Conference Agenda

This workshop offers to experience a way to analyse professional practices through an approach oriented by psychoanalysis. The method we will use is inspired by Institutional Pedagogy (Vasquez & Oury, 1967), that authors of the proposal both practice since a few decades. The leaders of the device proposed in this workshop have been conducting this type of working group for more than twenty years with different publics in the field of education and training.

This workshop will run in four steps:

–First step: presentation of the ‘device-frame’ (Roussillon, 1995).

–The second step, individual writing: each participant will be invited to write the narration of a situation encountered at work, in a context of teaching or training. The text will be handwritten and in English, which will be the language of the exchanges.

–The third step, a time for exchanges based on free-associations (Freud, 1904): each writer will be invited to read his text and the participants to share what has come to their minds in association with the evoked situation and the way it is related.

– The fourth stage, a time of "meta-reflection" on the method: after having experienced this method, a moment will be devoted to a free discussion during which each participant will be able to talk about this experience of working in group. The leader of this session will be able to briefly present the origin of this method and give examples of its use in the field of education. One of the participants (if possible one of the convenors of Network 21) could be placed in an observer position to focus especially group phenomena during the workshop, i.e. the associative chains.

Feelings of shame appear as a central dimension in the experiences of working-class students (Loveday, 2016; Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). Literature shows that those, who – against statistical odds (Hauschildt et al., 2021) – are the first in their family to attend university are frequently accompanied by feelings of shame in academic spaces. In his analysis, German Sociologist Sighard Neckel exposes feelings of shame as deeply connected with social hierarchy and thus always related to the social biography of subjects (Neckel, 2020). Nevertheless, the significance of shame in social mobility tends to remain a side note in empirical studies (e.g. Hinz, 2016). Rather, these studies focus on the experience of foreignness, the lack of fit and coping with habitual differences (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Lehmann, 2013; Hurst, 2010; Reay, Crozier & Clayton, 2009). However, shame seems to be of particular importance looking at the current state of education: According to the meritocratic logic, disadvantage, dropouts, and lack of fit in educational institutions are discursively interpreted as individual failures, as collective patterns of interpreting of social inequality lose their significance (Neckel, 2020). Feelings of shame are thus necessarily produced in the educational institutions of an increasingly individualised society. The university acts as an accomplice in the social production of shame – and shame becomes a fundamental pedagogical problem (Magyar-Haas, 2020). Still, the question of how shame unfolds in concrete empirical contexts of class transitions has yet to be answered.

Against this background, the paper poses the questions: What role do feelings of shame play in processes of social mobility in the context of university? How is 'class shame' coped with in the process of social mobility? To answer these questions, I will draw on exploratively collected data from a research project that aimed at gaining better understanding of the lived experiences of working-class students regarding their navigation of their course of education (“Becoming Academic – First-Generations Students in Austrian und German Higher Education”, 2019-2023). This in-depth qualitative research was formulated as a biographical inquiry (Merrill, 2020), with data having been collected via biographical-narrative interviews and through written accounts. The aim of this paper is to use in-depth empirical research to gain insight into the emotional experience of social class in education and outline systematic reflections the role of shame in these processes. As an example, the autobiographical accounts of an education studies student are brought into the centre of the analysis and questioned regarding shame and its representation.

Particularly when debating social closure and education, shame needs to be conceptualised in relation to the reproduction of social inequality. Thus, the theoretical framework of this study combines Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and his work on habitus, milieu and field (Bourdieu, 1984) with Neckel’s concept of shame as a social emotion (Neckel, 2020). Neckel differentiates between moral and social shame: unlike moral shame, which is linked to guilt, social shame has a specific societal function (ibid.). Shame is thus considered both a product and a producer of class relations in that it devalues the shamed, legitimates the subordination of one subject to another in the experience of shame, and thus contributes to the self-participation of the shamed subjects in the maintenance of the social order. The feelings of inferiority expressed in social shame are not individual, but bound to membership of certain social groups, collective identities, and social classes (ibid.). Feelings of shame in the context of higher education are therefore not simply personal, they are rather profoundly social since the symbolic relations of violence are reflected in the subjective experience of shame (Bourdieu, 2001).

Although the current trend is to shop online supermarkets still have customers, especially around rush hour. In Denmark, when we shop in person, we meet just a few junior (often young) staff members who perform the routine but essential retail tasks like stocking shelves, arranging displays, working on the tills, cleaning counters, and sweeping the floor. Such work seems simple but behind it there exists a complex, increasingly technological, global chain of markets, production, and transportation. To function within these challenging spheres requires skills that must be learned and further developed within a commercial, organisational framework, yet how these are acquired is rarely studied. So, this project sets out to examine and analyse internal training and educational practices in retail, focusing on the basic workforce up to mid-level management.

At the conference I will present preliminary findings and ideas for further research.

The background for the project is that the public education system, since WWII, has been part of an extensive education project (Imsen et al., 2017) which ensures that as citizens in the welfare state we in Denmark share a common view of society and consequently of how education should be understood and performed. Within this unilinear perspective, other forms of educational activities become invisible, particularly those that increasingly take place outside the welfare state's value framework, such as internships and training within the retail area. Even when it is acknowledged that the public and business sectors are not two separate worlds but interact and rely on each other at many points (Pedersen, 2011), training activities remain shrouded, for the educational activities of floor workers and management are not a fundamental part of a business’s daily activities. Dealing with specific competencies together with liberal and commercial values and attitudes requires worldviews that differ from those embedded in public education.

The overarching framework for this project is an analysis of how cultural worlds that traditionally are categorically apart, meet. Attitudes towards the other – a possibly unknown world – shape our ideas about ourselves even while we enhance our understanding of the unfamiliar. Taking a sociological perspective, and inspired by Bertaux & Bertaux-Wiame (1981), the study will seek to capture values and attitudes related to working in the business area from both within and outside retail. Furthermore, it will study young people who work and have careers within large retail chains: for personal, familial, and social reasons, significant numbers of retail employees have earlier opted out of public education programmes and are hence seen as individuals with 'No education'. However, this label often obscures other forms of educational activity: partly completed educational programmes, study undertaken outside Denmark, or informal learning from participation in civic society.

The questions the project will seek to answer are: What leads to the choice of a career in retail and which dynamics within families, school, society, and companies propel the young into retail? What are the young employees’ stories about their working life, and their understandings of possibilities in the organisational field they act within? Do discontinued studies or civic educational engagement influence the choice to work in retail and, if so, how? Moreover, what can we learn from this encounter between the cultural worlds in business and the public school system?

The number of international students in Australia has expanded rapidly over the past three decades, in line with a trend towards global expansion in the number of globally mobile postsecondary students: there were more than 5.3 million people studying for a tertiary qualification outside of their home country as of 2017 (UNESCO, 2021). Australia has benefitted from this migratory flow, having developed a highly lucrative higher education export industry. In 2021, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 570,626 students enrolled in Australian tertiary institutions, making it the fourth most popular destination country for globally mobile students.

In this paper, based on data from a mixed-methods study, first, we seek to understand how levels of financial precarity vary within this group, responding to calls to reverse the socioeconomic homogenization of the international student migrant in existing academic work (e.g. Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). Secondly, we explore the ways in which financial precarity seeps into the ‘intimate spheres’ of international students’ lives. In doing so, we aim to centre and refine ‘precarity’ as a conceptual framing for the study of international student mobility. As such, although this study is focused on the Australian context, we seek to discuss the wider implications of increased precarity among international students globally, including in Europe. We posit the use of precarity as a bridge or ‘relational nexus’ (Neilson, 2019), anchored in structural conditions but connecting these to the broader lived experiences of students, focusing on time poverty, social isolation, and negative impacts on physical and mental wellbeing, as facets of precariousness understood as ‘a socioontological dimension of lives and bodies’ (Lorey, 2015, p.11). In sum, rather than defining precarity exclusively as an economic condition, we propose that it is useful to explore the connections between financial precarity and precarious life (Strauss & McGrath, 2018).

The precarity and precariousness of international student migrants remains underexplored. They are generally framed as a relatively homogenous group, through consumption-based metaphors, as privileged members of the nascent ‘global middle class(es)’ (Robertson, 2015). This is reflected in the fact that a significant portion of the empirical research on internationally mobile students has been concerned with the ways in which this form of migration is employed as a means of middle-class social reproduction. As a result, research in this area, especially that focused on major destinations in the Global North, has only rarely acknowledged the full diversity of socio-economic backgrounds within this group. However, there is increasing recognition of a critical need to acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity faced by many international students, progressing beyond the aforementioned ‘flattening’ of the socio-economic dimensions of international student mobility (Lipura & Collins, 2020; Raghuram et al., 2020). The findings that we present in this paper contribute to understandings of precarity among international student migrants by highlighting the high level of variation between this group.

Survey respondents are divided into four groups of financial deprivation, according to results from a baseline survey which collected information on financial stress indicators – none, moderate, high, and extreme. This enables an exploration of the ways in which economic insecurity, and other facets of broader lived experience – wellbeing, free time, and relationships – interact with each other and shape migrants’ experiences differentially along lines of financial vulnerability.

Over the last years, the field of Critical EdTech Studies (CETS) has grown exponentially. With ‘critical edtech studies’, we denote studies that do not take educational technologies (‘EdTech’) at face value and/or merely try to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, but that rather aim to probe how they have come to increasingly shape and steer education through encoded and blackboxed logics—norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—invisible to schools and teachers and unaccountable to the professional sector (Macgilchrist, 2021). Prevalent in fields like media studies (e.g., van Dijck et al., 2018), data science (e.g., Daniel, 2019), and philosophy (e.g., Serres, 2014), CETS are widespread and not to be situated in one singular academic niche. However, CETS are especially prevalent and thriving in the field of sociologies of education – a broad academic discipline that has proven to provide especially fertile soil for critically analyzing the roles and impacts of digital technologies in/on the educational field [see, for instance, Castaneda & Williamson (2021), Decuypere et al. (2021), and Nichols & Garcia (2022) for recently published Special Issues on this topic]. Yet, despite this expansion and mainstreaming of CETS as an academic discipline, its highly valuable insights into how edtech invisibly reshapes education are not easily finding their way into concrete classroom practices, and are not easily used ‘to support teachers and other practitioners to rethink the ways that edtech works in their institutions and classrooms’ (Castenada & Williamson, 2021:11). To fill this gap between research and digital education in practice, this symposium addresses the following question: How can knowledge generated by CETS contribute to the conscious, responsible, and educationally valuable, implementation of EdTech by educational practitioners in schools (educators, students, ICT coordinators, data managers) and edtech developers?

To address this question, this symposium invites one discussant and three papers in the field of CETS to present practice-based (research) projects (still under development or already implemented) that are, through different approaches, committed to a shared objective of fostering responsible, conscious and pedagogically valuable adoption of EdTech in specific educational settings. Participants will discuss the design of tools that make the actions and (blackboxed) operations of EdTech platforms and apps legible for teachers and learners, the development of workshop formats in which teachers and students co-design the use of digital technologies in education, and the development of instruments that assess the impact of digital technologies on fundamental public and educational values of schools.

The so-called GAFAM big-tech companies of Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft are well-recognized gatekeepers to critical digital infrastructures in public sectors like education. However, the role they have as pillars within the infrastructure of the internet is commonly invisible to users, not least their “cloud-services” that adopt the so-called “as-a-service” infrastructure model (e.g. STorage-as-a-Service). These cloud-services are highly profitable. For example, in 2021 Amazon Web Services accounted for around 20% of the company's revenue, but nearly 75% of profits (Amazon, n.d.). Thus, the market and social value of these infrastructures motivates the big-tech presence (Birch et al., 2021) and as an increasingly data-intensive sector, public education is an attractive customer. Considering the incentives for expanding cloud-services and the already large infrastructurally installed bases (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) GAFAMcompanies have in schools, we set out to empirically unpack the ongoing infrastructuring that governs education (Ratner & Gad, 2019; Selwyn, 2015). For this purpose, we have developed a web-based tool, InfraReveal(infrareveal.net), for visualizing the cloud-services underlying educational platforms using techniques that reveal data-packet traffic as users access internet. The tool has been used in sessions with schoolteachers in Sweden with the purpose of enhancing their critical digital infrastructural understandings (part of the RED project focused on global digital education inequalities, edu-digitalinequality.org). While earlier critical studies have considered the influence that GAFAM have on public education through user-facing businesses and through analysis of marketing-technical documentation (Williamson et al., 2022), we set out to demonstrate and engage with schoolteachers in critical discussions on infrastructuring. Our work builds on the tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on critical infrastructural features such as “ubiquity, reliability, invisibility, gateways, and breakdown” (Plantin et al., 2018: 294), combined with computational methods. The results draw on the real-time visualisations produced by InfraReveal to unpack how and where GAFAMcompanies are involved in controlling key digital infrastructures for education and achieve market provision dominance. They illustrate the how and where of an increasing dependence on GAFAM that can be argued to be a risk as market logics supersede public sector values (van Dijck et al., 2018), an issue targeted in emerging policy regulations on digital services and markets (European Commission, 2022). Taking the visualizations produced by InfraReveal as a starting point, issues like the role of GAFAM in critical education infrastructures, global infrastructural inequalities affecting education, and the lack of public debate on Sweden’s marketized cloud-service school infrastructure are discussed.

