Co-constructors of policy-shaping in Mauritius: ICTE policies.

Abstract

This thesis builds on my ongoing experience in the field of ICT within education. Since the 1980s, the global interest in expanding the use of ICT devices to activate pedagogy in schooling has produced mixed reactions. The voices of support or challenge have emerged from within and outside schooling. These voices include the views of the governmental officials, the industrialists in the private and public sector and parents of school-going children. The study explores the co-involvement of a range of stakeholders influencing policy-shaping against the backdrop of postcolonial theory and appropriate postmodern and post-structuralist thinking. The particular case study of the small island Mauritius context forms the location of this study. This study explicates the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of the multiple consistencies and contradictions of the varied voices. It exposes the contingent and polyglot perspectives and processes of the shaping of the policy for ICT in education. Drawing on a foundation of the specific official educational policies, this study produced data through semi-structured narrative interviews of a range of shapers of policies, probing their responses to their involvement, reaction and/or implementation of the planned goals in practice. A grounded, inductive approach to qualitative analysis and a cross-case analysis yielded the emergence of five superordinate, yet fluid and overlapping typologies to depict the key construction shaping processes of ICT policy. The typologies were labelled Negotiators, Influencers, Legitimisers, Enactors and the self-proclaimed Excluded voices of the policy-shaping processes. The initial theoretical framework presented at the opening section of the thesis was used to further abstract deeper levels of analysis of the study’s findings. The emergent analysis provides a critique of the continuing impact of colonial and neoliberal educational policies on SIDS contexts. The implicit powers of the industrial agents collude with the official governmental systems. More powerful political interests related to the need to develop support from local populations as part of electioneering campaigns dominate the official space. The pedagogical foci underpinning ICT introduction are relatively sidelined during the introduction of ICTE efforts. What constitutes even the official policy becomes contestable. Paradoxically, those who initially appear disempowered in the policymaking process, like parents and teachers, exert powerful shaping forces over the ICT enacted space in education contexts. Policy emerges as a contested complication conversation. The thesis highlights the confluence of perpetual colonialism, political rhetoric versus pedagogical reasoning and the paradoxes of power. The thesis expands the framing of the ICT environment as infused simultaneously with a complicity, vulnerability and invisibility of the stakeholders. These characteristics are also not stable or consistent within particular stakeholder groups or individuals who speak a polyglot discourse of policy-shaping. The spaces are characterised by a tacit discourse of electioneering timeframes, a deliberate choice for ignoring and silencing of the rationale and concrete research evidence and logic. The policy-shaping space is dominated by illusory information and under-scrutinised global discourses. The effect is to sustain ICT globalisation and intensive marketing propaganda where international benchmarks are prioritised over local relevance. In such a space, post-truth policymaking emerges as a new construct. This thesis recommends that any potential to improve policymaking processes lies not only in the hands of policymakers but the population in general, as it has been found that everyone is a policy-shaper. Therefore, everyone needs to be critical about what is proposed or borrowed from the international community, including from their subtle spokespersons as depicted by the influences of the industry shapers. The thesis recommends foregrounding pedagogical and educational logic rationales and sensitivity to contextual schooling contexts when developing policies. To be able to do so, experts and bureaucrats would need to draw clear boundaries between electioneering agenda and education policies. Enhancing synergy between policymaking and the research space has the potential to protect policy from the dominant international discourse. The public, in general, must also be made more aware of dis/misinformation and be critical of political and industry rhetoric.