CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Digital Inequality and Educational Heterogeneity The Conectar Igualdad Programme in rural and urban working-class schools of Salta (Argentina)Alejandra García Vargas, Laura Golovanevsky and María Rosa Chachagua Does the level of promotion and protection of education -as part of human rights and dignity- have any relation to the level of technological development of the society? Is there any correlation between digital inequalities and social inequalities when it comes to the rights to education in social and geographical marginalised areas? This paper bridges both questions in order to answer them via quantitative and qualitative data produced in a research project conducted in a specific context and on a specific educative policy: the Conectar Igualdad Programme (CIP) as a social policy applied in an urban and a rural secondary school located in Salta (Argentina).In this way, this case study allows us to generate evidence on digital-inequality issues facing adolescent citizens among social and geographical marginalized communities; and promotes evidence- informed policy change for the improvement of the access, the use, and the implementation of ICTs for educational, social and cultural development (van Dijk, 2005).Both in Latin America and in Argentina, inequality is a historical and severe structural condition (Kessler, 2010). In turn, the social uses of technology constitute an important field of debate in the area, and the technological equity conditions during childhood and adolescence are part of most of the political and educational agendas (Becerra, 2015; Morales, 2015; Reygadas 2008; Rivoir, 2009). In that context, we propose to describe the situation in Argentina based on the analysis of the implementation of the CIP both in a rural and an urban secondary school from the province of Salta (Benítez Larghi and Winocur, 2016).We ask ourselves: What features does inequality acquire when questions are asked on the grounds of educational policies aimed at digital equity from a human rights perspective? To what extent is technological inequity part of wide and historical geographies of social inclusion/exclusion? How do digital inequalities relate with the public educational system and to what extent do they impact on the living conditions of the youth in diverse Latin American contexts? What is the role of the dissemination and gap-reduction public policies in the historically most disadvantaged areas of Salta (Argentina)?The answers to these questions are to be found in specific educational and social contexts. Such contexts are composed, among other elements, by the materiality of the technologies that allow the production, circulation and recognition of symbolic forms, which are relatively stabilised through various technical means.In this way, we consider that the possibility of rebuilding a material geography of the presence of the ICTs in the territory of Salta appears to be necessary to observe, later, both the heterogeneity as well as the inequalities of their multiple social uses, hence visibilising a part of the diverse forms and possibilities of access in our country.The work with comparative public statistical information during the 2011-2017 period, which is introduced in the first part of the paper, allows us to address the presence/absence of various technological devices in Argentine households, pointing out the differences between regions and specifying the situation for the province of Salta. Said statistical information is combined with an inclusive approach on the role, the valuation and the differential use of technologies according to contexts, regions and diverse socio-economic conditions. In order to do that, the statistical information is combined with the recent debates about the technological dissemination policies in Latin America, with the analysis of the implementation of the CIP in Argentina, and with the fieldwork in an urban school and a rural school, the latter being mediated by technologies in the province of Salta (2015-2017).Our analysis indicates that the technological dissemination policies developed in Argentina, especially the CIP, seem to have had a relevant impact in the educational system, accompanying a general ICTs broadcast process. In this expansion, differences persist between sectors of different income levels and of rural or urban localizations, although positive variations indicate the extent to which public policies may positively influence the reduction of the material dimension of access. Fieldwork indicates that, even if the digital gap is more narrow among the youth than among older-age groups, and among male students than among female students, it still persists. Furthermore, the analysis shows that there are regions and sectors which remain disconnected, that there are digital services that are only accessed by the most favoured sectors, and that this disconnection has a growing weight in the general configuration of social inequality in Salta. Thus, the availability of a specific device incipiently reduces the structural fragmentation between incipiently connected and disconnected people, while it neither solves the connectivity issue nor those issues derived from digital literacy processes and the social uses of such technologies.