Amazon. (n.d.). Quarterly results. Amazon.com, Inc. Retrieved Jan 17 2023, from https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx Birch, K., Cochrane, D., & Ward, C. (2021). Data as Asset? The Measurement, Governance, and Valuation of Digital Personal Data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1). European Commission (2022). Regulation on Digital Services Act. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Ratner, H., & Gad, C. (2019). Data Warehousing Organization: Infrastructural Experimentation with Educational Governance. Organization 26(4), 537–552. Selwyn, N. (2015). Data Entry: Towards the Critical Study of Digital Data and Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40(1), 64–82. Star, S.L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7, 111–134. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press. Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231–256.

EdTech vendors, but equally policy actors (e.g., the European Digital Education Action Plan) worldwide, commonly attribute deep structural transformations to the digitization of education, ranging from ‘truly’ personalized or fully ‘delocalized’ learning, to a remaking of schools into networked learning organizations. At the same time, a growing number of critical edtech studies have argued for an urgent need to ‘demystify’ such revolutionary visions, pointing to various implementations of digital technologies in schools that reproduce traditional structures of formal education (inequality, assessment-oriented input learning, etc.) rather than ‘disrupting’ them (e.g., Reich, 2020; Mertala, 2020). As this literature shows, at least part of the reasons for this lie in the complex interplay between the contextual needs of schools on the one hand, and the standardized (and scalable) design of many edtech products on the other hand (ibid.). Moreover, critical edtech studies show the huge need of schools to experiment, in their local context, with various edtech products, in order to obtain a good understanding of their working operations, their pedagogical intentions and design (e.g., Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022). Moreover, such findings show the urgent need of bringing critical edtech research (insights) into schools, rather than chiefly circulating these insights into academic circles alone (cf. Holloway et al., 2022). In this contribution, we will present the German-Belgian SMASCH (“Smart Schools”, www.smasch.eu) research project (2021-2024); a collaboration between KU Leuven and HSU Hamburg, with 13 sample schools in both countries, around ‘pedagogically meaningful’ digitization. Drawing on insights from critical edtech research as shortly outlined above, the project aims to move beyond an instrumental understanding of digitization as technologically-induced change(s), rather working towards a systematic development of a ‘critical, research-oriented attitude’ in schools that aims to foster a nuanced (yet practical) understanding of the promises, potentials and risks of EdTech adoption in concrete school practices. In doing so, SMASCH aims to work and think together with schools with regards to how such pedagogically meaningful digitization can look like, depending on the very specific context in which each school is situated. Thus far, in the context of SMASCH, we have brought insights of critical edtech studies into schools by means of practices of critical co-design; participatory workshops with schools; the creation of study materials for teachers and/students; and the bringing together of schools over the national boundaries of the two countries present in the project – all of which will be extensively discussed during our presentation.

Brandau, N., & Alirezabeigi, S. (2022). Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Holloway, J., Lewis, S., & Langman, S. (2022). Technical agonism: embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Mertala, P. (2020). Paradoxes of participation in the digitalization of education: A narrative account. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 179-192. Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can't transform education. Harvard University Press.

The platformization of classrooms stands out as a significant transformational force in K12 education. Big Tech (cloud) infrastructures and educational technology (‘EdTech’) platforms are increasingly penetrating daily classroom practices (Veale, 2022), affecting the autonomy of schools (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2022) and shaping student learning and teachers’ professional practices (Perrotta et al., 2020). This “reinstitutionalization” of K12 education around private platforms (Davies et al., 2022) fundamentally affects the public environment of schooling (Apps et al., 2022). Critical analysis of Big tech and EdTech platforms have addressed key questions around conflictual interests of for-profit platform companies and the values associated with the public or educative good (Kerssens and Van Dijck 2021; Williamson et al., 2022). Driven by economic values and corporate interests, commercial platforms in education establish new modes of value production through platform mechanisms of datafication and personalization (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018), which affects schools and teachers capacities to shape classroom education on their own organizational and professional values (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2021). Yet, despite a recent upsurge of critical scholarship expressing concern about Big tech and EdTech reshaping classroom education, schools and teachers in the Netherlands have been offered little actionable guidance on how to embed these technologies responsibly, in accordance with public and educational values. To aid schools and educators in selecting and employing technologies thoughtfully in their classrooms, a consortium of critical edtech scholars from Utrecht University, Kennisnet (a public network organization for education and ICT), Teacher Education Institutions and primary schools, started collaborating on the research and development of an ‘Impact Assessment Public Values and Educational Technology’ (IAPVET). This presentation will discuss a pilot of IAPVET, its development, and first results of early implementations at Dutch schools. The aim of IAPVET is to provide a methodology supporting primary schools in the responsible implementation of digital technologies, helping them aligning the digital education environment of the school with their value-based pedagogical vision. Therefore, IAPVET intends to intertwine four procedures: Mapping (How is the digital education environment arranged?); Vision development (What are we shaping digital education for?); Assessment (What impact does digitization have on teachers and children and the core values of the school?); Professional development (How can we better equip our school and employees to responsibly use digital technologies?)

Apps, T., Beckman, K., & Howard, S. K. (2022). Valuable data? Using walkthrough methods to understand the impact of digital reading platforms in Australian primary schools. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. Dijck, J. v., Poell, T., & Waal, M. d. (2018). The platform society: public values in a connective world. New York: Oxford University Press. Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J. v. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 250-263. Kerssens, N., & Van Dijck, J. (2022). Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 284-303. 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, 1-17. Veale, M. (2022). Schools must resist big EdTech – but it won’t be easy. In Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulatory and Practical Reflections. Retrieved from https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/ Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perrotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2)

Educational media are often viewed as 'objects' or 'tools'. Practice focusses e.g. on features of tablets, their usability and their capabilities to reach the given learning objectives (e.g. Stoltenhoff 2019). Research regularly focuses on how media can support the learning processes of students (e.g. Bernard et. al., 2018). From a media studies point of view, those perspectives are problematic, since they usually leave out e.g. the medial preconditions of knowledge production, cultural practices, or power relations and the constitution of subjects (e.g. McLuhan 1964; Winkler 2004) that are also important for education / ‘Bildung’ (Allert/Richter 2018). Moreover, those perspectives reproduce the ‘invisibility of media’ that media theory problematizes and aims to overcome (Krämer 1998, Winkler 2004). Instead, our approach assumes that medial preconditions are crucial for a critical research and practice of EdTech, and that they can be heuristically analysed as 'media constellations' (Weich 2020). This implies to understand media as a mutual interplay and production of materialities, knowledge/practices, subject positions and contents, and that reflection should begin with the analysis of this interplay. Based on this understanding, one can e.g. pose questions that probe how adaptive learning systems address students and teachers as objects and subjects of (self-)optimization and (self-)surveillance; how the learning content is constituted by technological and conceptual preconditions; what power relations, discourses and practices are inscribed in the system (Weich/Deny/Priedigkeit/Troeger 2021); and how students and teachers appropriate them in classroom practices. In various workshops with schools, we use the media constellation analysis (MCA) to analyse and reflect on educational media together with teachers. Teachers name challenges or planned undertakings concerning educational media. After the group decides which of the challenges/undertakings should be worked on first, subsequently a brainstorming is conducted about elements that are crucial for the given media constellation and try to map their interplay. Based on the question which of these elements and entanglements are beneficial or problematic, the workshop finally collects and discusses possible modifications that might change the media constellation for the better. The presentation will first outline the MCA. It proceeds by some examples from our research (e.g., on the adaptive math program bettermarks. In the last step, concepts of media reflection workshops with teachers, and some of their experiences based on MCA are shown. By sharing insight into our continuous re-modelling of workshop concepts, we will also discuss recurring problems and possible pathways for adapting this concept for teacher workshops.

Allert, H., Asmussen, M., & Richter C. (2018). Formen von Subjektivierung und Unbestimmtheit im Umgang mit datengetriebenen Lerntechnologien – eine praxis-theoretische Position. In: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 21: 142–158. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-017-0778-7 Bernard, R.M., Borokhovski, E., Schmid, R.F., Tamim, R.M. (2018). Gauging the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Integration in Education: What the Best-Quality Meta-Analyses Tell Us. In: Spector, M., Lockee, B., Childress, M. (ed.) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_109-2 Krämer, S. (1998). Das Medium als Spur und Apparat. In: Krämer, S. (ed.): Medien, Computer, Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 73–94. McLuhan, M. (1964): Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stoltenhoff, A. (2019). Medienbildung im kompetenzorientierten Schulsystem. Diskurs- und hegemonietheoretische Analyse des Wissensfeldes ›schulische Medienbildung‹. Tübingen: Universitätsbibliothek, dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-34828. Weich, A. (2020). Digitale Medien und Methoden: Andreas Weich über die Medienkonstellationsanalyse. In: Open-Media-Studies-Blog, 16.06.2020. Weich, A., Deny, P., Priedeigkeit, M. & Troeger, J. (2021). Adaptive Lernsysteme zwischen Optimierung und Kritik. Eine Analyse der Medienkonstellationen bettermarks aus informatischer und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. In: Datengetriebene Schule. Themenheft der Zeitschrift Medienpädagogik, 22-51. Winkler, Hartmut. (2004). Mediendefinition. In: Medienwissenschaft – Rezensionen, Reviews, 1/04: 9–27.

The proposed symposium is based on the quantitative data analysis output stemming from the Horizon 2020 PIONEERED project “Pioneering policies and practices tackling educational inequalities in Europe” (https://www.pioneered-project.eu). The project encompasses nine European countries and aims to uncover the mechanisms behind the persisting educational inequalities, as well as to offer science-based policy advice.

Empirical findings presented here are a part of a larger analytical work based on the exploration of national and cross-national quantitative data focusing on inequalities throughout the various educational stages (primary, secondary, and tertiary), including the trajectories and transitions, as well as both the formal and non-formal/informal educational settings. To bring together the drivers of educational inequalities and the complexity of their interactions on the one hand, and varying education systems on the other, the analyses rely on a comprehensive methodological framework proposed in the project, which combines the multi-level, intersectional, and life-course perspectives (abbr. MILC). The Multi-level approach determines the contribution of socio-economic and educational policies (macro-) through the schools, neighborhoods (meso-), and individual and family circumstances (micro-level) on educational outcomes. Individual-level predictors, such as socio-economic origin, gender, migration background are well-known axes of inequality. However, as we empirically show, it is their combinations, i.e. an intersection of these axes, that have a differentiated impact on educational outcomes. Thus, the Intersectional approach provides a nuanced understanding of the importance of each of this axis for a specific outcome, as well as across educational careers and contexts (e.g. between countries). The Life-course approach suggests that educational inequalities occur in cumulative manner, leading to a particular individual school path.

The three contributions in this symposium refer to these (or a combination of) approaches when answering research questions related to drivers of inequalities such as school admission age, school segregation and composition, and sense of belonging.

The first presentation analyses the effect of age cut-off at the beginning of school on achievement at the start and later along the educational path in the North-Western part of Switzerland. This is an example of school policy (at the macro-level), where an arbitrary decision with respect to cut-off age for school admission, has a concrete effect on student’s achievement that extends beyond the primary education (cumulative disadvantage). While empirical explorations exist in the US, this study is among very few that investigates this question in European context. The study is important as the unique data allows analyzing the achievement gap over time (life-course). Additionally, given the high-stratification of the education system, this study provides key evidence on the relevance of age cut-off on track placement in secondary education.

The second presentation focuses on school-segregation and the long-term consequences for achievement and attainment in Luxembourg, that is known for its multilingual and highly-stratified education system with a large share of immigrant students. Following the multi-level, intersectional and life-course approaches, the authors empirically test the effect of primary school composition on achievement (math and German language) and attainment (academic vs other school tracks) in secondary education. The emphasis of the paper is on three major inequality axes: social origin, migration status and gender.

The third presentation studies how the sense of belonging within learning environment varies across educational stages: primary, secondary and tertiary, focusing on the same inequality axes mentioned above (intersectional approach). This is a comparative study with more than 30 countries that attempts to explain the variation among concerned groups by including key macro-level indicators (multi-level approach). While sense of belonging is less frequently studied in the realm of educational outcomes, existing studies have largely proved its importance for school success and a general well-being of young children and youth.

