Lesley Gourlay, Professor of Education at University College in London, was invited to do a workshop at the DIE in Mexico City for the regional RED team and other scholars from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

The workshop took place on May 22, 2024 and focused on visual methodologies and what they bring into educational research. It began with a brief introduction in which Lesley talked about her own research and how she came to use drawings, photos and mapping as key parts of the process and immediately she invited each one of the 25 people attending – scholars, doctoral and master students, post-doctoral researchers – to take pictures of significant places at the DIE building.

The photos showed very different places from the building, which meant very different things for people who work there every day, visiting scholars, or students about to finish their programs. Using these resources, Lesley proposed a photo elicitation exercise in which, in pairs, the images were discussed following a set of questions.

Based upon this experience, Lesley discussed how visual methodologies such as working with photos enable the researcher to discover and inquire about things that don’t ‘emerge in a “regular” interview, in which there is very little place for details and nuances.

Using photo elicitation, as Lesley proposes, opens conversations involving embodiment, materiality, space, temporality, relationality and human-technology relationships.

The RED team shared visual productions such as drawings and diagrams produced during fieldwork in Mexico and Argentina, and they were discussed by Lesley and the other participants.

Photo by Alexander Wang on Unsplash

Invited by the Director of Educational Technology of Ministry of Education of Córdoba Province, Argentina; Patricia Ferrante and Alejo González will participate in the symposium “Innovative, creative and disruptive teachers”, that will take place on November 27 at the Ministry Building. At the symposium they will share results from RED research and findings about platform uses in education.

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

The mobile phone is the most available and used device for remote schooling, and only 47% of students have a computer for school use. In many cases, the students have only access to a shared pre paid phone. Only few schools can organize synchronic meetings, mostly from the private sector; and they frequently use Zoom for that purpose.

The national plan Seguimos Educando (we keep teaching) includes a 3 hour per day special programming in public media —tv and radio—that follows the curriculum of primary and secondary school and there are also printed booklets delivered nationwide. Recently the Ministry launched the Juana Manso Federal Plan, a virtual platform for schools including virtual classrooms, open educational resources and tools to create online lessons.

2 – Has the Covid-19 crisis changed the data policies in education in your country?
The COVID-19 crisis is showing some impacts in the data policies in education in Argentina. The first policy adopted when the attendance to school was suspended on March 19 was not to charge data consumption for the .edu sites, including schools, universities and educational portals. This entailed an agreement with ISP and mobile phone service providers. Later in August, the National Ministry of Education launched the Juana Manso Federal Plan, which contemplates digital resources and virtual classrooms, that will later include a new proposal for data management at schools, which seems to be a first attempt to tackle the data issue in the educational system as a whole. Also in late August, a presidential Decree declared for the first time that internet, mobile phones and cable TV are considered public services, and freezed the tariffs until the end of 2020.

Different provinces or local governments are extending their virtual education proposals, designing online campus or providing digital resources throughout a .edu platform.

3 – How have remote emergency education provisions (e.g. emergency technological infrastructures, hardware, software, home visits, other new practices) affected teachers and students from marginalized populations in your country? Which technological infrastructure do they have access to?
The technological infrastructure students and teachers have access to is widely conditioned by income and the practices that have been documented are very much influenced by the inequalities in the social structure. The main device for pedagogical continuity is the mobile phone, in most cases, a shared pre paid phone. Two national surveys, one done by the National Ministry and the other by UNICEF show great disparities between access and pedagogical possibilities according to income: students from poor families are not able to connect every day or to participate in synchronic meetings.

Less of 50% of households in Argentina have quality access to an internet connection, 3 in 10 have no access at all; 27% can only connect through the mobile phone (using 3G or 4G) and 3% have no connection at all. 53% of households don´t have a computer dedicated to educational use. Access and connectivity in households where students attend private schools duplicates those of students that attend public schools.

Even though there have been a special credit line for teachers to buy notebooks, there is no public policy dealing with hardware and software equipment and many teachers are still using the netbooks delivered by the Plan Conectar Igualdad, 10 years ago.

4 – Would you speak of a “pandemics pedagogy” (Williamson et al, 2020) in your country? If there is one, which features does it have?
Pandemic pedagogies in Argentina are highly conditioned by previous inequalities that are getting worst in this period. While some schools can manage to implement remote schooling throughout different strategies and resources, combining the use of different software and expecting children to keep up with a designed plan (children that frequently have familiar support), other schools are struggling to make the school present in populations which have very limited access to technologies and connectivity. The National Ministry of Education designed and implemented different policies for reaching those who are being unconnected or disconnected from the educational system with printed and public media resources, and also designing future plans to reconnect schools and students, in a similar fashion as the Plan Conectar Igualdad did from 2010 to 2015 (the Plan distributed a laptop per student in secondary schools and implemented a large teacher´s training programme) but with much less resources. This plans intend to centralize a general policy for ICT in education, regarding hardware and software distribution as well as teacher’s training and digital resources and an expectation to foster teacher’s autonomy in the design of digital learning.

Photos by Sharon McCutcheon (top) and Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

1 – Most school systems in the world have organized emergency assemblages to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. What role have digital platforms played in these arrangements?

2 – Has the Covid-19 crisis changed the data policies in education in your country?

3 – How have remote emergency education provisions (e.g. emergency technological infrastructures, hardware, software, home visits, other new practices) affected teachers and students from marginalized populations in your country? Which technological infrastructure do they have access to?

4 – Would you speak of a “pandemics pedagogy” (Williamson et al, 2020) in your country? If there is one, which features does it have?

Argentina (by Patricia Ferrante)

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Sweden (by Thomas Hillman and Svea Kiesewetter)

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Germany (by Felicitas Macgilchrist and Birte Schröder)

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