By the early 1990s I was completing my primary education in Uruguay. Unlike less privileged schools, the middle-class urban private school I attended had been equipped with a computer lab. It contained some four or five huge wooden desks with three or four desktop computers on each of them, most of them with black and white screens. Once a week, our teacher would walk us through the school to get to the computer lab and have our regular one-hour class with an ICT teacher to learn how to use the computers. As far as I can remember, that was the weekly contact I had with computers at the time. We did not have a computer at home and I did not “practice” my technology skills outside of the school lab. Roughly around the same time, my school also introduced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) lessons twice a week. An EFL teacher would come to our classroom for 45 minutes and help us work through some EFL tasks with a printed textbook, some color posters and a cassette. I did not “practice” my foreign language skills outside the school classroom either. In fact, my parents—and even my siblings—had grown up in a time when French and Italian were highly valued in the local community, and thus they hadn’t learned English. Moreover, my siblings never had a technology or ICT class throughout their school years. These two “new” elements, technology and EFL, being introduced in my school were becoming increasingly visible and valuable in education at a local, regional and probably global scale. Access to these new educational commodities was associated with promising professional prospects, a quicker insertion in the globalizing world and more and better economic, cultural and educational opportunities.
Since then, the situation in Uruguay has both changed and remained the same. It has changed because there have been several and more systematic attempts to implement EFL programs and to introduce technology in primary and secondary education. At present, access to both technology and EFL is being universalized across the country by Plan Ceibal, a social, educational and foreign language program set up by the left-wing government in 2007 to bridge social and digital divides. Plan Ceibal is the Spanish acronym for Project of Educational Connectivity for Online Learning. Laptops—and more recently tablets—are being handed out to students so that they can use them during class time in any school subject or at home. EFL lessons are being delivered in practically every corner of the country either by an EFL classroom teacher or by the joint work of a Spanish classroom teacher and a remote EFL teacher via a video-conference screen provided by Plan Ceibal. All these phenomena point to a change in local policy and education, which could easily be connected to (relatively) similar trends elsewhere. However, the situation in Uruguay has remained the same in that technology and EFL continue to be highly valued for the future—and present—of local children. Both technology and EFL have actually become key terms in education policy-making. Much of the future of local students is discussed around these two key terms, which often times are filled up with meanings of promising innovation, prosperity or even outside-the-box thinking; to a lesser extent, they are sometimes condemned for fostering neo-liberal and highly organized capitalist practices.
This book adopts a particular approach to technology and EFL. It does not center on the ideologically driven discussion of the pros and cons of technology or on whether technology re-skills or de-skills humans. I do take into account ideological aspects of technology in society and in education to better contextualize and understand current trends in policy-making, but instead of focusing on utopian and dystopian views, the book centers on how a nation-wide 1:1 policy (one laptop per child) is being implemented and enacted as an orchestrated attempt to democratize and universalize access to technology and English. In particular, it focuses on how, through enactment, this policy and its key terms come to index different meanings for different stakeholders in particular time/space frames. This, of course, has an effect on how the policy unfolds in time and space. The book also draws attention to the potential implications of education policies which foster the use of new technologies such as this one, in terms of both learning in the twenty-first century and providing meaningful meaning-making opportunities for students. For this to happen, it is required to dig deeper into the ideologies of learning that circulate and still dominate mainstream education and technology implementation. Are current education policies accompanied by a change in our conception of learning? Are these policies accompanied by a shift in views of how learning happens? And about how learning can be demonstrated? Questions like these underlie the discussion and analysis presented in this book to better understand how ideologies of learning shape interaction, communication and learning in the classroom; recognizing or misrecognizing the semiotic work students do with technology or with other educational media and artifacts.
Throughout the book I shall argue that attending to how policy key terms such as technology and EFL come to index particular meanings as they move in time/space scales is important to capture the semiotic processes through which policy-making and policy enactment achieve cultural, socio-political and ideological cohesion in society by articulating meanings at different scales. The trajectories of meaning across scales cannot be entirely predicted a priori; neither can they be entirely shaped by top-down policy actions. And yet, these trajectories impact classroom interaction, communication and learning. As will be argued throughout the book, focusing on policy as meaning-making (i.e. as a complex set of semiotic practices occurring at different time and space frames) and its trajectories is much needed in education not only to better explore the links between technology and learning but also to reflect on what is legitimated as learning, and its implications on students’ semiotic processes.
As I shall explain in more detail in Chap. 4, in its broadest form, the policy I investigate—Plan Ceibal—revolves around universalizing and democratizing access to technology. This is by no means strange to current trends in education and social policy-making. Debates over the role of new technology in formal learning settings have permeated discussions in education research, governments, mass media, domestic and international policy and legislation, as well as the political and ideological views of lay citizens.
Technology is both a social process and a social product, ubiquitous in social life. In particular, the wide array of social practices and events in which the dyad technology-education is being semiotized and re-semiotized points to two main aspects of technology that research should not neglect.
- 1.Technology operates in complex discursive networks which comprise political, ideological, social, economic and cultural struggles over the meanings of social reality, the spread of technology, its use and its interaction with individuals in particular environments. In the twenty-first century, these struggles call for research to adopt a critical stance, but not necessarily in terms of a negative critique of the role of technology in society and education and the ideological implications of the discourse of its supporters. Instead, I believe it calls for what can be framed in broader terms as a generative critique (Macgilchrist 2016), which to my mind requires a dynamic, situated approach to analyzing the connections between technology and education in such a way that a better future can be designed (The New London Group, TNLG 1996) for students and for society at large. Needless to say, a better future is, by definition, ideological; but it has the advantage of being overtly ideological, seeking to bridge cultural, social and economic gaps that at present might be widening due to unequal access to...