Discourse, Educational Policy & Technology

The scalar construction of identity

Authors

  • Germán Canale

Keywords:

technology. identity. scalar analysis. educational policy.

Abstract

Plan Ceibal is a social, technological and education policy that seeks to promote the use of technology in Uruguayan classrooms. As text (Ball 2006), it aims at democratizing access to technology to erase off socio-economic gaps. However, as practice (Mortimer & Wortham 2015) its implementation creates meanings (beyond the official expectations) that may (re)construct asymmetries in students’ identities. Adopting both an ethnographic-discursive and a socio-semiotic approach, this research uses scalar analysis to explore how a group of students’ identity becomes reconstructed in the implementation of this policy. The analysis of several co-implicated space/time scales demonstrates that by adopting different ideological positioning social actors construct these students’ identities in a way that they can, at the same time, be represented as ”“almost paradoxically”“ having a (linguistic) deficit and a (curricular) advantage.

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Author Biography

Germán Canale

Doctor en Second Language Acquisition (Carnegie Mellon University). Profesor Adjunto del Instituto de Lingüística de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República (Uruguay) e Investigador Activo Nivel I del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores de la Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación.

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Published

2020-10-19

How to Cite

Canale, G. . (2020). Discourse, Educational Policy & Technology: The scalar construction of identity. Revista Latinoamericana De Estudios Del Discurso, 19(2), 6–26. Retrieved from https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/raled/article/view/33128