Pupils who did not start learning at the same level as their peers might subsequently fall behind throughout their educational careers (e.g., Heckman 2006; Passaretta et al. 2022). The modalities of compulsory school admission may contribute to the emergence of early gaps in educational performance. Nearly all education systems have arbitrarily chosen cut-off dates for school enrolment, which create age differences of up to a year within a cohort of pupils. Prior research has shown that the youngest pupils in a cohort fall behind their relatively older peers in educational performance (e.g., Bedard and Dhuey 2006; Peña 2017; Dicks and Lancee 2018). These performance gaps are coined as relative age effects, which can be framed within theories of cumulative (dis)advantages (e.g., DiPrete and Eirich 2006). Drawing on a comprehensive data set encompassing the entire student population in North Western Switzerland (BR NWCH 2021), the study addresses three research questions. First, it is investigated to what extent pupils’ relative age affects their educational achievement in different subjects and track placement in secondary education. Second, by exploiting the longitudinal structure of the data, it is examined whether the influence of relative age diminishes the course of educational trajectories. Third, the study establishes a record linkage between administrative data and pupils’ test data to investigate whether pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds suffer more strongly from relative age effects. A pupil’s relative age might be correlated with various unobserved factors. Two strategies are employed to address these endogeneity concerns. First, the study employs an instrumental variable approach using “assigned relative age” (e.g., Bedard and Dhuey 2006) as an instrument for pupils’ actual age. Second, the study uses a regression discontinuity design contrasting pupils born just before and after the cut-off date to estimate relative age effects in Switzerland. Preliminary results provide evidence that students with a relative age advantage when they entered school achieve significantly higher than their counterparts with a relative age disadvantage during their first years of primary education. However, relative age effects vanish the more students advance in their educational trajectory. Additional analyses shed light on potential effect heterogeneity. The study illustrates how early disadvantages emerge by chance through arbitrarily chosen cut-off dates for school eligibility. Scholars and policy-makers alike are urged to debate how the modalities of school entry can be designed to ensure equal starting conditions for all.

Bedard, K., & Dhuey, E. (2006). The persistence of early childhood maturity: International evidence of long-run age effects. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(4), 1437–1472. BR NWCH. (2021). Checks in BR NWCH 2013-2020 [Dataset]. University of Zurich, Institute for Educational Evaluation. Distributed by FORS, Lausanne. https://doi.org/10.23662/FORS-DS-1261-1 Dicks, A., & Lancee, B. (2018). Double disadvantage in school? Children of immigrants and the relative age effect: A regression discontinuity design based on the month of birth. European Sociological Review, 34(3), 319–333. DiPrete, T. A., & Eirich, G. M. (2006). Cumulative advantage as a mechanism for inequality: A review of theoretical and empirical developments. Annual Review of Sociology, 32, 271-297. Heckman, J. J. (2006). Skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children. Science 312(5782), 1900-1902. Passaretta, G., Skopek, J., & van Huizen, T. (2022). Is social inequality in school-age achievement generated before or during schooling? A European perspective. European Sociological Review, 38(6), 849-865. Peña, P. A. (2017). Creating winners and losers: Date of birth, relative age in school, and outcomes in childhood and adulthood. Economics of Education Review, 56, 152–176.

For several decades, sociological research has studied determinants of educational inequalities, whereby most researches have focused on individual students’ characteristics (e.g., Boudon, 1974; Bourdieu, 1984), though others also considered system variables such as school composition and segregation (e.g., Jencks, 1974). However, few studies have addressed the possible interaction of system and student characteristics in relation to student academic outcomes (Gross et al., 2016). Educational inequalities in Luxembourg – with a highly stratified, multilingual education system, further characterised by a large proportion of students with a 1st or 2nd generation migrant status - are related to student characteristics (i.e., socio-economic status and migration status) (e.g., Lenz & Heinz, 2018) as well as schools’ social composition (Martins & Veiga, 2010). The present study aimed to investigate especial the intersectional impact of students´ academic and socio-demographic characteristics, school composition and school tracks on students’ academic performance in Luxembourg. It draws on longitudinal data collected as part of the Luxembourg school monitoring programme “Épreuves Standardisées” (ÉpStan; Fischbach et al., 2014) and included all students enrolled in public education Grade 3 (November 2013) matched with data from the same students in Grade 9 (November 2017-2021) including those repeating once or twice (N≈3600). Results of multilevel mixed effects regression analyses show that both Math and language achievement in Grade 9 is affected by student characteristics (gender, SES, migration background and prior achievement), as well as by the school track and school composition (i.e., percentage of Low SES families in 3rd Grade). In addition, some cross-level interaction effects were found. For example, results show that after controlling for prior performance and other individual characteristics, the gender gap in math achievement is more pronounced in the higher than in the middle school track. These results indicate that not only student and system variables, but also their intersectionality affect student achievement outcomes. More specifically, accounting for socio-demographic student characteristics and prior achievement, our results demonstrate a long-term effect of school composition on students´ educational pathways. Student and system characteristics have a direct effect on academic achievement as well as an indirect effect via school tracking. Furthermore, student and system variables interact such that achievement differences between certain groups of students (e.g., boys) may be exacerbated by system characteristics (i.e., school composition). Results will be discussed in relation to theory as well as their possible implications for tailored policy making.

Boudon, R. (1974). Education, opportunity and social inequality: changing prospects in Western society. Wiley. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the Judgement of taste (translated by R. Nice). Harvard University Press. Fischbach, A., Ugen, S., & Martin, R. (2014). ÉpStan Technical Report. University of Luxembourg ECCS research unit/LUCET. www.epstan.lu Gross, C., Gottburgsen, A., & Phoenix, A. (2016). Education systems and intersectionality. In A. Hadjar & C. Gross (Eds.), Education systems and inequalities (pp. 51–72). Policy Press. Jencks, C. (1974). Inequality: A re-assessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. Lane. Lenz, T., & Heinz, A. (2018). Das Luxemburgische Schulsystem: Einblicke und Trends. In T. Lentz, I. Baumann, & A. Küpper. (Eds.), Nationaler Bildungsbericht Luxemburg 2018 (pp. 22–34). Université du Luxembourg (LUCET) & SCRIPT. Martins, L., & Veiga, P. (2010). Do inequalities in parents’ education play an important role in PISA students’ mathematics achievement test score disparities? Economics of Education Review, 29(6), 1016–1033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2010.05.001

Sense of belonging in education has been linked to many aspects of students’ overall success in their educational path. It is associated with academic achievement and well-being related to studies (Finn & Zimmer 2012; Ulmanen et al. 2016; Pedler et al. 2022). Sense of belonging is also among humans’ basic psychological needs (Maslow 1943; Wenger 1998; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Gender, socioeconomic status, migrant status, and educational context has been linked with the variation in the sense of belonging (OECD, 2017), but the research has not been systematic or conclusive. While research often focuses on individual dimensions of inequalities, the effects of sociodemographic factors are intertwined and an intersectional approach is required in order broaden the view (e.g., Codiroli Mcmaster & Cook, 2019). The present study takes an intersectional view on the sense of belonging along the educational path. Interconnections between sociodemographic and contextual aspects are explored. The data consists of large, cross-national datasets, namely TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA, and Eurostudent, reflecting different educational stages, namely primary, secondary and tertiary education. The datasets have been harmonized for comparability across educational stages (see Kroezen & Alieva, 2022). Gender and socioeconomic and migrant statuses have been used to reflect intersectional inequalities, and macro-level indicators have been used in exploring associations between the educational context and inequalities. These include the Tracking index, UNESCO’s Female percentage of the graduation ratio from ISCED 6/7 in tertiary education, and the Migrant Integration and Policy Index. The findings show that the dynamics that play behind the sense of belonging vary in different stages of educational path. While girls perceive stronger belonging in education in primary level compared with boys, the socioeconomic and migrant statuses become more essential in inequalities in the sense of belonging in secondary and tertiary levels. Associations between educational context and intersectional inequalities in the sense of belonging are complex and even counterintuitive. While tracking seems to have little effect on intersectional inequalities, the analyses revealed mixed effects regarding the proportion of female graduates and inclusiveness towards immigrants. The measures that are intended for equalizers may even be counterproductive or they can benefit unintended groups. The findings indicate that individuals’ sense of belonging is not stable in different educational contexts, but rather a variety of individual and contextual factors are related to it.

Codiroli Mcmaster, N. & Cook, R., 2019. The contribution of intersectionality to quantitative research into educational inequalities. Review of Education, 7 (2), 271–292. Finn, J.D. & Zimmer, K.S., 2012. Student Engagement: What Is It? Why Does It Matter? In: S.L. Christenson, A.L. Reschly, and C. Wylie, eds. Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. New York: Springer. Kroezen, T. & Alieva, A., 2022. PIONEERED: Data Harmonisation Guidelines. Deliverable No. 4.1. Zenodo. Maslow, A.H., 1943. A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370–396. OECD, 2017. PISA 2015 Results (Volume III): Students’ Well-Being. OECD. Pedler, M.L., Willis, R., & Nieuwoudt, J.E., 2022. A sense of belonging at university: student retention, motivation and enjoyment. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43 (3), 397–408. Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L., 2000. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25 (1), 54–67.

Introduction

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) has emerged as an ‘education hub’ for international schooling, broadly defined here as schools offering international curricula at least partly in English outside an English-speaking country. In 2022, there were 168 international schools with 80,565 students and 11,458 staff across the GBA region (ISC Research, 2022). International schooling was traditionally associated with education for expatriate families (Hayden, 2016). One of the main social groups attending these schools was an affluent, cosmopolitan, and globally mobile social class of highly educated professionals, that is, the ‘Global Middle-Class’ (Ball & Nikita, 2014; Beach et al., 2021; Wright & Lee, 2019). However, the demographics of international schools are changing. The greatest demand in China and elsewhere has been from a ‘local’ base of middle-class families seeking an internationalised education that offers a pathway to overseas higher education and/or to ‘escape’ the local education system (Bunnell, 2020; Poole, 2020; Wright et al., 2022). Kim and Mobrand (2019) describe this pattern as ‘stealth marketisation’ in that the growth of an international schooling market for local families has happened without much fanfare or public discourse. Put differently, a growing number of local middle-class parents in China are capitalising on the changing landscape of international schooling. Nonetheless, there has been limited research into the implications of this change for social stratification in education.

We conducted a multi-site case study of five international schools in the GBA that primarily serve local students. Drawing on Brown’s (e.g., 2000) positional conflict theory, we had two objectives. First, uncover the motivations of local families for sending their children to international schools, experiences of attending an international school, and students’ post-high school trajectories, focusing on if and how international schools provide a pathway to join the Global Middle-Class. Second, consider the impacts of international schooling on social stratification. Overall, we sought answers to the question: ‘What are the roles of international schooling in (re)producing the Global Middle-Class in the GBA?’.

Framework

The framework was positional conflict theory (e.g., Brown, 2000, 2022; Kim, 2016). The approach is grounded in neo-Weberian notions of social closure that reject ideas of an open and fair contest within education. We move the analysis beyond the confines of the nation to consider the potential for competition on a global scale to join a privileged Global Middle-Class who are separate from national class structures. We apply Brown’s (2000) conceptualisation of three types of exclusion and inclusion – ‘Market’, Membership’, ‘Meritocracy’ – to investigate how local middle-class families mobilise resources to ‘get ahead’ in the race for class advantage through international schooling. Specifically, we examine if and how international schooling may create new forms of advantage for local students in terms of (re)producing a Global Middle-Class, especially in comparison to their peers in the local education system.

First, ‘Market’ rule is based on the price mechanism regulating the demand and restricting supply, including the cost of attending an international school (e.g., school fees). Second, the ‘Membership’ rule highlights group membership, demarcating eligibility based on socially-ascribed attributes. We consider how the international school experience may cultivate particular identities aligned with the Global Middle-Class (e.g., cosmopolitan worldviews, English proficiency, global networks) that are distinct from other local students. Third, the ‘Meritocracy’ rule is based on individual achievement. We explore how international schooling may present advantages to students in developing abilities and credentials, especially for elite higher education as a crucial entry point into the Global Middle-Class. Overall, we apply Brown’s (2000) positional conflict theory to illuminate the implications of expanding international schooling for class (re)production and social stratification in the GBA’s expanding international schooling hub.

The distribution of educational authority between families and the state is a fundamental, and fundamentally contentious, topic of modern education. According to theorists, whether parents have a natural right to determine the scope and nature of their children’s education, and the extent to which states are justified to limit this right in the interest of either children or society, is one of the core normative dilemmas of democratic education (Barry 2001; Gutmann 1999).

Historically, opinions were split along partisan lines (Ansell & Lindvall 2021). Challenging the educational authority of parents (and churches) was an integral element of liberals’ quest for more equal and democratic societies. The resistance to this program, in turn, was fundamental in shaping the mobilisation of the modern conservative movement. The conflict over educational authority therefore constitutes a foundational moment that shaped both the emergence modern party systems (Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Kalyvas 1996) and regional variation in the institutionalisation of education systems.

The relevance, and partisan nature, of the debate over educational authority in the period leading to the establishment of modern welfare states are undisputed. The same cannot be said for the more recent decades, which have been characterised first by the expansion (1960s-1990s) and then by the retrenchment of welfare states (1990s-…). Some educational sociologists describe this as a period in which global norms and a-political approaches to education erased partisan and regional variations in educational views (Plank & Boyd 1994; Meyer, Kamens, Benavot 1991). Similarly, some political scientists argue that, especially since the 1980s, an inter-partisan consensus has emerged on the need to expand formalised (i.e, state-regulated) education (Jakobi 2011).

