“This computer has come to do a job”: A socio-material analysis of the policy enactment of innovative policies in a technical school in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

This article uses actor network theory as a productive language to examine policies of educational innovation as effects of actions carried out by socio-material associations. It identifies, describes, and analyses actions performed by human and non-human actants that altered key aspects of education in a technical secondary school in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s. These actions transformed the workshop (el taller), which is a distinctive material and symbolic space of this type of secondary schooling. In so doing, human and non-human actors participated in struggles over the meaning of what a technical school and a good teacher should be. Following Ball (1993) and Fenwick & Edwards (2010), we describe material, pedagogic, and labour innovations in the workshop, and we trace the (non-anticipated) association amongst people, institutions, tools, technologies, and perspectives that mobilize them. We examine evidence from a qualitative study that included participant observations, interviews to teachers, and documentary analysis. This piece contributes to the study of the educational policies examining not only practices and meanings, but also materiality and its performative effects—aspects overlooked by educational policy research in Argentina.