Abstract
In the last decade, one of the most remarkable traits in educational policies in Latin America has been the implementation of programs that produced a massive distribution of digital technologies as a way to promote the digital inclusion of the poorest segments of society. Pushed by transnational technological companies and organizations as well as by national governments with social progressive agendas, these policies have been celebrated as a step forward to the modernization and transformation of school systems. In this article, and grounding on actor-network theory, I analyze the experience of Conectar Igualdad in Argentina, a program that distributed one computer per student in public secondary schools and teacher education institutions between 2010 and 2015. I am interested in understanding how these transnational actors and the globalizing rhetoric of educational reform connect with national and local scales of policy design and implementation. Using Jan Nespor’s approach to scales in educational policies, I confront top-down or bottom-up visions of educational reform, and instead seek to understand the flows and networks of this program as it moves through a heterogeneous topography, made of forces and actors with their own density.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed analysis of classroom practices, I refer to Dussel (in press).
- 2.
See Dussel et al. (2013) for a more detailed discussion of the program.
- 3.
- 4.
I take the notion of ‘laboratory for radical politics’ from Justin McGuirk’s analysis of recent urban policies in Latin American (McGuirk 2014).
- 5.
I have discussed elsewhere (Dussel 2015) these critiques to secondary schools in terms of their rigidity and their elitist traditions, which permeate both the prevalent pedagogies and the academic régimes that structure their daily lives.
- 6.
See “No Child Left Untableted”, New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9th 2013.
- 7.
The most recent development of this rivalry is that, with the change of government in December 2015, the centralized agency attached to the President’s Office has been terminated and the program has been transferred to another State agency, Educ.ar, which was created before the Kirchner administration. The fate of the program is uncertain; over 1000 contracts with trainers and technicians have been terminated (see “El plan Conectar Igualdad sigue”, March 4, 2016).
- 8.
http://huayra.conectarigualdad.gob.ar/huayra
- 9.
Geogebra is a interesting case in itself of knowledge travels and mobilization (Fenwick 2012). In 2015, its main leading designer is a secondary math teacher Michael Borcherds, and the Geogebra community has 120 non-profits partners around the world. From Wikipedia: “The GeoGebra Institutes (IGI) are more than 120 (in 2013 March) non-profit organizations around the world. GeoGebra Institutes join teachers, students, software developers and researchers to support, develop, translate and organise the Geogebra related tasks and projects. Local GeoGebra Institutes are groups at schools and universities who support students and teachers in their region. As part of the International GeoGebra Institute network they share free educational materials, organize workshops, and work on projects related to GeoGebra. GeoGebra Institute may certify local GeoGebra users, experts, and trainers according Guidelines.”
- 10.
Latour provides a telling example of the many connectors and mediators that are needed to produce schools and classrooms as such: “Fathom for one minute all that allows you to interact with your students without being interfered too much by the noise from the street or the crowds outside in the corridor waiting to be let in for another class. If you doubt that transporting power of all those humble mediators in making this a local place, open the doors and the windows and see if you can still teach anything. If you hesitate about this point, try to give your lecture in the middle of some art show with screaming kids and loud speakers spewing out techno music. The result is inescapable: if you are not thoroughly ‘framed’ by other agencies brought silently on the scene, neither you nor your students can even concentrate for a minute on what is being ‘locally’ achieved.” (Latour 2005, p. 195, his emphasis). In my analysis of Conectar, I try to visibilize the agencies and artifacts that silently operate to produce the reform network: plugs, computers, cables, software, platforms, booklets, walls, desks, teacher trainers, teachers, among many others.
- 11.
These agencies were: National Ministry of Education, Educ.ar, ANSES/Conectar Igualdad, Provincial Ministry of Education, and the Organization of Iberoamerican States (OEI), an inter-governmental agency that has had prominence in this area, training over 60,000 teachers since 2010.
- 12.
According to the evaluation report done by 11 national universities for the National Ministry of Education, 472,242 people) including principals, inspectors, teachers, families and students) attended training courses during 2010 and 2011 (Ministerio de Educación 2011b). Ros et al. (2014) also give similar numbers about the large extent of teachers who received training for the Program. The total number of teachers in the country is around 850,000.
- 13.
“Apps, like people, are connectors that boost overall data traffic so all companies can benefit from the “massive value” generated by expanded connectivity.” (van Dijck 2013, p. 58)
- 14.
Obviously, in these connections there is also some contiguity and mediation through material objects (for example, online courses that are available through particular devices or materials, or expert language and categories that becomes available through materials or the voice and body of an expert). The “non-corporeal” does not mean immaterial.
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Dussel, I. (2018). Digital Technologies in the Classroom: A Global Educational Reform?. In: Hultqvist, E., Lindblad, S., Popkewitz, T. (eds) Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance. Educational Governance Research, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61971-2_13
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