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)

The 15-minute podcast episode is here and wherever you listen to your podcasts:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/episodes/16588168-what-is-critical-in-critical-studies-of-edtech

Our events are taking place on Thursday 20 February and Friday 21 February. Feel free to reach out, if you would like to participate. We may still have a few free spaces. Each event explores four questions, each event is face-to-face, each event is focused on talking, sharing, inter-thinking. (No presentations, no slides, no flights!) We will be thinking about:

#1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

#2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

#3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

#4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

More information on the Gothenburg meet-up here: https://www.credtech.se/en/cset2025

More on Oldenburg here (in German): https://relab.uol.de/2024/11/06/cset2025-oldenburg/

More on Buenos Aires here:

Local meet-ups will each capture their key responses to the questions, which will feed into an international report on critical studies of education and technology (CSET) that collates ideas from across the local meet-ups.

The hype surrounding digital technologies in education has now partly been replaced with a opposite tendency where schools worldwide are going back to printed books and banning mobile phones from the classroom. At the same time, digital technologies are deeply embedded in educational practices and the global ed-tech industry is thriving. In this panel, four distinguished researchers from the field of media and education will give their perspectives on this development:

Neil Selwyn, Professor in the Faculty of Education (Monash University, Australia)
Petar Jandrić, Professor of Information Science (Zagreb University of Applied Science, Croatia)
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Professor of Digital Education and Schooling (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany)
Sarah Hayes, Professor of Education and Research Lead (Bath Spa University, UK)

The plenary discussion can be attended on site at Södertörn University or as a webinar.

Academic Writers’ Workshop (2 hours)External link.
For on-site participants, there will also be a workshop session in academic publishing in the afternoon. The Academic Writers’ Workshop is designed for people who wish to develop their abstracts and presentations into publications, or for those with papers that are nearing submission, who would like to improve their work through constructive critique from experienced academic journal editors. The workshop begins with participant introductions followed by a short talk. Based on their work as editors of Postdigital Science and Education (Petar Jandrić & Sarah Hayes) and Learning, Media and Technology (Felicitas Macgilchrist) the workshop convenors look into the intersections between political economy of academic publishing, review processes, and approaches to editorial decisions. After the talk, participants will split into three groups to discuss their ideas for articles and receive feedback. Abstracts and draft articles are sent to the workshop convenors in beforehand.

Please use this link to sign up for the symposium (you can choose to attend either or both of the sessions in the form). If you have any questions, please contact Saga Hansén or Ingrid Forsler.

Reposted from Södertörn University Stockholm: https://www.sh.se/english/sodertorn-university/calendar/events/2025-02-06-the-digital-backlash-in-education—critical-and-postdigital-perspectives

Tech use in teaching and learning has been considered as a contributory factor aiding academic success. Its lack in rural schools has also been considered as a hindrance to quality education. This study through a qualitative method explored the intersection of innovation and technology use as well as the challenges of disconnection. This was done using a selected rural school in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Data were collected from a case of a secondary school using observations, field notes and semi-structured interviews from a purposively selected sample of a principal, a head of department, six teachers and an administrative clerk. The collected data were coded, categorised and analysed thematically. The findings show among others that inequalities are due to infrastructure, socioeconomic status and location. The disparities influence how digital inequality is experienced, exposing barriers, and frustrations, through digital disconnection. The experience causes the teachers to utilise less of technology and make use of what they have. This study has shaped our discourse in digital technology theory and humanities about what technology is, what it is for, and what kind of justice we ought to seek from it.

Lesley Gourlay, Professor of Education at University College in London, was invited to do a workshop at the DIE in Mexico City for the regional RED team and other scholars from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

The workshop took place on May 22, 2024 and focused on visual methodologies and what they bring into educational research. It began with a brief introduction in which Lesley talked about her own research and how she came to use drawings, photos and mapping as key parts of the process and immediately she invited each one of the 25 people attending – scholars, doctoral and master students, post-doctoral researchers – to take pictures of significant places at the DIE building.

The photos showed very different places from the building, which meant very different things for people who work there every day, visiting scholars, or students about to finish their programs. Using these resources, Lesley proposed a photo elicitation exercise in which, in pairs, the images were discussed following a set of questions.

Based upon this experience, Lesley discussed how visual methodologies such as working with photos enable the researcher to discover and inquire about things that don’t ‘emerge in a “regular” interview, in which there is very little place for details and nuances.

Using photo elicitation, as Lesley proposes, opens conversations involving embodiment, materiality, space, temporality, relationality and human-technology relationships.

The RED team shared visual productions such as drawings and diagrams produced during fieldwork in Mexico and Argentina, and they were discussed by Lesley and the other participants.

