Ferrante, P., Williams, F., Büchner, F., Kiesewetter, S., Chitsauko Muyambi, G., Uleanya, C., & Utterberg Modén, M. (2024) “In/equalities in digital education policy – sociotechnical imaginaries from three world regions” Learning, Media and Technology 49(1): 122-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2237870 (open access)

Tech use in teaching and learning has been considered as a contributory factor aiding academic success. Its lack in rural schools has also been considered as a hindrance to quality education. This study through a qualitative method explored the intersection of innovation and technology use as well as the challenges of disconnection. This was done using a selected rural school in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Data were collected from a case of a secondary school using observations, field notes and semi-structured interviews from a purposively selected sample of a principal, a head of department, six teachers and an administrative clerk. The collected data were coded, categorised and analysed thematically. The findings show among others that inequalities are due to infrastructure, socioeconomic status and location. The disparities influence how digital inequality is experienced, exposing barriers, and frustrations, through digital disconnection. The experience causes the teachers to utilise less of technology and make use of what they have. This study has shaped our discourse in digital technology theory and humanities about what technology is, what it is for, and what kind of justice we ought to seek from it.

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

“Affordances” is likely to be an important word. “Participation” will also make an appearance. And perhaps (with a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin) “imagination” is more helpful than “creativity”.  

The event is organised together with the “Arbeitsstelle Schulentwicklung” (Task Force for School Development) at the University of Oldenburg’s Centre for Teacher Education.

As inspiration, here is an image we have used in the Re:Lab with the title of “how not to design the classroom of the future?”

“Reading, writing and narrating the world differently. With an enthusiasm that defies the virulence of the times that surround us, Orit Halpern invites us to explore the intersections of education, artificial intelligence, cognitivism and even economic theory. Orit is an American historian who talks to us about all this in a FLACSO classroom on a Buenos Aires midday.

Freedom, equality and ‘fraternity’: speculative history of artificial intelligence’ was the title of the keynote given by Halpern at a conference organised by Reconfigurations of Educational Inequality (RED), the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI) and FLACSO.

The expert in digital culture surprised the audience by adding to her hypotheses the theory of economist Friedrich Hayek: “The particular point is that each member (neuron, buyer or seller) is induced to do what, in the overall circumstances, benefits the system”.

The full article (in Spanish) is available here: https://www.clarin.com/revista-n/orit-halpern-educacion-importante-ahi-formamos-ensenamos-gente-pensar-manera_0_M6AhhR8e6J.html

Photos are from the full article

Day 1: Introducing Visual Methods

 
The first part of the workshop consisted of a theoretical, epistemological and methodological introduction of visual methods in educational science (and beyond). Starting with a description of the role of visualisations in the production of scientific knowledge (Latour, 1986) and a contextualisation of visual methods in the ‘visual turn’ in the social sciences (Dussel, 2013), we presented various examples of visual methods from the research literature. Examples included self-photographs by adolescents (Yates 2010), mappings of sociomaterial practices (Gourlay, 2015), historical drawings by children (Kay, 2021) and art-based projects with migrant children (Clacherty, 2021). Federico then presented some of the findings from his master’s thesis ‘Children’s and Adolescents’ Experiences of Migration: An Ethnography of the Casa Mambré Migrant Shelter’, in which he used visual methods in the form of comic stories. Finally, some visual examples from the data collection for the RED project were discussed. These examples were collected last year in our partner schools in KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng under the guidance of Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi. Based on these examples, we demonstrated how visual methods can provide access to the lived experience of young participants and depict forms of knowledge that are otherwise difficult to articulate – an essential undertaking for the RED project, but one that also involves ethical challenges. We discussed these challenges, as well as the general potential of visual methods, with our South African colleagues.

Day 2: Creating Visual Narratives

In the second part of the workshop, we asked the participants to create their own visual narratives in the form of comic stories. As a ‘micro’ research project for the rest of the workshop, the participants described how they create a research text. As inspiration for this task we introduced a research paper by Lesley Gourlay, in which she adopts a phenomenological perspective to describe the material, social, affective, bodily and infrastructural aspects involved in the mundane practice of opening an email on a computer (Gourlay, 2024). After the production of the visual narratives, we discussed the process and the experience of production with the participants. It became clear that, on the one hand, the method was met with resistance – for many participants, the practice of drawing was associated with uncertainties, as was the sharing of personal experiences and feelings. On the other hand, however, they emphasised that the method opened up access to other forms of knowledge – situated, embodied and contextual knowledge – and thus enabled exciting and surprising insights.

Day 3: Analysing Visual Narratives

In the last part of the workshop, the participants analysed the visual narratives they had previously produced. In small groups, they considered what the narratives could tell us about the experience of producing research texts, about the human and non-human actors involved, and about the affects and emotions that arise during a writing process. In the discussion that followed, they raised topics such as the solitude or sociality of academic writing, the moments of inspiration or idea generation, and the role of digital platforms and infrastructures for writing. Finally, Federico provided insights into the analysis he is conducting on the visual narratives from the RED project for his doctoral dissertation. As examples, he presented the thematic grouping of narratives on the digital whiteboard platform ‘Mural’ and the possibilities of content analysis using coding and categorisation in the ‘MaxQDA’ programme.