A second set of studies contests these findings. Several authors highlight that some of the most controversial debates of post-WWII education have revolved around educational authority, with issues such as the support (or opposition) to vouchers, religious schooling, or choice increasingly being integrated into dominant ideological programs (Apple 2006; Gingrich 2011). Others contend that the support for expanding formalised education is not as inter-partisan as it might seem at first sight. While left-wing parties are more positive towards increasing provision and regulation of compulsory education, the right’s focus on higher and further education largely targets adults, thus protecting family authority over children (Ansell 2010) – with some regional variation (Busemeyer 2015).

The first view suggests that, after 1945, the conflict over educational authority has essentially lost its relevance and partisan nature, whereas for the second, educational authority continues to constitute a contested dimension of educational politics and discourse. So far, however, we lacked the empirical data to discriminate between these two views and therefore to systematically answer questions such as: is the family vs state dimension still a salient issue of the contemporary political discourse over education? If it is, can we observe varying partisan-ideological and/or regional approaches to educational authority, or have these given way to an inter-partisan “wide-ranging societal support of education” (Jakobi 2011, 190)?

Our paper draws on a novel dataset to systematically investigate how parties, as the main representatives of contemporary political-ideological movements, have positioned themselves in the family vs state debate over educational authority since 1960 in 20 Western democracies (including 16 European democracies).

It has become a truism to even mention it: the COVID 19 pandemic altered every single aspect of our lives globally – our work and leisure time, our rights and duties, our family lives, even our intimate relationships were impacted. One of the most noticeable perturbations has been the closing down of schools and the confinement of families inside their homes. A great many parents, those with young children most evidently, were suddenly assigned the task of organizing and supporting learning activities for their progeniture, while sometimes simultaneously working from home themselves. Unprepared, burdened with the new role forced onto them or disturbed by the virtual presence of teachers in their living room, many soon longed for the reopening of schools.

A small group chose instead to continue homeschooling their children even after the end of their confinements, thus contributing to raising the numbers of homeschoolers in many countries of the world. Though drastic in some cases, the increase resulting from the pandemic merely accelerated a pre-existing, more profound and earlier trend. Beginning in the 1970s in the USA and eventually arising in most industrialized countries of the world, the homeschooling movement has been growing and extending its scope ever since its first appearance.

In an attempt to better understand the sociological dynamics underpinning this increasingly global phenomenon, we examine them through the lenses of systems theory. We first discusses the turn to modernity, paying specific attention to the emergence of the modern family. We then reflect on complications arising from the functional differentiation of society and emphasize two potentially problematic dynamics – reductive and expansive – typical of modernity. Next, we examine how such dynamics play out in the specific case of the relationship between the family and school education. We then explore whether and why schooling may be perceived as a risk, and homeschooling as a solution, by some families.

For several decades, efforts to transform the grammar of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) have proved to be little fruitful, producing at best marginal transformations (Mehta & Datnow, 2020). Today, however, we can observe in many countries that the omnipresent grammar of schooling is at the core of major debates regarding the future of education (Mehta & Datnow, 2020). Two tendencies can explain the rise of attempts to alter the conventional grammar of schooling. First, in the current context characterized by health, economic, ecological and social crises, concerns about our future and future generations have given rise to new educational imaginaries focused on the common good (Mehta, 2021; Taylor, 2017). They disrupt the taken-for-granted grammar of schooling through their particular philosophy, organization, governance structures, curriculum, pedagogy or type of students. Secondly, this tendency is also the result of new institutional pathways at the crossroads of the school institution and social movements, leading to a re-imagining of learning spaces and purposes (Taylor, 2017). As a result, the boundaries of organizations­—i.e., what should or shouldn’t be incorporated—are increasingly permeable to issues that go beyond them. Normative references and routines are no longer self-evident, and new partnerships are being created between organizations in order to assume the diversification of their missions (Devos, 2020). One of the most pressing contemporary challenges facing humanity is the preservation of the natural environment and the mitigation of anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s ecosystems. Hence, individual actors and organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of incorporating environmental concerns into their operations and decision-making (Dunlap & Brulle, 2015). As such, a new level of responsibility is required of educators whose job it is to prepare children to meet these profound challenges (Taylor, 2017).

In this paper presentation, we will analyze the emerging reality of “outdoor schools” as an attempt to reconfigure the grammar of schooling. Outdoor schools propose an education “outside the walls” by practicing a nature-based pedagogy that aims to rethink the place of humans within ecosystems (Wagnon & Martel, 2022). However, outdoor schools are emerging and still quite marginal, diversified initiatives. Indeed, environmental issues aren’t self-evident within schools, just as there is no consensus on the best way to educate about the environment. Traditionally external to the school institution, these issues are today imported and shaped by social movements that make the ecological transition a driver for changes in society, including institutionalized fields such as the school field.

In order to understand the institutionalization of alternative educational models, and in particular the outdoor schools, we make use of an integrated conceptual framework, combining theories of new institutionalism and the sociology of social movements. This interdisciplinarity is necessary to understand and characterize “interstitial” spaces (Furnari, 2014; Zietsma et al., 2017) where environmentalist activism meets school institution, and whose cognitions and logics are constructed by a group of central actors (school actors) and a group of very heterogeneous actors who are also embedded in other fields (e.g., companies, associations, science, etc.). Moreover, an approach that more strongly integrates social movements into the dynamics of institutional change is needed to better understand when and how 1) fields are constituted around multiple and competing logics; and 2) multiple logics and contradictions “fuel” field-level change and the creation of new pathways (Briscoe & Gupta, 2016).

The surge of Swedish independent school has been enormous through the past 30 years as a consequence of educational marketization. While the majority of these schools have been run by smaller firms and foundations, the ownership pattern is rapidly changing as large conglomerates expand in every sector of the educational market. This expansion is supported by the directors of the education industry, i.e., board members centrally embedded in the heartland of political and financial decision-making (Larsson 2021). These directors link public and private institutions in a web of ties, function as “brokers of information” (Buch-Hansen & Larsen 2021) and central to corporate governance. As such, they represent the systematic potency of organizational control, providing insight, guidance and opportunities for investments.

This paper aims to examine corporate governance within Swedish independent school firms and foundations in the three years following the 2018 political proposal to limit
corporate profit-making in the education sector. We use untapped data set, combining an analysis of interlocking directorates in all educational firms and foundations and voluntary disclosure in annual reports. Our research questions are:

- What kind of board interlocks emerge in the network?

- How are boards of educational firms and foundations embedded in society?

- How does the behaviors of the largest 5 firms change as an effect of internal and external challenges?

We know little about corporate governance within Swedish education. Network entanglements of Swedish educational actors within global policy chains have been mapped (Rönnberg 2017) and also corporate strategies of independent school firms (e.g., Rönnberg et al. 2021; Ideland & Serder 2022). Edlund and Sahlin (2021), analyze the embeddedness of boards in Swedish higher education organizations. They display ties to organizations in public, private and civil society over time and their finding is that external board members have increased. The increasing number of board members from financial institutions as well as direct ties with external organizations, is not only seen as adjustment to corporate behavior – but also to policies mandating interaction with other societal institutions. Internationally, corporate governance and corporatization has been analyzed as part of understanding marketization in education and higher education. Pusser, Slaughter and Thomas (2006) untangle the difference between private and public universities in the US, concerning inter-sectoral variations of board interlocks. The cohesion of boards shows “institutional behavior” as boards work as “sources of information and legitimacy for institutional policymaking” (748). They claim that private institutions are far more embedded and connected to financial institutions and elite actors than public institutions. This provides advantages when prospecting future investment and navigating uncertainty. Eaton (2022) discusses the composition and embeddedness of US University boards. He argues that the density of high-profiled financiers and the ties with financial institutions reflect economic advantage of elite universities, as these convert endowments into educational and economic profits. Studies of US charter schools indicate that the density of board members originating from financial institution and the absence of educational professionals’ signals marketization advocacy rather than educational quality (Sparks, 2021).

Following Fligstein (2001, 170 ff.), we argue that corporate governance could be seen as the struggle of “managing interdependence”. That is to say, controlling “internal and external environments” as “smoothly and predictably” as possible “[t]o ensure continued growth and profitability” (Ibid.). This relates to what Mizruchi (1996) and others call “behavior of firms”. We approach corporate governance empirically, combining the study of interlocking directorates and voluntary disclosure within annual reports. This approach provides a structural analysis of educational firms and foundations, including hierarchies and variations in embeddedness, behavior and ways of exerting control.

Faced with increasingly fierce competition, Chinese middle-class parents have mobilized multiple capitals to help their children to achieve academic success and transmit their social advantage (Fong, 2004, 2011; Zhang, 2020; Soong, 2022). Interestingly, during the past decade, some Chinese middle parents began to opt for alternative education instead of sending their children to mainstream schools (Wang, 2022; Wu, 2019; Xu and Spruyt, 2022). The emergence of different types of alternative education among Chinese middle-class parents challenges our understanding of the middle class and education in China in several ways. First, with the existence of high-stakes exams, mainstream schools, especially some elite public schools, are the most experienced in training and disciplining students to prepare for the educational market. As such, choosing different types of alternative schools also does not seem to be a safe strategy for middle-class parents to guarantee their children’s success in the educational competition. Furthermore, with the authoritarian educational governance in China, all schools are under close supervision of the government (Wang and Chan, 2015). Since most of the alternative education in China is still at an ambiguous legal status, these schools also face ongoing risks for survival (Xu and Spruyt, 2022). When we take these elements together, it raises the question that why Chinese middle-class parents opt for alternative education for children.

According to the classical social reproduction theories, middle-class parents are able to mobilize multiple forms of capital to help their children to achieve academic success (Bourdieu, 1998; Lareau, 2011). It concerns here an indirect, school-mediated, transmission of the status, which also means that for the individuals involved in the game, this social reproduction is not a guaranteed destiny (Bourdieu, 1998), so parents have to always make wise choices and invest intensively in their children so as to raise their children’s chances of educational success. Following this logic, the educational practice that seems to fall out of this schema is usually attributed to a deviation or error (Bourdieu, 1998). This reasoning, however, has been criticized and some scholars argue that Bourdieu’s argument is insufficient to account for “the intricacy, deviation, and differing degrees and directions of mobility” (Atkinson, 2012). To explain the alternative choices in the educational field, three threads in the current literature studies can be identified. First, some researchers turned to the diverse dimensions of the social reproduction process (Sayer, 205; Reay, 2011; Lan, 2014). The second thread of studies attributes some deviant educational practices such as the choice for alternative education to specific fractions within the middle-class (Bernstein, 2003; Aarseth, 2018; Uboldi, 2020). Thirdly, some scholars step out of the social reproduction framework and attribute the diverse social and educational trajectories to habitus changes as a result of social transformation and increasing individual reflectivity (Archer, 2007; Yang, 2014). Overall, the above studies provided different perspectives to understand unexpected (alternative) choices and trajectories within the educational field. Thus, the three strands of research also provided us with possible theoretical frameworks to understand middle-class parents’ alternative educational choices in China.

In the current study, we formulated our research questions as follows: (1) how do these Chinese middle-class parents account for their alternative educational choice? (2) how do these parents’ educational perspectives differ from/resemble the mainstream educational logic in China? (3) what are the possible structural and individual reasons for their alternative education practice? By focusing on middle-class parents choosing alternative education, we aim to unravel the logic behind the seemingly deviant educational trajectory and explore how the phenomenon relates to social reproduction theories. By doing this, we also want to further examine the applicability of Bourdieu’s theories in the Chinese context.

For understanding the ways in which elite school students actively cultivate and maintain privilege as a component of their identity, this study relies on theoretical and empirical reports that suggest examining privilege as identity (Howard et al., 2014). Identity has been considered in terms of the descriptions by which individuals define themselves and offer accounts of themselves (MacLure, 1993). In line with post-structural approaches (Clarke, 2009) this definition of identity includes the personal, the social, and the political. This perspective does not underestimate the importance of privilege as an advantage that groups of people have over another, but emphasizes the connection between privilege and identity or privilege as a specific identity (Howard, 2010; Howard et al., 2014). The study examines two key questions: (1) How do high school students define and experience their identity? (2) Do these identities contribute to the production and maintenance of privilege, and if so, how? To resolve these questions, twenty high school students in elite schools in Israel, were interviewed.

Belonging to an elite school, which is often perceived as a privilege and marker of distinction, has been depicted, as a crucial influence on students' learning experience and identity (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009; Howard, 2008). Belonging to an elite school involves self-comprehension, which includes ways of knowing and acting in the world, and working in coordination with the set of justifications and legitimacies for students’ life advantages (Howard et al., 2014; Khan, 2011). In this context Khan argued that "Privilege is not something you are born with, it is something you develop and cultivate" (Khan, 2011, p. 15).

