Spaces for resistance? Language, digital media and ‘new literacies’ discourse in Swiss education policy

Mathier, Marion Lina (23 July 2019). Spaces for resistance? Language, digital media and ‘new literacies’ discourse in Swiss education policy (Unpublished). In: Conference Language in the Media 8, Mediatising Resistance. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 23. - 26.07.2019.

In 2018, cantons across Switzerland have launched and begun implementing a massive overhaul of the school curriculum. Flagship features of the newly constructed policy documents are the sections on media and technology. As part of a broader discourse-ethnographic project (Krzyzanowski, 2018), the data for this presentation was generated from the French and German curricula for upper primary and lower secondary education. The study here is a discourse analytical inquiry of the Plan d’études romand and the Lehrplan 21 for the respective linguistic regions and the ways in which the curricula address digital media literacy (Buckingham, 2007). The analysis focuses on how new literacies (Kress, 2003) are promoted or not in the language curriculum and it is also interested in the metadiscursive framing of digital discourse (cf. Thurlow, 2018).
Even though at first sight the media and technology curricula in Switzerland seem to provide young people with the skills and competences they need to participate critically in their mediatized living environments, at a second glance, the curricula prioritize ‘social goods’ (Gee, 2018) to serve the country’s workforce, politics and culture. Adhering to globalization discourse (Fairclough, 2010), the curriculum writers texture a causal relationship between the material changes (increasing importance of information and communication technology and its impacts on education) and mental processes how learners have to cope with these changing realities. The curriculum writers construct schools and education as sites for the reproduction of capital, but also as sites for the reproduction of the social and cultural order (Giroux, 2001). By drawing on Giroux’s (2001) reflections on critical literacy, the study discusses how new forms of reading and writing could be addressed in formal learning contexts to empower young people to create and use spaces for resistance.

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