Are Latin American “knowledge systems” absent from educational technology?
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At a time when school districts are spending money on edtech like never before, it’s perhaps natural that some educators are skeptical of the pace and excitement behind it.
As we’ve reported in the past, some teachers have made it clear that technology tools should support, not replace, their expertise.
Meanwhile, the changing demographics of American public school students raises the question of whether curricula and technologies in education remain culturally relevant. Between 2010 and 2021, the share of non-Hispanic white children fell to 45% of public school students, while the share of Hispanic children increased to 28%.
EdSurge recently posed a question to a panel of Latino educators and an edtech leader: Is educational technology serving the Latino community, especially its students?
Who is Edtech for?
As a mother of two bilingual children growing up in Spanish at home, Rocío Raña has spent a lot of time thinking about this question. She co-founded the edtech company LangInnov to fill what she saw as a gap in the market for assessing the reading skills of Latino children.
There has been some progress in the human-centered design movement, Raña says, where companies involve end users in the design of a product – but she argues that the edtech landscape needs to do a lot more when it comes to is about designing for Latino and black kids. .
His comments come at a time when some experts worry that, despite all the excitement surrounding them, the rush to use AI tools in education could deepen racial disparities for black and Hispanic students.
“We constantly hear here that black and Latino kids don’t do well on assessments, and I wonder if it’s because those assessments weren’t really designed for them,” Raña says. “They’re designed mostly for middle-class white kids, but they’re used with a different population — with our community.”
Hold the door open to young Latinos
Cindy Noriega is a third-grade math and computer science teacher in the Los Angeles area. Before that, she became the first person in her family to attend college and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. It was her own struggles as a math student, which overlapped with her parents’ difficult divorce, that motivated Noriega to strive to cultivate a classroom where her students feel both loved and capable. to do math.
It’s not just the product side of the technology that needs more Latino representation, Noriega says, it’s the education side as well. She makes a concerted effort to encourage Latino students at her high school to take computer classes. But one of the first obstacles she has to help them overcome is their own self-doubt.
“I didn’t do computer science until I was 21, and I had classmates at UCLA who were doing computer science when they were in seventh grade,” Noriega says, “so everywhere where I can provide that space and provide them with that early introduction to computing and technology, then I will.
Latin students in particular will insist to Noriega that they are not smart enough to take a computer course.
It’s not enough for a school to simply provide these students with computer science courses—teachers like Noriega strive to break down the invisible mental and cultural barriers that prevent Latino students from fully envisioning the field. Figures from the Pew Research Center show that Latinos are still vastly underrepresented in the science, math and technology workforce.
“There’s this stigma that we sometimes have about ourselves as Latinos, this fear of ‘I won’t be able to do it,'” she says. “That’s why I’m their cheerleader too.”
Equal Access Doesn’t Mean Equally Useful
Edward Gonzalez oversees Open Educational Resources for the Superintendent of Kern County Schools in California. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Teacher Education at California State University, Bakersfield.
In Gonzalez’s opinion, simply putting technology in the hands of a child will not help them improve where they are falling behind academically or even teach them anything. That’s true whether you’re looking for Latino students in urban areas or rural communities, he says.
“You see students being pulled away from more meaningful learning experiences and kind of plugged into computer screens where it’s basically a memory card,” Gonzalez says of disappointing uses of edtech.
He imagines that a century from now, education researchers will be looking at the information technology explosion of our time and asking, “What were marginalized, Latino students doing?”
“And we’re going to see, unfortunately, a lot of spreadsheets that have yellow and red numbers and cells,” Gonzalez says. “And then when you go to more affluent communities or communities where there’s stronger advocacy, you’re going to see projects and you’re going to see stories and you’re going to see kids sharing their own voices. And the most unfortunate , is that our children could do it now.
Gonzalez isn’t alone in lamenting the poor implementation of technology that’s supposed to help students learn. A recent report on the effectiveness of edtech found that of the 100 most used edtech products in K-12 classrooms, only 26 have published research supporting their claims in a way that meets the standards. evidence from the US Department of Education. This is disheartening news at a time when students may need more help than ever as they recover academically from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Latino students might have better and more effective experiences with edtech right now, Gonzalez says.
“It’s not a future we have to wait for, because all the tools are there, and the defenders are there,” he said. “So it’s about making the move now and making it concrete.”
What technology is celebrated?
Antonio Vigil is the Director of Innovative Classroom Technology at Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. He has spent his 25-year career working for social change and transformation within public education, in part through what he calls “the humanization of mental models and systems.”
For Vigil, to understand how technology is insufficient for Latino students, you have to go far back in time.
The remains of sprawling Latin American cities like Machu Picchu in Peru or Tulum in Mexico represent feats of engineering that are part of the heritage of Latino students – who he says were prevented from learning or from whom they are proud.
“When we talk about how technology isn’t serving us, we can’t just think of devices, we just can’t think of software and hardware,” says Vigil. “We need to think about how the ecosystem itself, through colonization, has taken us away from that knowledge and that intellectual curiosity to be the problem solvers that we are.”
A human connection is missing when it comes to teaching technology to students, he says. Conversations about the pillars of advanced technology in the Americas shouldn’t start with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or MIT, Vigil argues, but with universities that were established by Indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans.
After all, Latino students come from a tradition of natives who used technology to build sprawling cities in the jungle and measure time more accurately than our modern calendar.
“Whether you are Quechua, whether you come from a Mayan background, whether you come from an indigenous background, there are cultures and systems of knowledge that we have neglected and that we must remember and bring into full presence. at this time period,” says Vigil. “Only then will we see the revolutionary needs of people and communities met so that we can grow and adapt to the world and society that we want and need. It’s fair and humanizing. Do you feel me?”
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