Ferrante, P., Williams, F., Büchner, F., Kiesewetter, S., Chitsauko Muyambi, G., Uleanya, C., & Utterberg Modén, M. (2024) “In/equalities in digital education policy – sociotechnical imaginaries from three world regions” Learning, Media and Technology 49(1): 122-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2237870 (open access)

“Affordances” is likely to be an important word. “Participation” will also make an appearance. And perhaps (with a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin) “imagination” is more helpful than “creativity”.  

The event is organised together with the “Arbeitsstelle Schulentwicklung” (Task Force for School Development) at the University of Oldenburg’s Centre for Teacher Education.

As inspiration, here is an image we have used in the Re:Lab with the title of “how not to design the classroom of the future?”

28 SES 17 A: (Un)Making (In)Equitable EdTech Futures in Schools

Friday, 30/Aug/2024: 14:15 – 15:45

A symposium hosted by RED and Towards equity-focused EdTech

Chairs: Felicitas Macgilchrist (Univ. Oldenburg), Rebecca Eynon (Univ. Oxford)

Discussant: Keri Facer (Univ. Bristol)

Public schooling has been considered an institution for shaping the future since its inauguration. Whether as an institution for creating national identities or, for enabling equality and social mobility, schooling is oriented to a sense of futurity. In recent decades, digital technology, in particular, digital educational technology (EdTech) has been woven into promises of better educational futures. Decades of educational research have shown, however, that schooling reproduces existing (structural) inequalities. Examining the algorithms, structures and infrastructures of digital technologies, recent studies argue that these systems reformat pedagogical priorities with implications for increasing discrimination, injustice and inequity (Zakhavora & Jarke, 2023; Perrotta et al., 2020). Further studies have proposed critical interventions with technology to alleviate inequalities and promote justice (Choi & Cristal, 2021; Swist & Gulson, 2023). The question that still requires systematic investigation is how, despite often well-intentioned efforts to alleviate inequalities, ‘persistent and pernicious inequalities’ (Facer & Selywn, 2021: 7) are reproduced and/or interrupted through technology use in schools. These inequalities make certainties for young people, by opening up some futures and foreclosing others. This panel thus draws on ethnographic research to ask: How is the uptake of digital technology reproducing, reconfiguring and/or alleviating relations of inequality in schools?

Ethnographic research, with its ‘arts of noticing’ in today’s ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015), offers a promising methodological approach to EdTech’s futures-making entanglements, since it enables researchers to spend time in the field, embedded in the practices, relations, tensions and ambiguities of everyday life with technology in schools (Alirezabeigi et al., 2020). Participant observation, accompanied by thick descriptions, enables scholars to trace the patterns of practices and the ‘rich points’ in which confusing, surprising or unexpected moments give insight into participants’ perspectives, expectations and hopes for the future. Although ethnographic explorations of digital technologies, education and inequality are emerging, these are currently based primarily in the US, with few studies of European or other contexts (Rafalow, 2020; Watkins et al., 2018). Given the situated and contextual unfolding of both schooling and of relations of inequality, there is a risk in assuming that these findings are relevant around the world. Research in further local settings aims to elaborate a more nuanced understanding of how data flows and other technologies reproduce, reconfigure and/or alleviate inequalities (Murris et al., 2023).

The chair opens the symposium by highlighting the key issues noted above, and by reflecting on the challenges of this kind of research when “new” technologies hint at moments of possibility and futures otherwise, and yet structural inequalities are historically sedimented in public education. The first paper presents a systematic review of recent international research on digital technology, schooling and inequality. Three ethnographic case studies then each highlight a central theme emerging from varied methods including participant observation, interviews, and workshops with students and teachers in Germany, Mexico, Sweden and the UK to explore how technology and inequality are interwoven in everyday school practices. Each study includes schools at different positions in the local opportunity structure, i.e., more privileged/ well-resourced schools and historically marginalised/ poorly-resourced schools.

With a shared relational sociomaterial/sociotechnical theoretical perspective, the papers explore the constitution of inequality through practices of waiting and maintenance, through the intensification of work, and through the shifting of pedagogical relations between teachers and students. Through these situated analyses, the papers also speak to broader issues such as temporal bordering, distraction, opportunity, trust, validity, surveillance, communication, temporal frictions and local collective action for social justice. The discussant responds to the individual papers and reflects on overarching themes in the making and unmaking of in/equitable edtech futures in today’s schools.

