In late June and early July I  worked in Argentina and Chile. I was primarily there to support the evaluation of the Ford Foundation funded TRAMAS. TRAMAS has been funded by the Ford Foundation for three distinct periods from 2006 and concludes 2010. It was originally comprised of three partners from Chile, Argentina and Peru but in its third phase (2009-2010) only consists of a partnership from the first two of these countries.It is led by independent organisations in the civic or third sectors.The main aims of all three phases of the project were:

–       to develop a regional network to facilitate and develop an exchange of practice and materials

–       to advocate and exert influence at the national level to support the growth of forms of media education to underpin the growth of citizenship education

–       to work with teacher training and with institutions responsible for the production of curriculum materials (especially AV) to support the confidence, scope and capabilities of teachers to be more effective in these areas.

Whislt there I also spoke at two conferences, Educar la Mirada 5 in Buenos Aires and Modos de Ver en la Era Digital in Santiago de Chile. In both talks I argued that the past twenty years have seen a paradoxical attitude to the learning experienced by young people as consequence of their engagement and participation in digital culture. On the one hand research has underwritten a notion of the strangeness or otherness of digital culture characterising fundamentally new and different literacies, ways of comprehending and manipulating even understanding knowledge. The key here is an argument about an alleged deep structural difference between the digital world and the day-to-day mundanity of schooling. At the same time this otherness has been at the forefront of anxieties about changing childhoods, alienated youth, the penetration of consumerism into make-up of the young and a decline in fundamental education standards. Both of these (contradictory) aspects have, I suggest, been part of a deep process of differentiation from an assumed norm. We are now witnessing a period where the everyday, typified by a construct of average public schooling is now fighting back and the current period is characterised by a series of interventions where the difference is being recuperated and standardised in ‘normal’ schooling.

Finally  I led an interactive workshop for 350 teachers about creative media making and ‘media learning’ as part of a national teacher training innovation in Argentina CAIE