ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted across several different jurisdictions that an important function of technology education is to develop technological perspective. That is, providing students with insight into ‘how technology works’ enabling a constructively critical view of technology and enabling consideration of how technology might be used to provide products and systems that help create the sort of society in which pupils wish to live. This chapter explores technological perspective through examination of disruptive technologies and identifies some key features of disruption. It suggests nine disruptive technologies suitable for consideration in the secondary school curriculum and links these suggestions to curriculum requirements in England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand and the USA. It describes a disruptive technology from the past, Henry Ford’s mass production system, and considers the way in which additive manufacture, artificial intelligence and robotics might interact with and influence what happens in the context of transport. It describes briefly some of the teaching strategies that can be used to help secondary pupils think about disruptive technologies. Finally, it considers a bigger picture of disruption involving three features, incidental disruption, intentional disruption and cultural disruption.
