Mobile Phones and Education: Civic Education by Kenyan Women's Rights Groups

• In Event: 63.023 - Exploring Boundaries and Counternarratives of Women and Globalized Education

Abstract

Education for All (EFA), Millenium Development Goals numerous other education statutes and policies focus on education as the most suitable way to ameliorate women’s lives. Developed within the constraints of a traditional understanding of schooling and education, EFA’s mandate still holds significant value with the vision of education as a human right defined not only by access but also quality education. With this in mind, this paper examines how we can understand education, learning, and schooling when we include technology and new media literacies and hybrid literacies (Razfar and Yang, 2010; Ware and Warschauer, 2005).To enhance value and relevance, education should serve as a way to equip individuals with skills and knowledge that reaches beyond traditional learning spaces and move towards improving adult literacy and lifelong learning. To do this effectively, both implementation and policy must include the concerns of technological advancements and new conceptualizations of how technology and media impacts learning and the shrinking gap between digital and academic literacy (Ware and Warschauer, 2005).
Over the last two decades, mobile phone subscriptions in Kenya have increased dramatically, with close to 60 percent of the population having access to mobile phones (Aker and Mbiti, 2010). What is striking about this increase is the dominance of text-based device use. Following Chiumbu’s (2012) decentering of the instrumental use of technology and the technology itself, this essay focuses on the technology’s educational capacities by holding in tension the user’s capacity to utilize technology and shape the technology to work towards their needs. Specifically, this essay takes up two cases of Kenyan feminist entities, (FIDA Kenya and Warembo ni Yes) which used mobile phone text based services to engage and educate women around the nation on the content of the draft constitution, prior to the national referendum. On both fronts, their involvement provided a widespread collection and distribution of information, especially among women and other marginalized populations. While not all information could be conveyed via text, the women were informed of important information as well as upcoming public hearings. The evidence of this study, alongside policy documents signals to questions about what we consider learning or literacy.
Through discourse analysis of policy briefs and annual reports from the Communications Commission of Kenya, I study the growth of mobile phone use alongside government data on literacy and theorize about the implications this growth has for youth and adult literacy, specifically among girls and women. Furthermore, I discuss the multiple literacies that the use of mobile phones has generated and fostered. Bringing to the forefront a discussion about the "disconnect" between academic literacy and new media, as part of a discussion that considers hybridity as a bridge between technology rich worlds and traditional modes of learning. This essay takes up a critical examination of the role of emerging technologies in our understanding of established assumptions about learning, teaching and curricula.

References on symposium submission paper

Author

• Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University