Overview

West African teachers and professors who are appropriating information and communication technologies (ICT) are making it part and parcel of education and everyday life. In Mali and beyond, they adapt ICT to their milieus and work as cultural agents, mediating between technology and society. They yearn to use ICT to make education more relevant to life, facilitate and enhance African participation in global debates and scholarly production, and evolve how Africa and Africans are projected and perceived. In sum, educators are harnessing ICT for its transformative possibilities. The changes apparent in student-teacher relations (more interactive) and classrooms (more dialogical) suggest that ICT can be a catalyst for pedagogical change, including in document-poor contexts and ones weighed down by legacies of colonialism. Learning from the perspectives and experiences of educators pioneering the use of ICT in education in Africa can inform educational theory, practice and policy and deepen understandings of the concept of appropriation as a process of cultural change.

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9789956763788

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This book opens a door to the daily experiences of educators, in Mali in particular, with technology. The descriptions of their perspectives and realities are simultaneously intimate and theoretical. I hope the book inspires each reader - on both sides of the Atlantic - to appreciate African creativity, better understand sociocultural change and take the bull by the horns to evolve education for our times. - Oumar Papa Traore, Founder and Director of Yena Issa school in Mali The research that gave birth to this book reveals ruptures and renovations - in the ways we seek information, interact with each other, and teach and learn. The theoretical basis for understanding these sociocultural, technological and pedagogical changes, and the possibilities that flow from them, is inspired by great African as well as Western thinkers. Technology is perceived not simply as a lever for development but as a formidable tool for the popularization of African personality in the world market of the knowledge economy. - Professor Brehima Tounkara, former Director of Higher Education and Professional Development at the West African Economic and Monetary Union

Author Information

Kathryn Toure is Regional Cordinator of the Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa (ERNWACA) in Mali.

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