Session Chair: Lynn Schofield Clark
Presentation 1
RESEARCHING YOUTH PERSPECTIVES – GROUP DISCUSSIONS IN NON-FORMAL DIGITISED EDUCATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS
Eva M. Bosse, Amelie Wiese, Nadia Kutscher
University of Cologne, Germany
In striving for equity, it is key to understand enabling and impeding factors of educational and digital participation of (marginalised) youth. Even though formal education is often focused on in the discussion on educational inequalities, non-formal and informal education need to be further considered, especially with regard to digitalised societies (Jeong et al. 2018; Spanhel 2020). Applying a broad understanding of education as a transformation of self-world-relations (Jörissen/Marotzki 2009), non-formal educational arrangements that revolve around digital media activities potentially contribute to educational and digital equity among youth by enabling processes of learning and experiences of self-efficacy.
Therefore, this paper focuses on investigating the accessibility of educational participation from a marginalised youth perspective: Do non-formal digitised educational arrangements recognise (marginalised) youth realities? Our research aims at identifying conditions that enable resp. limit participation of (marginalised) youth in relation to their orientations within two non-formal educational institutions that specialise in digital media activities.
Group Discussions are implemented with youth who take part in the researched educational arrangements and with youth who belong to the potential target group but do not participate. In Group Discussions, depictions and narrations are unfolded by the participants. Analysing Group Discussions with the Documentary Method allows for the reconstruction of collective patterns of orientations that influence everyday practice (Bohnsack 2010). Based on data extracts presented at AoIR 2024, conditions of participation in non-formal digitised educational arrangements from a (marginalised) youth perspective will be discussed.
Presentation 2
Researching the EdTech industry for children: Methodological reflections on a design-based approach
Xinyu Zhao(1), Rebecca Ng(2), Chris Zomer(1), Gavin Duffy(1), Julian Sefton-Green(1)
1: Deakin University, Australia; 2: University of Wollongong, Australia
Digital platforms and services are making inroads into the everyday lives of even very young children. As with many other domains of life, children’s learning and education are increasingly digitised through ‘educational technology’ software, or more commonly EdTech. The rise of the EdTech industry provokes new questions about children’s education in the digital age. Methodologically, studying the EdTech industry for children largely falls in the field of the political economy of digital childhood, an interdisciplinary research agenda underpinned by an overall interest in understanding the critical roles of institutions, especially companies and governments, in producing and distributing digital services that shape children’s and families’ everyday consumption of digital technologies. This paper focuses on the methodological offerings of a design-based method for researching the political economy of digital childhood. We explore how a design-based approach is compatible with the research interests of a political economy perspective by drawing on the processes and findings of a collaborative design intervention study which aimed to conceptualise and build a database of EdTech companies and products for young children living in Australia. Based on the findings of the Database, this paper illustrates how the design-based approach employed in this study enabled the researchers to identify the key EdTech industry trends and characteristics, surfaces the power asymmetry between EdTech corporations and individual users, and provoke new ideas and imaginaries among parents and educators to address these challenges.
Presentation 3
The Platformization of Private Tutoring and the Making of Technopreneurs in Education
Hany Zayed
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
This paper examines how private tutoring is changing with a new digital reality. Using the empirical case of Egypt, which features an aggressive educational digitalization, a disruptive global pandemic and a formidable tutoring industry, it explores how digital platforms are reconfiguring the shape, dynamics and logics of private tutoring, and how they are restructuring the roles, practices and identities of private tutors. Building on three years of digital ethnographic fieldwork, this paper makes two arguments.
First, it contends that social media platforms and digital learning platforms are profoundly penetrating Egypt’s private tutoring landscape in a process of platformization. As opposed to adding an online type of tutoring, this platformization is reconfiguring private tutoring and transforming it _Polymorphous Tutoring_. In this new modality, digital platforms are simultaneously co-existing and tightly co-constituted with in-person tutoring in a functional complementarity that utilizes various business models and economic logics towards commercial ends. Second, within this nascent polymorphous tutoring, digital platforms are reconfiguring the labor of private tutors and transforming them to _Education Technopreneurs_. Those technopreneurs are becoming social media-influencers, micro-celebrities and content creators in education; are pivoting into lucrative business models rooted in surveillance capitalism; and are becoming an elite class not of individual actors but institutional players that are entrenching the roots, amplifying the scope, and extending the ubiquity of polymorphous tutoring. With its digital sociological perspective from the global South, this paper raises critical questions with regards to digital inequalities, educational privatization, the role of schools, and unhinged datafication.
