Abstract
Canale explores Plan Ceibal policy in a focal classroom to investigate how through classroom interaction and work two curriculum artifacts (laptop and textbook) come to encapsulate either a traditional ideology of learning (underscoring verbal communication as demonstration of learning) or an alternative one (foregrounding the multiplicity of modal resources deployed in communication and learning). The analysis foregrounds teachers’ agentive role within the Policy in designing spaces for interacting with artifacts to demonstrate learning multimodally. Findings are also discussed in light of the expectations two legitimating policy audiences have (students/EFL supervisors and parents, respectively) and their effect on how artifacts are used and how semiotic labor is distributed between both artifacts in the classroom.
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at the Fellowship Colloquium of the Georg Eckert Institut (Leibniz-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung) in Braunschweig, Germany. I am most thankful to the audience for their insights and to the GEI researchers and staff for their support during my research stay.
- 2.
A preliminary analysis of some of the classroom events explored here appears in Canale (2018).
- 3.
In 2016, there was an attempt to incorporate digital EFL textbooks , but it did not succeed, for reasons which do not pertain to the medium itself, but to political and economic debates around purchasing licenses for such textbooks.
- 4.
Uruguay in Focus is the local adaptation of an internationally published ELT textbook. Actually, it was adapted from an already existing adaptation of the book in Argentina (De Oliveira Lucas et al. 2018) to introduce local culture and issues to students.
- 5.
EFL state supervisors are in charge of designing EFL official curricula for public schools and for private school classrooms which do not follow a “bilingual stream”. They are also in charge of selecting EFL textbooks. Supervisors may enter a classroom to oversee EFL teacher’s skills and to check whether they are following the mandated EFL syllabus and to go over the teacher’s book to check what type of activities are designed for the classroom. However, these supervisors more often do this for public school classrooms than for private school classrooms.
- 6.
- 7.
At first sight, the fact that the teacher assumes parents demand the use of the textbook seems counter-intuitive since within the policy there is more expectation for laptop use. However, my conversations and interviews with the teacher revealed two important aspects: the fact that parents pay for textbooks (while they are not charged for the laptops) and also the fact that being a working-middle-class school, most students at Fleetwood have digital technologies at home. Also, parents’ interest in students using the textbook point to the still dominant traditional ideology of learning which mostly focuses on language practice and legitimates the textbook as the learning artifact par excellence.
- 8.
Throughout the chapter, verbal data analysis focuses on main clauses. Ellipsis of process -if part of the main clause- is also analyzed.
- 9.
In this sense, XO laptop use in this environment seems to operate in a different way from other 1:1 contexts, for which researchers have found that the most extensive use of laptops pertains to the search of information, vocabulary and other areas of human-artifact distributed memory, and which has even been characterized as one of the most frequent laptop-student practice in some Plan Ceibal settings (Gabbiani 2010; Kachinovsky et al. 2013).
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Canale, G. (2019). Laptops and Textbooks as Curriculum Artifacts: Audience, Authorization and Ideologies in the Classroom. In: Technology, Multimodality and Learning. Palgrave Studies in Educational Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21795-2_6
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