References
Alirezabeigi, S., Masschelein, J., & Decuypere, M. (2020). Investigating digital doings through breakdowns. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 193-207.
Choi, M., & Cristol, D. (2021). Digital citizenship with intersectionality lens. Theory into Practice, 60(4), 361-370.
Facer, K. & Selwyn, N. (2021). Digital Technology and the Futures of Education: Towards ‘Non-Stupid’ Optimism. The Futures of Education initiative UNESCO.
Murris, K., Scott, F., Stjerne Thomsen, B., Dixon, K., Giorza, T., Peers, J., & Lawrence, C. (2023). Researching digital inequalities in children’s play with technology in South Africa. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(3), 542-555.
Perrotta, C., Gulson, K. N., Williamson, B., & Witzenberger, K. (2020). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 97-113.
Rafalow, M. H. (2020). Digital Divisions. University of Chicago Press.
Swist, T., & Gulson, K. N. (2023). Instituting socio-technical education futures. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(2), 181-186.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
Watkins, S. C., Cho, A., Lombana-Bermudez, A., Shaw, V., Vickery, J. R., & Weinzimmer, L. (2018). The Digital Edge. New York University Press.
Zakharova, I., & Jarke, J. (2024). Do Predictive Analytics Dream of Risk-Free Education? Postdigital Science and Education, 6(1)

We plan four papers:

Conceptualising the Relationships between Digital Technologies, Equity and Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools: Mapping the Research Landscape (Rebecca Eynon (University of Oxford), Laura Hakimi (University of Oxford), Valentina Andries (University of Oxford), Louise Couceiro (University of Oxford))

When EdTech Makes Us Wait. Temporal Bordering and Inequalities in European Classrooms (Felix Büchner (University of Oldenburg), Svea Kiesewetter (University of Gothenburg))

Global Time Platforms and Local Arrangements in Teachers’ Work Intensification in Sweden and Mexico: Tensions and Frictions (Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt (University of Gothenburg), Inés Dussel (Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Mexico)))

Pedagogical Relationships and the Use of EdTech: Implications for Equity and Future Design (Louise Couceiro (University of Oxford), Valentina Andries (University of Oxford), Laura Hakimi (University of Oxford), Rebecca Eynon (University of Oxford))

RED’s Felicitas Macgilchrist and Dr. Elke Van dermijnsbrugge will be discussing Elke’s Beyond Hope and Despair: The Radical Imagination as a Collective Practice for Uprising on 11 April 2024 (online).

In this session of EERA’s Network 28, we actively engage in alternative world-making through the exploration of Education for Uprising. We investigate the concepts of hope, despair and the radical imagination, driven by the following questions: 

Can we exist beyond the binaries of hope and despair, two key concepts that drive educational practices? And if so, what does this place look like?

What is the radical imagination and what are the conditions for it to be put to work in educational spaces?

Elke Van dermijnsbrugge first explores education as a hyperobject that is owned, imagined and practiced collectively. The semiotic square is introduced as a heuristic tool to illustrate the limitations of the binary opposition between hope and despair, and allows for an exploration of what is possible when these binaries are being set aside. The radical imagination then, is described as a collective practice that is radical in the sense that alternative social forms can always be imagined once we acknowledge that every social form is the result of the collective imagination. Finally, we explore conceptual as well as practical ideas and examples that underpin Education for Uprising which is understood as the emergence of micro-political, autonomous spaces of direct action where community, solidarity and self-organization are key principles.

Join us by registering here: https://forms.gle/5BSUe4cwaXxsmd2y6

This article investigates policy-as-discourse and policy-as-technology with specific focus on how the deployment of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education is positioned as a redemptive force in the case of Botswana. Therborn’s theory of inequalities was adopted to catalogue ways in which supranational organisations and the national government of Botswana consider the potential of ICT and/ICT in education to address (in)equalities in Botswana. A deductive Directed Qualitative Content Analysis (DQICA) was adopted focusing on how the national government and supranational organisations view and present ICT in education in Botswana with regards to being an equaliser. The analysis of the evidence points to ICT in education being seen and operationalised to ameliorate existing inequalities in education and broader society, without, necessarily, questioning broader socioeconomic structural arrangements and factors sustaining inequalities.

Photo by WOKANDAPIX on Pixabay

Büchner, F., Bittner, M., & Macgilchrist, F. (2023). Imaginationen von Ungleichheit im Notfall-Distanzunterricht: Analyse eines Policydiskurses und seiner Problemrepräsentationen. MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, 20, 347-373.

A policy study by RED’s local team in Germany has just been published in the journal MedienPädagogik. Using Bacchi’s “What’s-the-Problem-Represented-to-Be” approach (e.g. Bacchi 2012), we reconstructed the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) in the policy discourse around emergency remote education. For this purpose, we partnered with the CoBiS project at the University of Flensburg. The CoBiS team has built an extensive archive of educational policies related to COVID-19 in Germany. Initial results of this study were presented in 2022 at the autumn conference of the German Educational Research Association‘s division on Media Education. We are now happy to present the final publication.