Photo by Alexander Wang on Unsplash

“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?”

“Reading, writing and narrating the world differently. With an enthusiasm that defies the virulence of the times that surround us, Orit Halpern invites us to explore the intersections of education, artificial intelligence, cognitivism and even economic theory. Orit is an American historian who talks to us about all this in a FLACSO classroom on a Buenos Aires midday.

Freedom, equality and ‘fraternity’: speculative history of artificial intelligence’ was the title of the keynote given by Halpern at a conference organised by Reconfigurations of Educational Inequality (RED), the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI) and FLACSO.

The expert in digital culture surprised the audience by adding to her hypotheses the theory of economist Friedrich Hayek: “The particular point is that each member (neuron, buyer or seller) is induced to do what, in the overall circumstances, benefits the system”.

The full article (in Spanish) is available here: https://www.clarin.com/revista-n/orit-halpern-educacion-importante-ahi-formamos-ensenamos-gente-pensar-manera_0_M6AhhR8e6J.html

Photos are from the full article

Day 1: Introducing Visual Methods

 
The first part of the workshop consisted of a theoretical, epistemological and methodological introduction of visual methods in educational science (and beyond). Starting with a description of the role of visualisations in the production of scientific knowledge (Latour, 1986) and a contextualisation of visual methods in the ‘visual turn’ in the social sciences (Dussel, 2013), we presented various examples of visual methods from the research literature. Examples included self-photographs by adolescents (Yates 2010), mappings of sociomaterial practices (Gourlay, 2015), historical drawings by children (Kay, 2021) and art-based projects with migrant children (Clacherty, 2021). Federico then presented some of the findings from his master’s thesis ‘Children’s and Adolescents’ Experiences of Migration: An Ethnography of the Casa Mambré Migrant Shelter’, in which he used visual methods in the form of comic stories. Finally, some visual examples from the data collection for the RED project were discussed. These examples were collected last year in our partner schools in KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng under the guidance of Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi. Based on these examples, we demonstrated how visual methods can provide access to the lived experience of young participants and depict forms of knowledge that are otherwise difficult to articulate – an essential undertaking for the RED project, but one that also involves ethical challenges. We discussed these challenges, as well as the general potential of visual methods, with our South African colleagues.

Day 2: Creating Visual Narratives

In the second part of the workshop, we asked the participants to create their own visual narratives in the form of comic stories. As a ‘micro’ research project for the rest of the workshop, the participants described how they create a research text. As inspiration for this task we introduced a research paper by Lesley Gourlay, in which she adopts a phenomenological perspective to describe the material, social, affective, bodily and infrastructural aspects involved in the mundane practice of opening an email on a computer (Gourlay, 2024). After the production of the visual narratives, we discussed the process and the experience of production with the participants. It became clear that, on the one hand, the method was met with resistance – for many participants, the practice of drawing was associated with uncertainties, as was the sharing of personal experiences and feelings. On the other hand, however, they emphasised that the method opened up access to other forms of knowledge – situated, embodied and contextual knowledge – and thus enabled exciting and surprising insights.

Day 3: Analysing Visual Narratives

In the last part of the workshop, the participants analysed the visual narratives they had previously produced. In small groups, they considered what the narratives could tell us about the experience of producing research texts, about the human and non-human actors involved, and about the affects and emotions that arise during a writing process. In the discussion that followed, they raised topics such as the solitude or sociality of academic writing, the moments of inspiration or idea generation, and the role of digital platforms and infrastructures for writing. Finally, Federico provided insights into the analysis he is conducting on the visual narratives from the RED project for his doctoral dissertation. As examples, he presented the thematic grouping of narratives on the digital whiteboard platform ‘Mural’ and the possibilities of content analysis using coding and categorisation in the ‘MaxQDA’ programme.

We thank our colleagues from UNISA for the lively and inspiring exchange during the retreat. We also thank Prof. Dr Marcia Mkansi for her invitation and hospitality, Prof. Dr Paul Prinsloo for his support throughout the process and Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi for their help with data collection and analysis.

Literature

Clacherty, G. (2021). Art-based, narrative research with unaccompanied migrant children living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 36(4), 547–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2019.1621766

Dussel, I. (2013). The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 29–49). Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_2

Gourlay, L. (2015). ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 402–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020784

Gourlay, L. (2024). More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making: Paratexts of the Postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education, 6(3), 756–766. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00449-x

Kay, C. (2021). German children’s art during World War I. Global Studies of Childhood, 11(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/20436106211015694

Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands. Knowledge and Society, 6, 1–40.