Several Studies have revealed that students in elite schools think in terms of traits, abilities, skills, and personal qualities (Howard, 2010; Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009). Elite schools provide a wealth of resources and opportunities, such as unique curricula and access to prestigious colleges and universities, giving their students an advantage over students in other schools (Prosser, 2020). These educational experiences enable students to sustain academic success and predict a future of many opportunities for success (Demerath, 2009). These successes have been described by teachers and principals as an expression of meritocratic logic that is common in many elite educational arenas (Khan, 2011). Elite school students have reported that they deserve privileged status because of being intelligent and committed to the morals of challenging work and strict academic excellence (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009). Sense of Entitlement has been found to be fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of elite identities (Lareau, 2002). Researchers have described micro-interactive cultural processes associated with the development of a sense of entitlement (Calarco, 2011; Lareau & Weininger, 2003). Gaztambide-Fernandez and colleagues (2013) proposed that the sense of entitlement of students in elite schools is expressed through three components: belonging, alienation, and agency. Demonstrating entitlement was found involves cultivating a sense of ease that means meeting the expectations of the "best" effortlessly and while exhibiting a sense of control, ease, and naturalness. Self-comprehension that helps students internalize their identity and maintain their privileged status is also formed through the drawing of boundaries in relation to "others" who do not belong. students un elite school treated students belonging to the low SES and their families as lazy, indifferent to education, and making poor decisions as explanations for gaps in educational achievement (Maxwell & Aggleton, 2010). The actions of elite school students in relation to issues of social justice are based on this organizing principle of self-identity and the identity of the other. researchers described that the social work of elite students did not undermine the existing situation or strive to change the existing social reality (Howard & Kenway, 2015).

After decades without major structural changes in Luxembourg's school system, it was in 2009 that extensive school reforms were introduced, which intend to reduce educational inequalities. A variety of further reforms since 2013, under the slogan 'Different schools suited to different pupils' (MENJE, 2020), aimed at diversifying the educational landscape as a direct response to the increasingly heterogeneous student body – with more than 60% of students speaking a language other than Luxembourgish at home (Eurydice, 2022). As the public education system has a trilingual nature (MENJE, 2020; n.d.), this diversity accounts for a source of inequality due to the high demanding language requirements.

In this context, the recent development of state-funded Accredited European Schools (AES) that follow the European curriculum instead of the Luxembourgish curriculum is noteworthy. Like the ‘original’ model of the European schools established for children of European Union institutions’ staff in 1953 – with its first site in Luxembourg – the AES, which are open to local children, offer different language sections from which students can choose the language of instruction.

AES were established based on the suggestions of the European Parliament and the ‘open up’ initiative starting in 2009 (ibid.). They are required to meet the pedagogical requirements of the European curriculum. Each Member State is responsible for the administration and funding. AES are also characterized by integrating skills such as critical thinking that are clearly identified within primary education syllabi (Lombardi et al., 2021). Thus, the program is also of interest regarding the need for 21 century skills.

The development of a European education system in parallel to the traditional school system in Luxembourg raises many social, political, and educational questions. An evaluation study that analyses the genesis and ethos, and functioning of the entire European school system, states that “European schooling is a particular, exportable, and replicable type of education” (Leaton Gray et al., 2018). However, under which patterns of reasoning such a school system is imported as an addition to a decades-old, persistent, stratified school system is one of the research questions.

One can argue that global models of education are not simply implemented on a national level but are transformed and adapted to national and local circumstances. Robertson (1994) calls this the “glocalisation of social problems”. With regards to education this means that there must be a group of people or an institution that on the one hand absorbs international ideas and on the other hand translates and changes them to make them usable for the national education context. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, long before the globalization era of the 1990s, global networks were very influential in Luxembourg, and knowledge producers like social scientists and politicians served as agents to translate international ideas into national policies. However, national traditions remained strong. Teachers, politicians, and researchers served as agents of change, transforming international ideas to make them acceptable for the national context. Ideas from a trans-/international context (like the European Schools) were accepted and adopted at a local level.

The study aims to understand the genesis and outcomes of the implementation of an additional curriculum in public schooling in Luxembourg by asking:

• What patterns of legitimation accompany the emerging parallel school system, and what hopes, fears, and myths underlie these narratives?
• Which student groups benefit from the AES? How do different student groups in traditional schools versus AES perform in terms of educational achievement and well-being?

To understand the legitimization patterns and the ascribed role of AES in public and political discourses, social constructivism (Hacking, 1999) is used as the European public curriculum is understood as practices, material, and emotions (Parker, 2011).

Higher Education is increasingly seen to be a problem space where governing rationales with contradictory logics clash partly due to the history of modern nation building and partly to emerging state languages that might cause novel forms of authorial power; a situation that creates paradoxes for those who work or study in the sector (Dillabough 2022; Coman and Volintiru 2021)).To identify what causes democratic deficit at the micro level of the polity and how they can be mitigated under the recurrent wave of the current crisis UNESCO has called for a new social contract in education whereby learning for democracy can be reimagined or retooled (UNESCO. 2021). Within this framework, this action research aims to address the question of how education can contribute to “resilient recovery” and shift the axis of politics through the interplay of political actors, institutions, and communities to produce regenerative practices which de-polarize political and social relations. The paper focuses on the potential role universities can have in promoting resilience through pedagogical practices which involve their publics in learning ‘for democracy’.

The specificity of territorial needs in terms of professionalisation constitutes a challenge for vocational and continuing training throughout Europe. The specificities of the territories are indeed more than ever a determining factor for the organisation and deployment of training actions in the context of societal changes leading to transformations in the relationship to training. In particular, the implementation of training is now aimed 'less at guaranteeing prerogatives dictated by national guidelines and defending margins of manoeuvre and local autonomy' than at 'accompanying transitions and the capacity of territories to adapt to major ecological, economic and digital changes' in these contexts and for different sectors of activity (Lebreton, 2013; Besson and Brouillard, 2018; Landel and Vigné, 2021; Chaze et alii., 2021).

Although the adaptive challenge posed by territorial characteristics has long been understood by a number of structures (public and private, secondary and higher education) in charge of vocational training, agricultural training in sparsely populated areas being a notable example (Guerrier, 2014), the fact remains that the production of scientific results likely to specifically guide the training engineering approach is not available when the question arises of training modalities adapted to remote areas, where actors are faced with organisational constraints limiting their ability to reach regional agglomerations for training. This global problem is particularly sensitive in the field of health training (Dywili et al., 2012; Rourke, 2010) and the challenges are nothing less than exacerbated by the increasing use of digital tools, the increased isolation that this use may imply in terms of training resources in rural or remote communities, and the failure to take into account territorial specificities (Correa & Pavez, 2016; Spiers & Harris, 2015; Townsend et al., 2013).
The lack of academic production is also all the more significant when it comes to training courses that are emerging at the same time, such as medico-technical training to promote home care for people losing their autonomy.

The ACSADOM project was born in this scientific and societal context, with the support of the Occitanie Region, 90% of whose territory is considered rural according to a criterion of population density per spatial unit, and with the objective of improving, through research and development, the adequacy of medical-technical training systems in rural areas. The communication presents the way in which the research team has operationalised a selection of sub-sets within this space. In doing so, the research aims to produce a result, to support training engineering and to contribute to the improvement of knowledge in the face of the questioning raised by the diversity of ways in which the literature tends to construct rurality, a diversity which, by the same token, refers to different ways of questioning its heterogeneity (Blanc 1997).

Long periods of policy stability are rare in education. The intensification of external pressures over educational systems that we have witnessed in the last two decades has changed the focus and the rhythm, but also the very nature of educational reform, which currently mainly gears around the goal of strengthening the effectiveness, performance and competitiveness of educational systems. Beyond inputs, current reforms are guided by the definition of learning and other performance goals, and outcomes-based management approaches seem to enjoy bipartisan support in the sector of education. Despite equity and innovation tend to be part of reform intentions as well, they are always articulated with, subordinated to and assessed against performance standards.

Regarding this trend, school autonomy and accountability have become two central policy principles in the contemporary educational reforms we are describing. We label this reform approach as school autonomy with accountability (SAWA), given its emphasis on simultaneously promoting school-based management among public schools and strengthening outcomes-based accountability relations between schools and educational authorities. Issues of centralization, power and control in school decisions are at the core of SAWA as a model of educational governance. To a great extent, school actors have increasing capacity to decide on school management and pedagogy, as far as these decisions are taken to address centrally-defined performance outcomes, and feed a course of continuous school improvement. Within the SAWA model, schools are conceived as autonomous managerial units that enter into contractual relationships with public authorities and are encouraged to engage in performance data-use, (self-)assessment, innovation and improvement virtuous cycles (Grek et al 2022). Despite their piecemeal approach, SAWA reforms have great transformatory potential. They can alter schools’ ethos and organizational routines, change the interactions and decision-making capacity of key educational actors, and modify the main objectives and practices of teaching work.

However, and paradoxically, countries are adopting SAWA policies despite only weak evidence on their benefits. Empirical research in this area reaches very different and even contradictory conclusions. There is a body of literature that reports the positive effects of SAWA policies (especially in student learning outcomes) that clashes with another current that points to negative results (especially in relation to educational inequalities and segregation) and numerous adverse effects. Some of these impact studies conclude that the difficulty of reaching more conclusive and generalizable results is related to the context-dependent nature of SAWA interventions.

The main purpose of the symposium is to examine the enactment of SAWA instruments and their regulatory effects on school actors’ behaviors and their practices. The panel will combine single-case studies with comparative papers that will address enactment’s similarities and differences in different countries, allowing for a better understanding of the role of regulatory factors in mediating enactment processes and their effects.

The cases covered include countries and regions with different administrative traditions and educational arrangements on school autonomy, teachers’ regulations and accountability: The Netherlands, Spain (Catalonia), Italy, Norway, England and Chile. The papers presented in this symposium will allow for a better understanding of the mechanisms and circumstances that explain variegated effects in schools. Thus, this session will shed light on the implementation of recent education reforms across diverse contexts by paying attention to different components of the global education reform agenda -i.e., performance-based accountability, school autonomy, curricular standards, educational innovation- in local contexts. Furthermore, the papers included in the panel will provide insights on the role of local education markets, and sense-making processes together with an account of the administrative designs of the cases studied, which also mold the policy mandates in its implementation phases, bringing to the surface tensions and dilemmas (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017).

Often, contemporary educational reforms are not structural in nature, but rather follow a piecemeal approach, advancing through the adoption of new policy instruments. Such instruments are data-intensive, they set standards of appropriate behavior and best practice among teachers, school principals and school providers, and they are tied to incentives and sanctions. Schools, conceived as autonomous managerial units, often enter contractual relationships with public authorities and are encouraged to engage in continual data-use, assessment and improvement cycles (Authors, 2021). Despite their piecemeal approach, contemporary reforms have a great transformatory potential (Author et al., 2019). They can alter schools’ ethos and core organizational practices, the interactions and decision-making capacity of key educational actors, and change organizational routines, and modify main objectives and practices of teaching work. The use of such instruments is often enforced by regulatory power, e.g. when routines and procedures embedded in quality assurance are regulated. Thus, governance instruments connected to routines and procedures can gain importance and develop a regulatory status themselves even if they only represent means that aim to fulfil quality assurance. In this paper, we analyse how policy instruments structure and regulate school practices enable combinations of performance-based, contractual and legal accountabilities. We apply a political sociology of policy instruments which implies analyzing the logics of instrument choice, as well as tracing the development of policy instruments. We pay particular attention to how policy instruments incentivize the generation of new constituencies, which are comprised of actors “oriented towards developing, maintaining and expanding a specific instrumental model of governing” (Simons & Voß, 2018. p. 31). The analysis draws on data from empirical studies on datafication in education and the enactment of accountability policy in various educational settings, such as Chile, England, the Netherlands, Spain, and Norway. Based on existing case studies, the use of policy instruments in schools are re-analysed and compared, and thus providing a rich basis for generating new knowledge and discussing implications for theories of education governance. The preliminary analysis shows that accountability systems have become central in the governance of multiple public sectors and domains but are becoming increasingly sophisticated and adaptable to a complex and fluid world. In education, most of accountability systems assemble different policy instruments such as large-scale assessments, targets, data infrastructures and contracts between public administrations and schools as well as between actors within the schools such as teachers and students, and regulated routines and procedures.

Authors (2019) Authors (2021) Lascoumes, P., & Le Gales, P. (2007). Introduction: Understanding public policy through its instruments—from the nature of instruments to the sociology of public policy instrumentation. Governance, 20(1), 1–21. Simons, A., & Voß, J.-P. (2018). The concept of instrument constituencies: Accounting for dynamics and practices of knowing governance. Policy and Society, 37(1), 14–35.

