Languages and new technologies on urban children’s and adolescents’ representations

Abstract

Abstract: This article aims to describe the different ways that children in public schools connote values and represent two new educational tools received in the framework of two educational policies, concerning access to foreign languages since first grade, and laptops and digital literacy. How do children and adolescents represent the use of computers and the dominance of a foreign language? How do they imagine that both tools modify people’s course of life? What values are associated with the use of them? Also, given that the aim of such policies is mainly to reduce social gaps, the article explores the notion that social inequalities may be evident in the representations that children build around these tools. In order to answer these questions, it analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews conducted in 2012 with a group of students from primary and secondary public schools in Buenos Aires City, in which a ‘creativity method’ was used as a means to determine students’ perceptions about the new educational tools they had acquired. The cases were selected with maximum variation sampling, using the following criterion for differentiating residential status: informal (slum or urban settlement) or formal (upper-middle socio-economic neighbourhood).