Please join us in congratulating Michael LeBlanc who successfully defended his EdD Dissertation on November 18 of 2025.
Title:
By the Bootstraps: Teachers, Grassroots Computing, and Educational Culture in British Columbia, 1966 to 1986
Abstract:
This dissertation is a history of computer culture in British Columbia’s (BC) education system from 1966 to 1986, a period of teacher-led, grassroots computer adoption, integration, and interpretation. As cultural artifacts, computers were more than instruments—they were symbols that held meaning for people. I first discuss what they meant in the context of the 1960s computer counterculture, where computers were interpreted as a transformative force leading to personal empowerment. This ethos sparked various computer-based cultural initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the People’s Computer Company and Community Memory, an early social network. Beliefs in accessible and convivial technologies transferred to Vancouver, BC, where activists formed a computing organization called INFACT and their own Community Memory system. By the late 1970s, INFACT members were involved in the early computer hobbyist movement, promoting microcomputers as devices for everyone to access, understand, and control.
Some BC teachers were also hobbyists, and computers held a similar significance for them. Just like members of the countercultural computing movement, teachers were immersed in the social, political, and cultural currents of the Sixties. As teachers increasingly adopted a social justice orientation and progressive pedagogy, they viewed computers as a means to achieve both social and professional change. Computers would support their transformation into facilitators and curricular leaders, and lay the foundation for greater social equity. Rather than opposing computers in the classroom, as other scholars suggest in an American context, teachers led computer adoption and innovation in BC. Computers represented an opportunity to reshape the philosophy, practice, and business of education.
This progressive, teacher-led culture of computing began with William Goddard in 1966, who encouraged “computers for the whole school,” and continued through the Instructional Uses of Microcomputers Pilot Project in 1980; it concluded with the Provincial Advisory Committee on Computers in 1986. This cultural history of educational computing in BC draws on a variety of primary sources, including archival documents and reports, contemporary newsletters and magazines, newspaper articles, conference recordings, and oral interviews. It is a history rooted in teacher agency and local reinterpretations of global ideas about education, technology, and power.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Jason Ellis
Dr. Alison Taylor
Dr. Robert Brain
We are thankful for the Examining Committee’s contribution and expertise.
Dr. Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, External Examiner
Dr. Arthur (Skip) Ray, History, University Examiner
Dr. Leslie Paris, History, University Examiner
Dr. Marina Milner-Bolotin, Chair of Examination Committee
Congratulations Michael!