Presentation 1
THE DIGITAL INDUSTRY OF EDUCATION: SHAPING SCHOOLING THROUGH EDTECH
Meenakshi Mani(1), Gavin Duffy(2), Carlos David Ortegón Banoy(3), Michelle Ciccone(4), Ted Palenski(5)
1: University of Edinburgh, UK; 2: Deakin University, Australia; 3: KU Leuven, Belgium; 4: UMass Amherst, USA; 5: University of Glasgow, UK
The Education Technology sector, EdTech, has been a steadily growing presence in education, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic and the ‘digital turn’ that many schools were forced to undergo. Uniting these papers is the contention that, while the use of technology for student governance is not new to education (Cuban,1990; Selwyn, 2016), the material reality has evolved rapidly: the use of digital technologies specifically has furthered the possibilities for student quantification, datafication, and the encoding of pedagogical relationships (Perrotta et al., 2021).
This panel pursues three lines of argument. First, we suggest that EdTech is not just about learning: it increasingly implicates itself in administration, pastoral care, and public discourse. Second, we uncover the expanding network of actors involved in the production, procurement, and implementation of EdTech, including developers, a new category of EdTech brokers, and also more ‘traditional’ actors: administrators, staff, educators, and students. We show the enactment of EdTech depends on this range of actors that are the focus of our research, thus opening up the black box of EdTech, using varied methodological approaches grounded in empirical data. Third, we recognize that while EdTech is no monolith, EdTech is reconfiguring educational realities beyond the scope of apps in classrooms. In showing this, we retain a critical perspective without defaulting to cynical techno-nihilism. Crucially, we all engage in empirical research to document the changing landscape of this increasingly prominent industry in the sphere of education.
The first paper scrutinizes the technical underpinnings of ROYBI, an EdTech product that utilizes Amazon Rekognition to personalize content for young children based on their emotions (Amazon, 2020). Using the Ground Truth Tracing method (Kang, 2023), the paper finds that such EdTech hinges on the use of eight ‘valid’ emotions, and is rife with subjective choices and dissonances that determine what these technologies do, ultimately showing that leveraging ML within EdTech can lead to narrow conceptions of learning and learners based on constraints of ML infrastructures and processes.
The second paper explores how EdTech impacts the social hierarchies between school staff, with EdTech privileging roles which are more performative (Perrotta & Williamson, 2018), i.e. administrative staff benefitting at the expense of teaching staff. This is enabled by an acceptance of performativity measures by school staff, despite recognizing these measures as flawed. As a result, the EdTech industry generates a data episteme (Koopman, 2019) within schools, enshrining the persistent need for more data and, in turn, more EdTech.
The third paper explores how knowledge and evidence around EdTech are built and circulated by emerging intermediary organizations referred to here as “edTech brokers” (Ortegón, Decuypere & Williamson, forthcoming). Drawing on interviews with relevant stakeholders (including CEOs, program managers, researchers, consultants) as well as publicly available documentary sources produced by brokers, this contribution explores the political, financial, and educational factors that come into play when brokers manufacture EdTech ‘evidence’ of ‘what works’, as well as the concrete implications that this knowledge has in both schools and markets.
The fourth paper looks at the experience of university staff whose work is becoming increasingly intertwined with and dependent on a particular EdTech platform, despite a growing mismatch between the logics of the platform and how the staff members understand and conceptualize their own work. This paper draws on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and discourse analysis to try to understand how technologies become embedded and put to use despite the critique these technologies inspire in users.
The final paper focuses on surveillance software used in schools increasingly since the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper employs multi-sited ethnography, which begins at a global EdTech conference and ends in a US secondary school, ultimately arriving at seven variants of the software. These variants foreground how the software acts to harden certain classroom practices while also offering specific ways of framing and responding to young people in crisis. This author ultimately raises questions about how EdTech shapes educational futures.
Together, these papers critically interrogate EdTech’s role in how information is generated and understood about students, thus exploring how the EdTech industry shapes what is considered legitimate ‘knowledge’ and desirable ‘behaviour’ in education. This is achieved through empirically assessing the impact that this external influence has on both students and school staff, making the case for avenues that staff and students might reassert their agency, even as they resist or reimagine the EdTech within their institutions. Thus, this panel resists technological determinism, instead imagining how these products could better reflect the needs of its users. At a time of continued promotion of AI tools for teaching (Warren-Lee & Grant, 2023), persistent EdTech data leaks (Human Rights Watch, 2022; Carey, 2022) and EdTech-driven discrimination (Gallegos, 2023), it is vital that the EdTech industry be subject to this critical scrutiny, that asks when, how, and whether this technology should be used in educational institutions.
