Teaching Tech by Rote: Socialization into Digital Literacies in a Ghanaian Classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on decades of interdisciplinary language-centered research on literacies, this article is an exploration of the many ideologies about technology, literacy, and “good” learners, and the resulting tangle of contradictory practices, that converge in rural Ghanaian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) classrooms. In addition to tracing how Western ideologies of technological transformation were imported into the design of ICT policy and curricula via international development organizations, the article contrasts the enduring routines and practices of hierarchical knowledge transfer in Ghanaian classrooms with assumptions about exploratory users embedded in the design of technologies primarily produced in and for North American contexts. In doing so, the article highlights the regimes of participation (Flamenbaum & George 2023), or the interplay between these taken-for-granted ideologies, technological affordances, and available roles for participation in knowledge production, which dynamically structure participatory engagements with digital literacies. Such a lens highlights the ways in which persistent policy framings of digital literacies as universal, neutral universal encounters between individuals and particular hardware or software enable and reproduce longstanding processes of disciplining marginalized populations.