We thank our colleagues from UNISA for the lively and inspiring exchange during the retreat. We also thank Prof. Dr Marcia Mkansi for her invitation and hospitality, Prof. Dr Paul Prinsloo for his support throughout the process and Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi for their help with data collection and analysis.

Literature

Clacherty, G. (2021). Art-based, narrative research with unaccompanied migrant children living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 36(4), 547–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2019.1621766

Dussel, I. (2013). The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 29–49). Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_2

Gourlay, L. (2015). ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 402–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020784

Gourlay, L. (2024). More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making: Paratexts of the Postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education, 6(3), 756–766. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00449-x

Kay, C. (2021). German children’s art during World War I. Global Studies of Childhood, 11(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/20436106211015694

Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands. Knowledge and Society, 6, 1–40.

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 conference was opened by Patricia Ferrante (RED/FLACSO, Argentina), Lydia Heidrich (RED/UOL, Germany), Luis Scazzo (OEI, Argentina), Valentina Delich (FLACSO, Argentina), and Felicitas Macgilchrist (RED/UOL, Germany).

Rebecca Eynon (University of Oxford, UK) then gave the first keynote on Demanding better EdTech – Reflections from the field, which Inés Dussel (RED/DIE-Cinvestav, Mexico) chaired and commented on. Eynon based her presentation on ethnographic research conducted in UK education and raised concerns about how digital software is not always sufficiently nuanced and often neglects to account for students’ “informed guesswork” and their questions. She raised the issue of the importance of demanding better products from the commercial sector, questioning the narrative of efficiency and bringing questions on the purpose of schooling to the agenda. In this way, educational experts can reclaim responsibility for education from the EdTech sector.

Gabriel Kessler (CONICET/UNSAM, Argentina), Paul Prinsloo (RED/UNISA, South Africa), and Alejandro Artopoulos (UDESA, Argentina) discussed Inequalities and Platformization: Dilemmas in Digital Education in the first panel, chaired by Cora Steinberg (UNICEF). They raised issues on, for example, to what extent platforms change curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments, and how much learning nowadays is possible outside of platforms. The questions could definitely be food for further thought.

After lunch, Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt (RED/GU, Sweden) hosted the next panel on Pedagogies in/of Connected Schools. Ethnographies of Practices, where Felicitas Macgilchrist (RED/UOL, Germany), Soledad Vercellino (Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro, Argentina), and Rosalia Winocur (UdelaR, Uruguay) shared reflections from ethnographic fieldwork around the world with examples from Uruguay, Argentina, and Germany. Their empirical work showed that access does not automatically mean inclusion.

A panel on Platforms and Datafication: Are there Alternatives to the Corporate World? was hosted by Adriana Robles (RED/DIE-Cinvestav, Mexico). Thomas Hillman (RED/GU, Sweden), Patrico Lorente (UNLP, Argentina), and Lila Pagola (Universidad Nacional de Villa Maria, Argentina) discussed the influence of digital platform providers in the education sector in different world regions and how to understand their impact with regard to datafication.

The last keynote was held by Orit Halpern (TUD, Germany) and discussed by Flavia Costa (CONICET/UNSAM, Argentina). In her research, Halpern engages in histories of science, computing, cybernetics, and design. The keynote focused on digitalization and subjectification, where Halpern discussed big data and its, sometimes, unrealistic impact on societal questions.

One reflection from the all-day program was how well the arrangement worked. The bilingual structure, in which Spanish and English speakers could meet, worked surprisingly well due to the simultaneous interpretation provided. The Global South and the Global North definitely share common interests and can benefit from each other’s perspectives. Let us hope that this conference was one of many more to come.

A special thanks to Patricia Ferrante (RED/FLACSO, Argentina), Lydia Heidrich (RED/UOL, Germany), RiksbankensJubileumsfond (RJ), and everyone in the background at FLACSO, OEI, and RED that made this conference possible.

Christina Löfving, RED

Ahiaku, P., & Muyambi, G. (2024). Empowering learners for the fourth industrial revolution: The crucial role of teachers and school management. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2024.101141 (open access)

This paper delves into the pivotal roles of teachers and school management in driving Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) readiness among leaners. It examines the ways in which teachers and school management can contribute to preparing learners for the demands of 4IR by fostering essential skills, mindsets and knowledge. Drawing from interpretivist paradigm, sample of this qualitative study included three secondary schools close to Empangeni (South Africa) and ranged from fully subsidised to partially subsidised, representing a rich and varied sample. Data collection included class observations, ethnographic field notes and semi-structured interviews with 27 purposively selected teachers including three principals, three heads of departments and 21 teachers. The collective data was analysed using the Atlas-ti and the research found that access to digital technologies, training and skills and continuous professional development remains a problem among teachers and school managers from poor socioeconomic schools whereas teachers and school managers from the richest and most high socioeconomic schools are technologically advanced and in readiness to empower learners for the 4IR. Based on these findings the study advocate for provision of technological resources to schools, comprehensive teacher preparation programs that focus on pedagogical approaches, effective use of digital tools, strategies and curriculum integration of digital technology.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash