Digital Technologies in the Classroom: A Global Educational Reform?

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.