Page 103 - Education in a Digital World

90 Local Variations

these variations and differences be explained, especially in light of the broad policy
agendas and (inter)national strategies outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, and the universal
discourses that surround them? One popular explanation is that all these macro-level
descriptions of educational technology undergo a process of ‘translation’ and ‘enactment’
in specific local settings. In this sense, it could be argued that many of the differing
patterns and trends outlined in the PISA and SITES surveys are due to the selective
‘adopting’ and ‘adapting’ of educational policies and practices by local actors. In other
words, it could be that aspects of an educational technology ‘solution’ are only being
appropriated and enacted when there is sufficient correspondence between the
interests of local actors and the dominant political ideologies promoting the reform
(see Halpin and Troyna 1995). In this sense, local actors could be said to be selecting
from multiple and competing models of ‘educational technology’ in their everyday
practice. Thus while local actors may be using the same language and concepts as are
being promoted at the international and national levels, in practice, any global model of
change is altered to fit local circumstances (see Spring 2009). For example, as Ball et al.
(2012) demonstrate, what national policymakers may mean by technology-based
‘personalisation’ and how this is then enacted within local school settings may be very
different in nature and form. In short, what is initially said about educational technology
may often not fully describe what is subsequently done with educational technology.
Of course, it would be a mistake to imagine this process of selection and rein-
terpretation as an unconstrained process of free choice. As Ball (1998) argues, words
such as ‘select’ or ‘choose’ are perhaps not appropriate ways to describe the actions
of either national or local actors – subject as all these interests are to the pressures of
international economic markets, new managerialism, performativity and various
forms of de-regulation. To assume that any organisation or individual is free to pick
and ‘choose’ what path of action they take (and do not take) is to overlook the
many structures that constrain the actions of even the most seemingly unconstrained
of actors. As Ball (2006, p.75) continues, the enactment of any forms of national
policymaking is therefore better understood as an on-going process of ‘bricolage’– i.e.:

a matter of borrowing and copying bits and pieces of ideas from elsewhere,
drawing upon and amending locally tried and tested approaches, cannibalising
theories, research, trends and fashions and not infrequently flailing around
for anything at all that looks as though it might work. Most policies are ram-
shackle, compromise, hit and miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with,
nuanced and inflected through complex processes of influence, text production,
dissemination and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice.

As this description implies, any enactment of a globalised education form (such as
‘educational technology’) at a local level is a convoluted and compromised business.
In this sense, it is useful to reconsider the emphasis placed within the tradition of
comparative education study on the significance of context. Here, then, we are
referring back to the importance of what Grant (2000, p.310) terms “understanding