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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital literacies
• language ideologies
• ethnography
• knowledge production
• ICT
• Ghana

Acknowledgments

I am eternally grateful to the kindness, patience, and generosity of the many Ghanaian friends, mentors, and colleagues who made this research possible. Many thanks also to Rachel George for productive digital literacies “co-braining”, and to the reviewers whose input improved this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I’ve pseudonymized the names and details of individuals in my research, but the uniqueness of Ashesi University in the West African landscape makes it, and its setting in Berekuso, difficult to anonymize.

2 Roughly 47% of Ghana’s population was categorized as “rural” at the time of research, and is closer to 42% as of writing (World Bank 2023).

3 I fully acknowledge that supplementing Ashesi’s donation to ensure I could conduct research was ethically ambiguous; it was interpreted locally as an entirely appropriate act of reciprocity by a relatively affluent outsider wishing to embed herself in local networks of obligation and support.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and overseen via UCLA IRB#13-000933 & Ashesi IRB#001.