Overall, the paper suggests that a key sociotechnical imaginary is a particular kind of “frictionless” living. But where would frictionlessness take society? How does an imaginary of frictionless living reproduce or transform relations of inequality?

This paper understands emergency remote education as a sociotechnical phenomenon and analyses its construction in the policy discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic. It asks how remote education is imagined in German federal states’ policy documents and how socio-digital inequality is represented as a problem in these imaginaries. Based on the thematic document collection ‹CoBiS – Covid 19-Corpus des Bildungssystems›, a policy analysis was conducted using the ‹WPR approach›. Findings suggest a ‹sociotechnical imaginary› of frictionlessness. The paper illustrates this imaginary through three aspects: (1) frictionless living spaces, (2) friction through inequality and (3) equality through technology.

It is shown that through the imaginary of frictionlessness in the policy discourse, ideas and visions of educational subjects are generated that favour affluent, privileged and middle-class white contexts and at the same time disadvantage marginalised, deprived and minoritised contexts. Overall, the paper proposes a framework for inclusive media education to critically reflect on sociotechnical imaginaries invoked in policy discourses. 

For more details, feel free to peruse (and perhaps automatically translate!) the full paper (open access; German) here: https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/jb20/2023.09.14.X.

(Image credits: The images are taken from the front covers of policy documents in Germany. Credits are given in full in the publication.)

Dussel, I., & Williams, F. (2023). Los imaginarios sociotécnicos de la política educativa digital en México (2012-2022). Profesorado. Revista de Curriculum y Formación del Profesorado, 27(1), 39-60. https://doi.org/10.30827/profesorado.v27i1.26247

The published paper presents an analysis of Mexican educational policies addressing digital digital technologies and the issue of inequality, utilizing the concept of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, developed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. The corpus comprises over 220 documents spanning from 2012 to 2022, corresponding to two distinct administrations (each lasting six years) with opposing political orientations. It encompasses official sources as well as “grey literature” from newspapers and blogs. These documents were analysed to identify problematizations and significant nodal points related to the envisioning of socio-technical futures. This analysis was carried out using the Infranodus software in conjunction with a thorough critical reading.

The findings prompt a contemplation of educational priorities concerning digital technologies and inequality across both time periods. Despite the contrasting rhetoric between the two six-year terms, certain shared assumptions emerge: the direct linkage between digital technologies and economic growth, the narrative of inevitable technological change, and the potential for mitigating inequality through virtual offerings that expand coverage. Among the divergent aspects, the more recent six-year term demonstrates heightened concern for inequality, a discursive shift toward concepts such as digital culture, and an inclination to transcend technocratic perspectives. However, there’s an absence of reference to Big Data or data colonization, and the digital realm seems confined to enhancing income and access to equipment and connectivity.

Within this conception, the risks brought about by these technologies are linked to the bad practices of users, without considering the agencies of digital platforms or the interests of large corporations. The limited ethical reflections formulated tend to pose superficial queries about connectivity risks, offering vague solutions to the challenges posed by the burgeoning digitalization of society. Education policies continue to be shaped by a perception of the nation-state’s robust capacity to direct digitalization processes within schools. The presence of transnational actors challenging this educational governance model goes unrecognized. As is the case in other domains, digital education policies fail to engage with the intricate interplay of actors and contexts within the Mexican education system.

Finally, it’s noteworthy that the analysed documents lack substantial pedagogical reflection on the transformations wrought by the new knowledge infrastructures. Celebratory speeches heralding the successful integration of digital technologies, viewed by some as an imminent future and by others as a distant one, provide limited space for a comprehensive analysis of the utilization of these tools in classrooms, homes, and society.  The absence of orientations and debates regarding the advance of algorithmisation in education and the new digital governance raises questions about the capacity of these policies to guide educational practices in the face of contemporary challenges.

For further, details, follow the link to the paper (open access): https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/profesorado/article/view/26247

In April of this year, the RED team had the honour of presenting ongoing results from a platform analysis at AERA in Chicago. Among the thousands of presentations, many of which were thought-provoking, my personal highlight was the panel with presenters from this book, which was in press at the time:

Reauthoring Savage Inequalities: Narratives of Community Cultural Wealth in Urban Educational Environments, edited by Lori D. Patton, Ishwanzya D. Rivers, Raquel L. Farmer-Hinton, and Joi D. Lewis

The book takes a new look at the communities which Jonathan Kozol wrote about in his book Savage Inequalities from 1991. The presenters reported that Kozol’s book has become a foundational text in university courses on urban education or educational inequality in the USA. It did aim to offer a critical take on inequality. The book showed the structural disadvantages which communities living in material poverty in the US face. (Full disclosure, I haven’t read Kozol, I’m describing the discussion at AERA.) But the presenters critique the deficit perspective that this book reproduces and which many researchers on educational inequality also reproduce. It offers, they argued, a narrow narrative, bereft of lived experience, which erases people as it misrepresents communities.