Over the last two decades, schools are, nearly worldwide, increasingly expected to use various data sources to change and improve education. As a result, discussions about what data is and how and for what it can be used animate education debates in many countries. Sources such as student performance data, are at the core of school autonomy with accountability regimes that have developed to steer growingly fragmented, complex and multi-layered education systems (Verger & Skedsmo, 2021). Most of the research on the use of student performance data comes from the United States, which has a longer and stronger tradition of output-oriented school governing linked to high-stakes accountability. This research has also influenced how we talk about and understand the use of student outcomes in Europe and Norway (Prøitz et al., 2017). With more countries adapting policies and practices of data use, what we understood as data a decade ago, may be too reductionist if compared to what we consider as data today. In addition, digital technology has increased access and ability to combine data on different aspects of education. To understand conceptualisations of data (Coburn and Turner, 2011; Spillane, 2012) and how they are used by school actors in different times and places means enabling informed debates about data use in the education sector. In this paper, we present the results of a mapping review (cf. Grant & Booth, 2009) of international research on data use published during the period of 2000-2022.In the analysis, we concentrate on tracing development trends with respect to data sources and purposes of data use across country contexts. Methodologically, systematic literature searches for peer-reviewed publications were conducted in the Scopus and ERIC databases. After initial searches, a search string was developed and criteria for inclusion/exclusion were formulated. The identified publications were first screened based on title and abstract, then based on full-text versions. In cases of disagreement, the publications were critically examined to reach a joint decision, leading to a refined attainment of decisions and increasing the agreement rate. Preliminary results indicate a geographical spread of research in this area moving from Anglo-Saxon countries, to include continental, Nordic, and Mediterranean European countries, and other parts of the world. Moreover, the analysis shows an expanded understanding of what data is, who can produce it and how it should be viewed by school actors, a more holistic approach to quality indicators, and increased awareness of ethical issues.

Coburn, C. E., & Turner, E. O. (2011). Research on Data Use: A Framework and Analysis. Measurement, 9(4), 173–206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15366367.2011.626729 Grant, M. J., & Booth, A. (2009). A typology of reviews: An analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 26(2), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2009.00848.x Prøitz, T.S., Mausethagen, S. & Skedsmo, G. (2017): Investigative modes in research on data use in education. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 3(1), p. 42-55. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2017.1326280 Spillane, J. P. (2012). Data in practice: Conceptualizing the data-based decision-making phenomena. American Journal of Education, 118(2), 113–141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/663283 Verger, A. & Skedsmo, G. (2021). Enacting accountability in education: exploring new policy contexts and theoretical elaborations. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 33(3), 391-402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-021-09371-x

Performance-based accountability (PBA) policies have become central in the governance of educational systems worldwide. In the field of education, these policies commonly consist of the evaluation of students’ performance through large-scale standardized tests, to which consequences of a different nature are tied (material and symbolic, individual and collective), which are faced by school actors (Verger et al., 2019). The idea behind this policy approach is that being held accountable and facing consequences will generate pressure, which will move actors towards accomplishing the requested performance goals more efficiently (Chiang, 2009). Research on PBA in education has long considered material consequences as generating more pressure, and therefore as having stronger behavioral effects, compared to symbolic ones, i.e., consequences merely associated with the visibility of test results (Au, 2007). Nonetheless, more recently, studies have found that symbolic consequences also have the potential to generate high levels of performative pressure and can trigger similar behavioral responses as material ones (Thiel et al., 2017; Authors, forthcoming). Reputational concerns seem to play a crucial role in explaining this. Research on public accountability in general has recently also highlighted the importance of deepening our understanding of the “reputational basis” of public accountability (Busuioc and Lodge, 2015; 2016). Reputational concerns, however, remain underexplored in the educational literature, in particular in non-marketized contexts. In this study, we conduct a comparative study of the role of reputation in explaining accountability concerns in different policy contexts: Catalonia, Chile and Norway. These three cases differ in terms of the consequences associated with PBA, but also in other aspects (school choice, students´ enrolment and/or teachers´ recruitment policies, school actors´ working conditions, etc.). Our aim is to explore and analyze to what extent, how and why reputation matters for school actors by taking into account the complex interplay between accountability policy settings and other issues related with contextual factors and other educational policies. Our comparative analysis relies primarily on qualitative data based on in-depth interviews with school principals and teachers in all three policy settings. The findings provide key insights in terms of the extent to which, how and why reputational concerns are related to accountability matters. By highlighting both a number of general/universal trends in terms of how reputational concerns are experienced, and by identifying various context-specific mechanisms that influence the extent and impact of reputation concerns in different policy settings, the paper contributes to the existing literature on reputation and accountability.

Au, W. (2007). High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis. Educational Researcher, 36(5), 258–267. Busuioc, E.M., Lodge, M. (2016). The reputational basis of public accountability. Governance, 29(2), 247-263. Busuioc, E.M., Lodge, M. (2017). Reputation and Accountability Relationships: Managing Accountability Expectations through Reputation. Public Administration Review, 77(1), 91-100 Chiang, H. (2009). How accountability pressure on failing schools affects student achievement. Journal of Public Economics, 93, 1045–1057. Espeland, W. N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: how public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40. Thiel, C., Schweizer, S., & Bellmann, J. (2017). Rethinking side effects of accountability in education: insights from a multiple methods study in four German school systems. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(93), 1–32. Verger, A., Parcerisa, L., & Fontdevila, C. (2019). The growth and spread of national assessments and test-based accountabilities: a political sociology of global education reforms. Educational Review, 71(1), 5–30.

Most education systems are trying to combine external and internal school evaluation as well as school autonomy to foster authentic improvement processes (Eurydice, 2015). Through these instruments, schools are expected to improve and adapt to the learning contexts and needs of students. Following these premises, schools are expected to engage in a virtuous circle of improvement, which should benefit all students, particularly the most disadvantaged. Yet, the meaning and goals of improvement remain obscure and its ways of addressing it in schools are also unexplored. The existing evidence suggests that unexpected effects tend to emerge, often resulting in superfluous school changes (Lubienski, 2009), instrumental behaviors (Au, 2007) and increasing competition between schools (Falabella, 2020). Recent reforms in Catalonia (Spain) follow these trends. Improvement and innovation are core elements of the governance system, characterized by being a low-stakes accountability, where internal and external evaluation―through standardized tests and inspections―coexist. The apparatus, based on a continuous improvement process, should lead to reflexivity and change in professional practices. Improvement discourses from the government push towards a student-centered, competence-based teaching, and are associated with pedagogical and organizational change, and the strengthening of school innovation networks. However, structural conditions seem not supportive of such changes (EU Commission, 2018). The goal of the paper is to analyze how improvement materialize in schools, looking at how schools interpret and interact with the policy expectations according to the local context and school results. How do school actors negotiate between the education mandates? What organizational and educational practices does this translate into? What aspects facilitate or hinder the adoption of such practices? What is the role of school context and performative pressure? We embrace a mixed methods approach that combines in-depth semi-structured interviews with teachers (n=25) and principals (n=8) from 8 schools, with descriptive analysis of survey responses. Preliminary findings show that school actors adopt a range of responses to the improvement mandate. Pressure to perform shapes the adoption of improvements strategies in most schools. In some cases, innovation is sustained by schools’ capacity to use autonomy and is mainly associated with project-based planning and pedagogical changes, but in other occasions is related to 'innovation shopping' or to performance-oriented practice (such as intensive test preparation). Finally, we also find resigned schools in socially segregated contexts, renounce to play the innovation game. Professional, organizational, and material factors emerge as enabling conditions to explain these variegated school responses.

Falabella, A. (2020). The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life. Journal of Education Policy, 35(1), 23-45. European Commission, Directorate-General for Education Sport and Culture (2018). Study on supporting school innovation across Europe: final report. Report, European Commission: Publications Office 2018. Lubienski, C. (2009). Do Quasi-markets Foster Innovation in Education? A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. OECD Education Working Papers. Malen, B., Croninger, R., Muncey, D., & Redmond-Jones, D. (2002). Reconstituting schools: “Testing” the “theory of action.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(2), 113–132. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737024002113 Paletta, A., Basyte Ferrari, E., & Alimehmeti, G. (2020). How Principals Use a New Accountability System to Promote Change in Teacher Practices: Evidence From Italy. Educational Administration Quarterly, 56(1), 123–173.

Over the past decades, digital technologies (EdTech) of various kinds – learning management systems, student information systems, business intelligence platforms or adaptive assessments, just to name a few – have become embedded in education governance and practice, many of them increasingly using forms of artificial intelligence (AI). In many countries around the world, these technologies hereby substantially inform government policy, funding decisions, classroom interactions and assessment structures, both in schools and higher education.

While there are indeed growing controversies about the impacts and risks of digital technologies (not only) in education, e.g., using gamified platforms for behavior control, facial recognition for attendance taking, algorithms for school choice allocation, or AI for essay generation and grading (e.g., Andrejevic & Selwyn, 2020; Swist & Gulson, 2022; Manolev et al., 2019), these technologies have remained opaque to both those that use and are impacted by them. Put differently, there are substantial concerns about the capacity of educators, administrators, policy makers, but also, to a growing extent, critical researchers themselves, to understand the presuppositions, the performative dimensions, and also limitations of using complex socio-technical digital technologies in decision-making (EC, 2021). As a consequence, over the past years, there have been growing efforts in the field which seek to specifically address this gap by more substantially integrating practitioners and policy-makers (or the public more generally) into critical technology investigation, empowering them to respond to the problematic impacts of these technologies, as well as motivating them to engage in their future shaping.

This symposium presents selected work from this field of ‘participatory approaches’, or ‘participatory experiments’(Chilvers & Kearnes, 2020), which can broadly be seen to draw on ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that seek to democratise technology (Callon et al., 2009). Such approaches combine both expert and non-expert perspectives to create new ways of looking at and responding to digital technologies. In this symposium, we discuss three fields of application for such participatory approaches:

The first level refers to potentials and challenges when working with individual schools, that is, when seeking to include a whole school community (including the teaching body, leadership, students, and parents) instead of only a few (anyway) interested teachers. Anja Loft-Akhoondi, Sigrid Hartong, Toon Tierens and Mathias Decuypere present insights from a cross-country project on digital school empowerment, which draws on so-called ‘critical co-design approaches’ (Richter & Allert, 2019). The second level refers to the competence framework development, that is, frameworks that bring together the specific and complex knowledge from critical technology research on the one hand, and the practical needs of educators on the other hand. Ina Sander provides insights to a study which aimed at developing a theoretically and empirically grounded framework for critical datafication literacy, adopting a collaborative approach (see also Sander, 2020). The third level covered in this symposium is collective policy making, which is still less commonly discussed in education than in many other policy fields, and refers to the inclusion of both practitioners and researchers (e.g., Laessøe et al., 2013; Floridi et al., 2018). Kalervo Gulson, Marcia McKenzie and Sam Sellar examine the potentials and limitations of collective policy making related to AI in education, both about AI and with AI.

Taken together, the three presentations, which will be rounded up by a critical discussion (Felicitas Macgilchrist), offer a systematic, both conceptually and empirically grounded insight into the complex, challenging, but also highly promising field of participatory approaches to shape a better future of EdTech.

Over the past years, there has been a rising popularity of ‘design-based approaches’ (e.g., Jesson et al., 2015) in the field of digital education research, that is, approaches which seek to develop knowledge together with (rather than for) education practitioners in dealing with data-based technologies. However, not seldomly, such research has been criticized for following a rather instrumentalist understanding in seeking to make learning more efficient through technology usage, resulting in a growing call for ‘more critical, participatory, pedagogically- and long-term-focused approaches in the design and research of educational technology’ (Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022, p.1). Such approaches have increasingly moved from digitization towards digitality, that is, a perspective beyond technical instrumentalism that acknowledges the complex and broader conditions of education affected by the far-reaching developments of digital technologies (Negroponte, 1995; see also Stalder, 2016). While (critical) co-design approaches are undoubtedly highly important in order to empower educational institutions in gaining knowledge, attitudes, values, as well as concrete ideas to engage in digitality, the theoretical assumptions and also inscribed normativities of such co-design processes need to be carefully discussed (Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022). Additionally, even though educational institutions might be eager to engage in participatory work and in ideas of digitality, they frequently face barriers resulting from institutional regulations and formalities (e.g., technology-focused funding schemes, assessment-orientation, temporal restrictions for teacher training, etc.) as well as highly limited resources, the latter being especially true for low SES (socio-economic status) schools (see also Kutscher et al., 2022). Against this background, this paper provides insights into a cross-national research project that seeks to foster digitality among schools (www.smasch.eu) through co-design oriented, participatory approaches. More specifically, we present our work with two low SES elementary schools between 2021 and 2023, which aimed at the careful development of migration- and barrier-sensitive (postdigital) environments. Hereby, the focus of the paper is less on outcomes of this participatory work, and more on the project evolvement itself, that is, how notions of participation, barriers and inclusion (both within the school and between the schools and the project team) have been emerging and transforming during the different stages of the project. Based on our findings, we argue that participatory, (critical) co-design approaches in education – that is, with strong pedagogical intentions – require a high level of both normative self-reflexivity and pragmatism, in order to avoid the risk of actually reproducing educational inequality.

