high-school teacher wrote: "I have had to eliminate a lot of the skills education and the general knowledge in favour of the problem-solving way. The latter takes a lot of time and the students end up with a lot less product than they used to."
The director of Waikato University's Centre for Science and Technology Education Research, Professor Alister Jones, said the results reflected poor teacher training.
"We are talking about teacher knowledge. They didn't do technology at school," he said.
The call by some teachers for more practical teaching was "harking back to what they used to do and feel comfortable with".
He believed technology should be seen as a balance between practical and academic work.
"In the past, technology has been seen as for the dummies," he said. But the new subject could lead students into engineering as well as trades.
He said the new subject was "at the cutting edge internationally", and the Education Ministry had acknowledged this by spending $23 million on training technology teachers during the 1990s.
"I think the ministry should still be putting money into professional development for technology," Professor Jones said.
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