Institutional discourses, technology-mediated practices and pedagogy : a critical perspective

The changing paradigms of pedagogy within India seem to be closely related to the focus on the interventions of technology that such a paradigmatic shift requires. The thrust of the paper is to probe both the presuppositions and entailments that the discourse of institution and the discourse of practice iterate. It sets out to examine how the discourse of technology impinges upon and expects a reorientation of pedagogy. It also seeks to understand the practices that learner/practitioners themselves engage in that can alter the nature of this institutional discourses and the roles which the teacher plays within this exchange. Further, the paper theorises these discourses by relating it to the implications that it holds out for teaching–learning practices. For this theorisation, it uses Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic exchange’ and how this concept might have a bearing on how teachers deal with the emergent practice of technology.