Brandau, N. & Alirezabeigi, S. (2022): Critical and participatory design in between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2156538 Jesson, R., McNaughton, S., & Wilson, A. (2015). Raising literacy levels using digital learning: A design-based approach in New Zealand. Curriculum Journal, 26(2), 198-223. Kutscher, N., Hüttmann, J., Fujii, M. S., Engfer, N. P., & Friedrichs-Liesenkötter, H. (2022). Educational participation of young refugees in the context of digitized settings. Information, Communication & Society, 25(4), 570-586. Negroponte, N. (1995). The digital revolution: Reasons for optimism. The Futurist, 29(6), 68. Spoden, Christian, and Josef Schrader. 2021. “Gestaltungsorientierte Forschung Zu Digitalen Lern- Und Bildungsmedien: Herausforderungen Und Handlungsempfehlungen.” DIE Resultate aus Forschung und Entwicklung. https://www.die-bonn.de/id/41432

Despite the growing influence of data-based technologies on our lives – often described as the ‘datafication’ of society (Hepp et al. 2022) – citizens’ knowledge of how digital and data technologies function and affect their lives has remained limited (Miller et al. 2020; Akman 2022). Yet, studies show that this “major understanding gap” (Doteveryone 2018, p.5) is neither due to a lack of interest, nor to notions of having ‘nothing to hide’. Instead, many people were found to be highly concerned about the use of their data and wish for more control (Kennedy et al. 2021; Ada Lovelace Institute 2022). It is also due to such findings that there have been rising calls for more or better education about data(fication). Scholars have argued that educational responses have emerged as the “most plausible and successful strategy to combat the challenges of datafication” and that critical data literacy can be seen as a prerequisite of legal and tactical responses to challenges of datafication (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green 2020, pp.212, 218). However, despite many new conceptual suggestions for data literacies, both a “more complete theorisation” of critical data literacy as well as practical models for educators have remained largely absent (ibid., p.208, 215). This study offers a fruitful contribution to the field by taking a holistic approach to developing a theoretically and empirically grounded framework for critical datafication literacy, and in doing so through a collaborative approach. More specifically, the study investigated – together with the NGO Privacy International – one of the earliest forms of critically educating about data(fication): online educational resources. The goal was to learn from the experiences of practitioners by analysing existing online critical data literacy resources, conducting expert interviews with creators of such resources and a qualitative survey with educators who apply such resources in their teaching. Knowledge exchange between the researcher and the NGO took place throughout the entire study and the NGO’s decade-long experience in educating about digital technologies informed all methodological decisions. Moreover, the study’s findings as well as the NGO’s practical experiences in educating about datafication were mobilised in a final, collaborative knowledge mobilisation project. The presentation will present the outcome of this collaborative knowledge mobilisation – an online learning resource for educators who are interested in teaching about data(fication) – and provide insights on the interconnection of critical data literacy theory and practice in the study.

Ada Lovelace Institute 2022. Who cares what the public think? London: Ada Lovelace Institute. Available at: https://www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/evidence-review/public-attitudes-data-regulation/. Akman, P. 2022. A Web Of Paradoxes: Empirical Evidence On Online Platform Users And Implications For Competition And Regulation In Digital Markets. Virginia Law & Business Review 16(2), pp. 217-292. Doteveryone 2018. People, Power and Technology: The 2018 Digital Attitudes Report. London: Doteveryone. Available at: https://attitudes.doteveryone.org.uk. Hepp, A., Jarke, J. and Kramp, L. 2022. New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The Ambivalences of Data Power - An Introduction. In: Hepp, A., Jarke, J., and Kramp, L. eds. New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The Ambivalences of Data Power. Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 1–23. Kennedy, H., Steedman, R. and Jones, R. 2021. Approaching public perceptions of datafication through the lens of inequality: a case study in public service media. Information, Communication & Society 24(12), pp. 1745–1761. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1736122. Miller, C., Kitcher, H., Perera, K. and Abiola, A. 2020. People, Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report. London: Doteveryone. Available at: https://doteveryone.org.uk/report/peoplepowertech2020. Pangrazio, L. and Sefton-Green, J. 2020. The social utility of ‘data literacy’. Learning, Media and Technology 45(2), pp. 208–220. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2020.1707223.

In late 2022, ChatGPT rocked the world of education. ChatGPT is a freely available large language model AI system, which can generate writing across genres from a range of user created prompts. In recent months, social and mainstream media has been filled with stories about the ease of using ChatGPT to write convincing essays and other assessment tasks, raising concerns about academic integrity, including plagiarism. Universities and school systems responded, with some accepting its use and others banning it. These responses highlight a policy problem created by all forms of AI that are being introduced into education. That is, the current education policy environment lags behind the roll out of these technologies. Responses to ChatGPT also highlight the wide range of views on the use of AI, yet we have few methods for incorporating broad-based expertise and stakeholder input to create policies that support the productive use of AI while ameliorating potential harms. This paper contributes to current debates about the use AI in education by showing how collective policy making can serve as a method for creating more inclusive and participatory policy making (Emerson et al, 2012; Rickson & McKenzie, 2021) for AI in education. That is, we explore the potential role of participatory processes in (1) decision-making about the uses of AI in education (e.g., guidelines relating to the use of AI technologies to provide an education service) and (2) the uses of AI in education policy making and implementation (i.e., as part of education governance processes). The latter includes using AI to implement education policy (i.e., using automated systems to deliver high stakes tests) and to provide evidence to support policy making (e.g., new insights regarding links between inequality and student outcomes) (Gulson, Sellar & Webb, 2022). The paper outlines current approaches that can be used to enable collective policy making about AI through principled engagement, shared motivation, and capacity for joint action (Emerson et al, 2012). These approaches can include participatory procurement processes for education technology, policy prototyping, and education-specific algorithmic impact assessments (Gulson et al, 2022). These collective policy making methods aim to create ‘meaningful relationships between researchers and the different actors involved in the policy process’ (Rickson & McKenzie, 2021). The paper also explores the dynamics of new forms of collective policy making, which are emerging with the automation of ‘governmental decision-making’ (Paul, 2022) and the collaboration of machine and human policy actors.

Emerson, K., Nabatchi, T. & Balogh, S. (2011). An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22(1), 1-29. Gulson, K. N., Sellar, S. & Webb, P.T. (2022). Algorithms of Education: How Datafication and Artificial Intelligence Shapes Policy. University of Minnesota Press. Paul, R. (2022), Can Critical Policy Studies Outsmart AI? Research Agenda on Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Public Policy. Critical Policy Studies, 16(4), 497-509 Rickinson, M., & McKenzie, M. (2021). The research-policy relationship in environmental and sustainability education. Environmental Education Research, 27(4), 465-479.

The extent to which education systems should select students for particular types of education and/or institutions is a recurrent theme in political debate across many European countries. It has also been an important focus of the sociological literature. Scholars have sought, for example, to assess the impact of selection – at different points in the education system – on social mobility and processes of social reproduction. In this symposium, we showcase four contemporary studies of selection in different parts of Europe (England, Spain, France and Denmark) and across both the school and higher education sectors.

Sociological studies of school-level education have typically indicated that early selection into different ‘tracks’ or types of school can have a negative impact on social mobility, with those from lower income families typically over-represented in lower status forms of schooling, from which progression to higher education and well-paid employment is often more difficult (e.g. Berends, 2015; Wells et al., 1999; West, 2014). Moreover, they have shown that ‘school choice’ policies, often popular with politicians in some European nations, typically advantage the middle classes, who have more cultural, social and economic capital to draw upon when making their decisions (e.g. Bunar, 2010; Butler and Hamnett, 2012). The first two papers in this symposium extend further debates about selection within the school sector. Drawing on evidence from England, the first paper explores whether a school system can ever promote excellence without also promoting elitism. The second examines tracking in the upper secondary sector in Spain, considering the extent to which being selected into either an academic or vocational track impacts on both social inequality and the subjectivities of individual students.

With respect to higher education, extant research has demonstrated that, across Europe, higher education has, historically, excluded many social groups – particularly those from low-income families, without parental experience of higher education, from particular ethnic backgrounds, and who are older than average (e.g. Thomsen, 2023). Moreover, even when such students secure access to higher education, they can often feel ‘out-of-place’ and excluded from practices both within and outside of the classroom (e.g. Gregersen and Nielsen, 2022). Over recent decades, the higher education sectors in many European countries have massified, student populations have become increasingly diverse, and attempts have been made – in some nations at least – to better support applicants from under-represented groups (Harrison, 2019). Nevertheless, there is evidence that entry to highly selective universities has not diversified to the same degree (e.g. Boliver, 2013). Building on this body of work, the third and fourth papers in this symposium consider contemporary evidence about higher education selectivity. The third examines contextualised admission policies that have been put in place to widen participation to a selective French institution. It assesses the efficacy of such initiatives by drawing on the narratives of applicants, as well as those of higher education staff involved in assessing their applications. The final paper draws on data from a selective degree programme in Denmark to examine the ways in which gender interacts with both social class and academic attainment in the formation of social and symbolic boundaries.

This symposium has been organised by the executive editors of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The chair of the executive editors will chair this symposium, and another executive editor will act as discussant. In addition, two of the four presenters are members of the journal’s editorial board.

School systems must provide enough convenient school places for the population. There is no need for the system to provide different kinds of schools and school places for different parts of the population. Yet this is what most developed school systems do. The claim is regularly made by policy-makers that different types of school are more or less effective, or more effective for certain types of pupils – selective grammar schools for the most able, or technical schools for the less able, for example. There is little evidence for these claims (Gorard and Siddiqui 2018, 2019). Diversity of schooling make no clear difference to differential attainment. Selective systems are not more successful with equivalent students. But they do tend to segregate students by background – academic selection also segregates by poverty, faith-based schools segregate by ethnicity, and so on. Such diversity in the type of schools provided in one system is strongly associated with the increased clustering of poorer children within schools, and between economic areas. This kind of clustering, of students with indicators of potential disadvantage, is then linked to further undesirable school outcomes. Exposure to a less varied set of possible friends at school leads to reduced role models for lower attaining pupils, less tolerant wider pupil attitudes, and higher degrees of social reproduction (Gorard et al. 2022). Equivalent student behaviours, interactions and achievements are interpreted differently in different settings as defined by the peer group. Going to school in segregated settings is therefore potentially damaging in a variety of ways – such as lowering aspiration, expectations, and participation for individuals. It reduces national and regional social and ethnic cohesion, and decreases trust in public institutions. Similarly to widening participation to prestigious universities, access to selective schools could be increased for poorer students by reducing the test threshold for entry, or using some form of contextualised admissions (Boliver et al. 2002). But given that there is no overall gain and considerable harm done, it would be simpler and fairer simply to abolish selection at a young age. Of course, schools could still offer bespoke programmes and activities, including gifted and talented, for some sessions in the week. In all-ability schools, the provision does not have to be uniform for all sessions. But these programmes must be robustly evaluated for benefit, and take place in a wider setting wherein students of all types can interact for most of the week.

Boliver, V., Gorard, S. and Siddiqui. N. (2022) Who counts as disadvantaged for the purposes of widening access to higher education?, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43, 3, 349-374, https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.2017852 Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2018) Grammar schools in England: a new analysis of social segregation and academic outcomes, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39, 7, 909-924 Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2019) How trajectories of disadvantage help explain school attainment, SAGE Open, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018825171 Gorard, S., See BH, and Siddiqui, N. (2022) Making schools better for disadvantaged students, Abingdon: Routledge

The expansion of the neoliberal paradigm has brought with it the proliferation of individualistic and meritocratic discourses. In education, this has meant placing on students the full responsibility of their academic trajectories and results, which, in the long term, will explain their social locations (Vieira et al., 2013). As a consequence, the distribution of social positions appears as the natural distribution of abilities, skills, and talents (Furlong, 2009). In this context, educational choices and transitions play a key role in the distribution of social opportunities (Tarabini & Ingram, 2018; Tarabini, 2022). Students are supposed to make free and well-informed choices aligned with their tastes, abilities, and aspirations. Despite this rhetoric, sociological research has demonstrated how students’ choices are deeply embedded in social dynamics and particularly influenced by the structure of capitals and the working of the habitus (Ball et al., 2002). In Spain, transitions to upper secondary education are the first moment when students are separated into different tracks -academic and vocational-, with substantive differences in the supply, the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the future opportunities and prospects. Based on 68 in-depth interviews with first-year students in the academic and vocational upper secondary tracks we will explore their representation on the way tracking contributes to (re)reproduce social inequality. This will allow us to study the embeddedness of educational selectivity and inequality in individuals’ subjectivities (Nylund et al., 2017).

Ball, S., Maguire, M., Macrae, S. (2000). Choice, pathways and transitions post-16: new youth, new economies in the global city. Falmer Press. Furlong, A. (2009). Revisiting transitional metaphors: reproducing social inequalities under the conditions of late modernity. Journal of Education and Work, 22 (5), 343-353. Nylund, M., Rosvall, P., & Ledman, K (2017). The vocational-academic divide in neoliberal upper-secondary curricula: the Swedish case. Journal of Education Policy. 32 (6), 788-808. Tarabini, A. (2022) (Ed). Educational Transitions and Social Justice: Understanding Upper Secondary School Choices in Urban Contexts. Policy Press. Tarabini, A., Ingram, N. (2018). Educational choices, transitions and aspirations in Europe. Systemic, institutional and subjective challenges. Routledge Vieira, M. M., Pappámikail, L. &; Resende, J. (2013). Forced to deal with the future. Uncertainty and risk in vocational choices among Portuguese secondary school students. The Sociological Review, 61 (4), 745-768.

