Radiating out rather than scaling up: Horizontalism and digital educational governance in Ghana

Abstract

Digital education is often understood as a force for the standardization of education. In this paper, we argue for the development of policy and strategy instruments founded on situated local educational contexts and needs. Using the theoretical lens of Escobar’s horizontalism, we interrogate how educational governance in Ghana is being increasingly structured around digital technologies and the effects of these policy structures on local educational diversity. The governance around the digitalisation of education in Ghana sits in productive tension with that horizontalism. In this paper, we explore this through an analysis of two interrelated national instruments that speak to this digitalisation: (i) the Education Strategic Plan 2018 – 2030 and (ii) the ICT in education reform. We note how these instruments provide oversight and centralisation around the use of ICT in education in Ghana, and how this centralisation is seen as increasingly critical to meeting the scaled educational targets of SDG4. We explore how these policies cascade into two digital initiatives in education in Ghana, namely (i) Edmodo and (ii) the Open University Framework.

This analysis provides insight into how the structure of educational governance impacts what might potentially be diverse responses to local educational needs and contextual realities, how that governance is increasingly codified in policy and strategy instruments, and how those instruments are entangled in discrete digital initiatives. Our analysis, while rooted in the situated horizontalism of local educational needs, also engages with the globalised and universalist policy discourses of technology use in education.