Toward a Political Economy of Educational Apps

• In Event: 43.052 - Politics in the Foreground and Background of Learning: Analyses of Power and Learning Across Settings

Abstract

This paper argues that technological designs for education (typically framed as innovations and interventions) are imbued with politics and power relations, even when apparently devoid of them. As they are central to the current techno-fetishist regime of truth (Foucault, 1977), these concepts and technologies may be seen as natural, inevitable, and largely apolitical. When socio-political implications are identified in classroom technologies, they tend to be seen in ways that are separate from technologies, as social processes transmitted through them such as in discriminatory practices or racialized discourses. Even from a critical standpoint, it may be suggested that only the discourses communicated through technologies need change. Not enough attention has been given the material consequences of technological designs on the learning and subjectivities of marginalized students.

In this paper I focus on the political economy of apps in and around a US urban middle school. The data come from an 8-month classroom ethnography in a school district piloting a voter-approved 1:1 laptop initiative, and additional research since the fieldwork. The district serves primarily low-income and Mexican-American families, but also historic Chinese-American, Native American, and African-American communities. The initiative is understandable within broader trends in school reform drawing on technological interventions and technologized policies (such as standardized testing and international assessments) that fit with broader neoliberal remaking of the social contract. I approach the analysis through an activity theory perspective (e.g. Ekbia & Nardi, 2017; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Vygotsky, 1978) informed by work in Marxist political ecology (e.g. Hornborg, 2016), anthropology (e.g. Sims, 2017; Suchman, 2007, 2011), and ICT for development (e.g. Toyama, 2015).

In the study, I found that the school, teachers, and students “digitized the status quo” in their integration and use of laptops. By “status quo” I mean that these actions with technology tended to perpetuate and even accelerate neo-liberal and (relatedly) inequitable trends in education. Technologized discourse was materialized in ways that shaped student and teacher subjectivities, such as shifts to being a “user” rather than teacher/student and the process of subjectification through accountability to “objective” data. Evidenced in the school was a neo-colonial expansion of Silicon Valley discourse through technological interventions, including but not limited to the 1:1 laptop program, and the valorization of newness within commodity capitalism (Suchman, 2011) as material-discursive manifestations of technoscapes (Escobar, 1994). Students took up technology in ways that were often highly personally meaningful outside of the sanctioned classwork. However, compared to higher SES classrooms, these were indicative of gaps in digital media engagement between schools and communities. Additionally, built into the experience of interactive software are ideological constructs like power and gender norms, not simply through semiotics but through the logic, process, and structuring of interactions. Learning should always be contextualized in local manifestations of global processes – within a consolidating and volatile neo-liberal global order – as experienced by the members of a community.

Author

• Roberto de Roock, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education