8 - Bridging the Curricular Divide: Open Educational Resources and the Digitization of Guatemala’s National Basic Curriculum

Summary

Introduction

In 2005, the Guatemalan Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) introduced the National Basic Curriculum (Curriculo Nacional Base [CNB]). Responding to the previous decades of civil war, the CNB attempted to foster a more multicultural and inclusive education system by bringing culturally relevant and academically rigorous pedagogies to the forefront of the national strategy (Asturias de Barrios and Merida Arriano, 2007). While the CNB was a collaborative effort towards standards-based learning, financial and logistical challenges complicated its implementation in the classroom. In 2012, a Guatemalan living in the US,1 recognizing the need for an accessible curriculum tool, developed cnbGuatemala.org (hereinafter ‘cnbGuatemala’), a wiki2 containing the full CNB, supplementary information, and hyperlinks to other open educational resources (OERs) that are aligned to elements of the CNB. The website, hosted by the Online Learning Initiative (OLI), is used by a broad network of public, private, and civil society actors, including schools, universities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). As cnbGuatemala has developed, the increase in site traffic demonstrates how individuals (for example, developers, supporters, and users) partners) and artifacts (for example, CNB and cnbGuatemala) drive the formation of global education networks and illuminate a set of global-local dynamics that include political and economic drivers and vested interests and actors in policy making and practice (see Chapter 2, this volume).

The chapter traces the history of cnbGuatemala from its ideation, design, and implementation across local, national, and transnational spaces (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017). To understand the assemblages of actors involved, the chapter utilizes concepts from science and technology studies, and specifically Actor– Network Theory (ANT). In line with this perspective, we contend that, like public policy, technological artifacts are not neutral and only partially represent the intended form of their designers. Instead, technologies like cnbGuatemala become socially constructed as they are adopted, adapted, and utilized within the dynamics of actor networks (Bijker et al, 1987; Bijker, 2001; Latour, 2005). As Bartlett and Vavrus point out, ‘ANT considers how, within networks, people and objects get invited, excluded and enrolled’ and how they ‘accept (at least temporarily) the interests and agenda as set by focal actors’, in addition to how ‘social acts curtail or facilitate future action’ (2017, pp 45– 46).