Raquel L. Farmer-Hinton pointed to a problem with educational research when we make the same critique again and again. We are standing still, she said. We need to move forward.

In Reauthoring Savage Inequalities, contributors move forward by visiting some of the same communities that Kozol visited, and “renarrativizing” them, showing what he missed. The presentations, which included personal reflections, poems, stories, analyses and more, highlighted what Tara Yosso termed “community cultural wealth” in these same communities. The presenters argued for more nuanced truths, for an assets-based approach, for experience-rich narratives.

As one speaker noted, it is only “renarrativizing” from the perspective Kozol took, a white gaze. The people living in these communities have long known and shared stories like those told in this book. But now, increasingly, (professional) scholars are also taking this perspective.

[Reauthoring Savage Inequalities] offers rich, wide-ranging counternarratives to social, political, and educational discourses that characterize urban schools and communities as places of despair, revealing the resources and strategies of resistance that teachers, students, and families use to succeed and thrive.

Publisher website for Reauthoring Savage Inequalities: Narratives of Community Cultural Wealth in Urban Educational Environments. (SUNY Press, 2023).

Towards the end of the panel, an audience member asked about the danger of presenting asset-based narratives. Are we in danger, she asked, of giving people in positions of power – those people who could reallocate funds and change structures but are currently not – an easy way out. They can say, well, hey look, these folk are fine, they have strong community, they support one another, they don’t need anything else (from the state).

No, said the editors, the trick is to hold both: It is not an either/or game: It is not that you have either structural disadvantage or you have community cultural wealth. No, the job of the researcher is to hold both: Demonstrate the impact of disinvestment, redlining, the militarisation of schools, and the need for structural change. And also show strong community relations, social support structures, complex dynamics and the moments of joy. Show the struggle and the survival, the critique and the thriving.

That is hard work, and that is absolutely necessary work. I was inspired by this panel. I immediately pre-ordered the book, and am delighted that it has now arrived. I definitely hope we at RED will be reading it together after the northern hemisphere’s summer holidays.

Editors:

Lori D. Patton is Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs and Chair for the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University.

Ishwanzya D. Rivers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Evaluation, and Organizational Development at the University of Louisville.

Raquel L. Farmer-Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Joi D. Lewis is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Joi Unlimited and the Founder and President of Healing Justice Foundation.

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Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

Introduction

The aim of this study is to examine datafication in schools by unpacking the arrangements of policy and practice. Producing digital data has become a central and integral part of daily school practice in many countries, and a shift toward data-driven schooling has been set in motion by a range of policy initiatives targeting digitalization. Teachers, educational leaders, and administrative staff are encouraged and expected to use digital software, leading to witting and unwitting generation of digital data while performing both pedagogical and more mundane tasks, such as ordering school supplies. A requirement for a seamless flow of digital data is interoperability, which is also a central implicit finding in this study. Deriving from the Latin words ‘inter’ (between) and ‘opus’ (work) interoperability defines the ability of different technical systems and platforms to ‘work together’ by sharing digital data with one another. While a technical term, interoperability is viewed as sociotechnical in the present study, since human actions such as manual translations from one system to another are regularly required to support and achieve it. In that sense, system, software, and data interoperability have the capacity to facilitate and re-configure every-day school practice and affect teachers’ work. However, while often described in terms of increasing efficiency and reducing teachers’ work, digital data interoperability has come under scrutiny. While providing the benefit of a seamless integration of services, interoperability simultaneously opens up for the re-configuration of pedagogical practices according to the organizing principles of commercial actors while pushing the processes of privatization and commercialization forward (Kerssens & Van Dijck, 2021). European perspectives have further underlined the intensification of data-driven accountability and performativity for teachers (Roberts-Holmes, 2015) and the governing capacities of EdTech ecosystems, which simultaneously create, shape and influence educational, administrative and organizational practices (Williamson, 2017; Hartong & Förschler, 2019). While these studies among others have examined teachers’ practices in relation to datafication and the data infrastructure landscapes in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, there are open questions about the policy and practice relationships formed by the very wide range of actors implicated. In this respect, Sweden provides an interesting research context with a highly decentralized and market-driven school system that maintains a two-tier structure of public and private schools for compulsory education. Adding to existing work on the datafication of school practices in a European context, this study first asks: What relational arrangements of actors, objectives, political imaginations, laws, and infrastructures emerge in relation to school datafication? And second; what underlying problematizations are represented?

