Rebooting the classroom? A critical discourse ethnography of media ideologies in education

When it comes to digital media, young people seem always to be caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, public discourse frets about the dangers of their apparently excessive digital media use; on the other hand, educational discourse stresses an everincreasing need for them to be “wired whizzes” in the classroom. In Switzerland, this kind of tension is evident in the recent implementation of a nation-wide curricular overhaul (Lehrplan 21 and Plan d’études romand) where we find a preoccupation with, and demand for, young people to engage more intensely with new technology.
Designed as a discourse-ethnographic project, my PhD examines how young people, pre-service teachers and teachers themselves make sense of technology, but also how their sense-making is shaped by top-down discourses. On the one hand, my work is interested in the accounts of different social actors in education of their actual digital media use and the kinds of media ideologies which inform and structure the way they reflect on technology in their lives. On the other hand, I analyze how curriculum writers and agenda-setters produce social meanings about technology and classroom practices to promote media and technology in learning and teaching, which are also informed and constructed by media ideologies.
Even though at first sight the media and technology curricula in Switzerland seem to provide young people with the skills and competences they need to be prepared for active citizenship, at a second glance, actors in education promote technology in ways which effectively limit young people’s scope for action. While young people’s digital literacy practices outside of school are affective, social and emotional, policy-makers and teachers alike seem to predominantly adhere to instrumental, scholastic media practices. However, ignoring young people’s vernacular literacies risks excluding or alienating many learners.
Thus, by addressing metadiscursive framings of digital media use inside and outside the classroom, I aim at detecting possible disconnects between classroom media uses and young people’s outside of school digital literacy practices. Accordingly, my work wants to discuss how a broader understanding of “new literacies” which are fully multimodal and often grounded in learning beyond the classroom could be addressed in formal learning contexts to empower young people to critically participate in today’s highly mediatized worlds.