Introducing Discursive Institutionalism to Education Technology Scholarship

• In Event: 69.056 - Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 69.056-5 - Research on School and Curricular Reform

Abstract

Many policymakers support expanded access to technologies as a way to upend historic inequities in schooling. Education technology’s broad appeal is striking, however, given a history of prior technological reform failures and a lack of scientific consensus regarding its efficacy. In this theoretical paper, I review how researchers approach the study of education technology to make sense of a prevailing reform “common sense” that constructs technology as beyond critique. I argue that two key limitations characterize existing approaches: an inattention to how power operates discursively and an under-theorized notion of institutional contexts. I use discursive institutionalism, a framework that examines how discourse reflects prevailing relations of power and constitutes institutions, to address these limitations and to guide future empirical inquiries.

Author

• Ethan Chang, University of California - Santa Cruz