Method

Drawing on the case of Sweden, this study addresses policy as an assemblage, viewing educational policy as emerging from the relational arrangements of government agencies, private sector companies as well as material and discourses. Taking both human and non-human actors into consideration, the policy assemblage analysis in this study unpacks how multiple heterogeneous components are arranged and constituted (Savage, 2020). This highlights the emergent nature of policy by highlighting the relational arrangements of actors, objectives, political imaginations, laws, and infrastructures. Based on a large collection of sources related to the datafication and digitalization of schooling in Sweden, we selected three key policy documents and three interviews with stakeholders to foreground sociotechnical aspects. The sources were selected based on their topicality. In the case of the policy documents, prevalence and currency were also considered with the documents chosen being published between the years 2016 and 2019. One of the key texts for this analysis is the national action plan produced by the quasi-national Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions for the digitalization of the school system (Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, 2019). In addition, national (Ministry of Education, 2017) and regionally focused documents (Swedish Data Protection Authority, 2019) were included. In the case of the interviews, three stakeholders working at various levels within the educational system were selected. The six sources were then analyzed using the analytical approach called What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) developed by Bacchi (2009). This analytical lens was chosen to allow the unpacking and problematizing of underlying logics. Policy was not viewed as a solution to problems that exist outside of politics and the critical reading engaged in following the WPR approach allowed for questions to be asked about the reasoning behind problem representations and their effects. Following Bacchi (2009), in the first analytical step, problem representations, the underlying assumptions and genealogies of the identified problem representations were analyzed. Interoperability, as the exemplified problem representation, was then further analyzed with a focus on the evoked silences as well as the subjectification and discursive and lived effects of what the problem is represented to be.

Conclusion

An assemblage perspective offers ways of unpacking sociotechnical aspects of the datafication discourse. In this study, the approach revealed the issue of interoperability as a key concern. Lack of interoperability is presented as a problem for school digitalization, but there are also struggles and concerns associated with achieving the ideals of interoperability in practice. The lived effects of interoperability become visible in the expectation of frictionless data flow between systems while limited technical interoperability increases workloads as teachers are forced to use several tools or communication channels simultaneously to complete seemingly simple tasks such as taking attendance. Here, emerging interoperability standards (Swedish Standards Institute, 2020) for school platforms and attendance registers mean attendance could be further datafied and streamlined. However, interoperability is also accompanied by discursive and subjectification effects, since interoperability and data standards enact categories and distinctions to which schools like other institutions adapt (Bowker & Star, 2000). This may dramatically change classroom practices as they adapt to the organizing
principles of generating digital data and interoperability (Kerssens & Van Dijck, 2021). While technical systems and interoperability standards are set up to smooth out the production and sharing of data and rationalize teacher work, the analysis in this study suggests that they may not necessarily be directed to or beneficial for teaching practice or pedagogical considerations, as teachers may not be positioned as the recipients of the value derived from the data produced. Overall, the discourse of interoperability promotes ideals of efficiency and ease-of-use, but the data here shows a clear mismatch and tension between the intended purposes of data practices and their uses and outcomes from a more holistic view of teacher practices.

References

Bacchi, C. L. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson.

Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences (First paperback edition). The MIT Press.

Hartong, S., & Förschler, A. (2019). Opening the black box of data-based school monitoring: Data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. Big Data & Society, 6(1), 205395171985331.

Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J. van. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–14.

Ministry of Education. (2017). National digitalisation strategy for the school system.

Roberts-Holmes, G. (2015). The ‘datafication’ of early years pedagogy: ‘If the teaching is good, the data should be good and if there’s bad teaching, there is bad data.’ Journal of Education Policy, 30(3), 302–315.

Savage, G. C. (2020). What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3), 319–335.

Selwyn, N. (2020). The human labour of school data: Exploring the production of digital data in schools. Oxford Review of Education, 1–16.

Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. (2019). # skolDigiplan- National action plan for digitization of the school system, Skoldigiplan.

Swedish Data Protection Authority. (2019). Oversight according to the EU Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 – facial recognition for attendance of students

Swedish Standards Institute. (2020). Swedish Standards 12000:2020—Information Management—Interface for Information Exchange between School Administration Processes.

Williamson, B. (2017). Learning in the ‘platform society’: Disassembling an educational data assemblage. Research in Education, 24.

Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash