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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will reflect on the hopes and practices of educators and state officials with (and despite) the material and social legacies of education technology (EdTech) policies in Colombia. 

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines repair practices and utopian discourses when implementing education technology (EdTech) policies in Bogotá, Colombia. Since the beginning of the XXI century, national EdTech policies have pursued the goal of economic development through total technological appropriation, that is, access to and consumption of Internet and computers by public school students all over the country to include them in the global digital economy. These policies have generated a public-private infrastructure that sustains the lifecycle of thousands of laptops and other electronic and digital devices, such as 3D printers, DIY robots, learning software, and drones. The lifecycle includes the buying, delivery to public schools, and after a few years of use, the collection and disposal of those technologies. However, such neoliberal fantasy and Fordist process have also sedimented a legacy of failure: unaccomplished indicators, cut-off budgets, and (literally) tons of electronic debris that cannot be repaired or recycled. This paper focuses on the practices and perspectives of public officers, private contractors, and schoolteachers in Bogotá. They try to work through and with those processes of failure and decay by engaging with trendy EdTech terminologies (i.e. Maker Culture, STEM Education), repairing old electronic parts, and coping with state practices of corruption while thinking about their work as doing ‘good’ for the country’s future. Drawing on the concept of utopian impulses (c.f. Prince and Neumark 2022), the paper asks how different moralities inhabit the legacies of techno-neoliberal state policies and what forms of futures grow in the interstices.