HEIs around the world are introducing contextualised admissions that is selection procedures not only based on grades, exams or general aptitude tests but including the examination of personal data, ‘personal statements’ and, less often, interviews to evaluate non-academic factors (Bastedo 2021). This trend has notably been driven by policy pressures to reduce social and ethnoracial inequalities in access to HE. As a result, much of the research on this topic has explored whether consideration of these data makes admissions fairer (Boliver et al. 2015) and under which conditions (Bastedo et al. 2018; Boliver and Gorard 2020; Mountford-Zimdars and Moore. 2020). The focus of this presentation is different. Considering the increasing level of competition among disadvantaged and diverse applicants to gain access to selective institutions, it focuses on how they use the requested personal writings to ‘stand out from the crowd’ (Jones 2013) of similar students. In addition to exploring differences on the number of interests and activities mentioned and on students’ level of aspiration and HE plans, we consider two types of qualitative differences. We draw on Phil Brown’s (2000) distinction between three idealtypical principles of social organisation (‘membership’, ‘merit’ and ‘market’) to show the degree to which these students tend to present themselves as similar in their cultural interests, activities and aspirations to traditional elite students or to emphasize their scholastic or non-scholastic merit or to put forwards qualities and ‘talents’ rewarded in job markets (Brown and Hesketh 2004; Author 2023). We also focus on the degree of elaboration of these students’ ‘storytelling’ (Polletta et al. 2011) and the extent to which it highlights their disadvantage or diversity to justify benefiting from a compensatory institutional sponsorship (Grodsky 2007). We examine applications to Sciences Po, a selective French HEI that in 2021 introduced contextualized admissions for all candidates including those from disadvantaged ‘partner’ secondary schools who, since 2001, had been admitted through a special procedure called ‘convention education prioritaire’ (CEP). The latter are nevertheless still evaluated by a different jury, compared among themselves only and ranked in separate admission and waiting lists. Our interpretations are based on the analysis of the personal narratives of 100 candidates (20 ‘traditional’ and 80 CEP with equal proportions in each group of admitted and rejected applicants) out of a total number of more than 10 000 applications to Sciences Po’s Bachelor’s program in 2021, as well as of interviews with evaluators and admission officers.

Bastedo M. 2021. Holistic admissions as a global phenomenon. In H. Eggins et al (Eds.), The Next Decade: Challenges for Global Higher Education. Leiden: Brill. Bastedo M. et al. 2018. What are we talking about when we talk about holistic review. Journal of Higher Education 89: 782-805. Boliver V. and Gorard S. 2020. The use of evidence from research on contextualised admissions to widen access to Scottish universities. In Getting evidence into education: evaluating the routes to policy and practice. London: Routledge, pp. 166-177. Boliver V., Gorard S., Siddiqui N. 2015. Will the use of contextual indicators make UK higher education admissions fairer? Education Sciences 5: 306-322. Brown P. 2000, Globalisation of positional competition, Sociology 34 (4): 633-654. Brown P. and Hesketh A. 2004. The Mismanagement of Talent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grodsky E., 2007. Compensatory sponsorship in higher education. American Journal of Sociology, 112 (6): 1662-1712. Jones S. 2014. ‘Ensure that you stand out from the crowd': A corpus-based analysis of personal statements according to applicants' school type. In A. Mountford-Zimdars, D. Sabbagh (eds). Fair Access to Higher Education. Chicago: Chicago UP. Polletta F. et al. 2011. The sociology of storytelling. Annual Review of Sociology 37: 109-130.

International research into stratification in and through higher education (HE) emphasises the interconnections between high selectivity within admission processes and stratification of universities, and how these in turn (re)produce societal elites (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Stevens 2009; Karabel 2005). Studies in Scandinavian contexts, emphasised processes of horizontal stratification, (i.e. differential access to study programmes) despite strong discourses around meritocracy and egalitarian structures (e.g. Börjesson et al. 2016; Munk and Thomsen 2018). This research tends to focus on social class reproduction, demonstrating how academic attainment and parents’ socioeconomic status strongly shape access into programmes. Meanwhile, other studies concentrate on how gender shapes HE, in relation to choice of study (e.g Kriesi 2019), as well as the formation of gendered student identities (e.g. Archer and DeWitt 2015). However, such research often focuses on a particular institution or programme, without situating it within the national field. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between gendered horizontal stratification in a national field of HE and the processes of gendering at the intersubjective level of a programme’s study culture. Firstly, the stratified nature of the Danish field of HE is established, considering gender, academic attainment and socioeconomic background. This is done via Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) using register data from Statistics Denmark from 2021 on HE applications. Secondly, the processes of gendering at the highly selective Cognitive Science programme at Aarhus University are examined. The programme is interdisciplinary, ranging across philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and psychology and there is an overrepresentation of women. Drawing on the MCA and, Bourdieu’s (1998) and Lamont and Molnár’s (2002) work on social and symbolic boundaries, I examine how hierarchies between the disciplines are mirrored and maintained, and how this shapes understandings of the ‘ideal (gendered) student’. To do so, I analyse interviews with 10 cognitive science students, and observations from the first day of induction week. The study sets out to more fully integrate gender into research on stratification and elite HE. Gender, academic merits and socioeconomic class are shown to intersect in the formation of social and symbolic boundaries both at the structural macro level of the field of HE, but also at the cultural micro level of study programmes. This challenges the perception that the academic achievement of women, their growing participation in HE and their presence in elite study programmes (i.e. the feminization thesis), have eliminated gendered barriers in HE.

Archer, L., and J. DeWitt. 2015. “Science Aspirations and Gender Identity; Lessons from the ASPIRES Project.” In Understanding Student Participation and Choice in Science and Technology Education, ed. Dillon, Henriksen, and Ryder, Springer. Börjesson, M., Donald B., T. Dalberg, and I. Lidegran. 2016. “Elite Education in Sweden: A Contradiction in Terms?” In Elite Education: International Perspectives on the Education of Elites and the Shaping of Education Systems, ed. Maxwell and Aggleton. Routledge Bourdieu, P. 1998. State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Standford: Univ. Press. Bourdieu, P., and J.C. Passeron. 1979. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. University of Chicago Press. Karabel, J. 2005. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Houghton Mifflin. Kriesi, I. 2019. “Gender Segregation in Education.” In Research Handbook on the Sociology of Education, ed. Becker, Elgar Publishing. Lamont, M., and V. Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 Munk, M.D., and J.P. Thomsen. 2018. “Horizontal Stratification in Access to Danish University Programmes.” Acta Sociologica 61(1) Stevens, M.L. 2009. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press.

The individualisation of financial risk in higher education through tuition fees and the discourse around employability outcomes has often been coupled with a demarcation of low and high value courses. The benefits of a highly educated workforce to broader society, or a more equitable share of university opportunities are rarely considered. However, research has shown that students do not necessarily subscribe to a marketised view of higher education (Budd, 2017; Tomlinson, 2017), with Muddiman (2018) pointing to a more active and less instrumental ‘being’ mode of learning.

Drawing on Burawoy’s assertion (2014) that sociology is infused with moral purpose, this paper explores how sociology undergraduate and postgraduate students understand and discuss their disciplinary choice and future in three national contexts of Norway, England and Hungary. It also uses the notion of Bernsteinian powerful knowledge to understand the self within the discipline, and the intent to disrupt broader classed, racialized and gendered inequalities (McLean et al. 2013).

While Japanese education has been extensively studied, it has hardly been seen as a theoretical and methodological resource in the field of comparative and international education. This paper explores the possibility and the limitation of using Japanese philosophy as an epistemic resource for educational research, aiming to multiply the ways of knowledge production.

In the field of educational research in general, and comparative and international education in particular, Japan has been extensively studied in terms of prominent reference societies in Asia (see Santos and Centeno 2021), a point of comparison (e.g. Takeda and Williams 2008), and a comparative link in global educational governance (e.g. Willis and Rappleye 2011). In the large body of English-language literature, Japan has been often studied as a research object rather than a theoretical and methodological resource. To put differently, Japanese education has been a data source or an ‘empirical other’ where ‘theories are applied, revised or domesticated’ rather than an ‘epistemic other’ that provides a source of new theoretical insights and develops alternative theories (Takayama 2019: 147, 153). Recently, scholars have explored the possibility of using Japan as an epistemic resource in conducting comparative education (e.g. Hayashi 2021; Takayama 2020: Rappleye 2020), aiming to multiply the epistemological resource to study and highlight the more proliferated worldview in education.

Resonating with the current scholarly attempt to move beyond the Western horizon in knowledge production, I experiment the use of Japanese philosophical thoughts, namely, Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889–1960) comparative phenomenological study in comparative educational research. I autoethnographically explore how my epistemic mindset has changed during my PhD journey through a slow conversation with Watsuji’s study on milieu, relationality and ontological inquiry into human beings. The aim of my study is to multiply epistemological resources for educational research by reflecting and telling how I was destabilised by Japanese philosophy in (un)learning the Japanese education system.

In 2018, I initiated my doctoral studies on policy transfer, taking Japan as an empirical case to examine how the European Framework (CEFR) was adapted to foreign language education reforms in the non-European context. In the initial dissertation writing stage, I was rather interested in analysing why and how Japan failed in adapting the European ideas – or more precisely, plurilingualism and multilingualism – to the reform of foreign language education. In retrospect, I uncritically accepted the ‘failure’ discourse on foreign language education in Japan which circulates in academic and social discourses (see Aspinall, 2012; Terasawa 2015). I also understood internationalisation and globalisation as a synonym of Europeanisation/modernisation and assumed it beneficial and crucial to cultivate the Japanese people’s global competency.

Reading literatures on post- and decolonial thinking, I became uncomfortable with my initial research questions which were formed on the Eurocentric understanding of modernisation and civilization. And I have eventually come to think that as encouraging the value of progress, improvement, and global competency (Silova, 2019), I had been taking the liberty to position the Japanese system as ‘developing’ and the European and global education policy as ‘advanced’.

Literature on post- and decolonialism in education motivated me to examine the Japanese case of policy transfer from a different perspective, drawing upon a different epistemological base. Searching alternative concepts and analytical tools to study the Japanese education system, I started reading Japanese philosophy including Watsuji, and accordingly, I became more interested in exploring the inquiry of power in relation to policy transfer. In the autoethnographic study which I present in ECER 2023, I tell my story of transformation through dialogues with Watsuji.

Our proposed symposium explores diversity as not a transcendental concept but something produced as a domain of knowledge articulated through educational practice and research, in the theories and daily language of education and its goals. Put differently, educational research is seen as part of producing and naturalizing particular kinds of knowledge and facts about the world and people. This process of valuation and naturalization, in Europe and beyond, entails that values, politics of knowledge, and the creation of diversities become invisible in this process (Latour, 1987, 1993).

Drawing on science and technology studies (Dussauge, Helgesson & Lee, 2015; Latour, 1987, Popkewitz, 2020; Sundström Sjödin, 2019), the papers of this symposium approach different layers of practices that explore how science becomes mode of reasoning about diversity and differences in children, teaching, and society. In particular we use literacy and Literature reading as examples for understanding how truths and facts about an educational content are created, valued and naturalized through its systems of knowledge. How do truths and facts about educational phenomena, content, teaching, and learning – once they are stabilized and naturalized – order, classify and differentiate people? (Latour, 1993; Hamilton, 2012).

The symposium specifically contributes with knowledge on how both the infrastructure and the social inscriptions of ‘numbers’ act as truth telling practices that generate notions of differences as diversity, and how the valuations generated in the sciences circulate in science based public and political debate (Popkewitz, 2022; Sundström Sjödin, 2019; see also Edwards, Ivanič, & Mannon, 2009; Graff, 2010; Hamilton, Maddox & Addey, 2015). Our shared focus is on how these numbers become entangled in processes of value-making about people and things, and how science operates phenomenally as a policy and pedagogical knowledge about what is “reasonable” (and not reasoned) people in the ordering of society. The valuations are in no way innocent. Productive in the governing of modernity, its modes of giving intelligibility to the self and others, and in how social commitments are enacted concretely in the discourses for political reforms and interventions with a direct impact on society and individuals (Popkewitz, 2022).

The symposium includes four papers commented by a discussant from the field. The papers take two different intersecting avenues. One is papers that historicize the notion of “truth” through examining how science performs agentially; that is, examining how the infrastructures of science generate patterns of recognition and expectations of experience by which “truth” is constituted through the rules and standards applied to the objects of reflection and action (Popkewitz, 2020). The other avenue highlight research–school–society interractions that enact certain values on educational content such as literacy and literature reading, which entails specific educational effects and diversities.

Reading is a political phenomenon of modernity. While reading as an idea of literacy in the European Middle Ages was to learn the gospel of God, literacy in the modern societies and school is for making of the earthly “self “ and the good life. The paper takes this historical interest to explore how science generates a reading about the “literate” self as a kind of person through the architectures and cartographies of research. The calculations of research are viewed as formed through grids of practices that generate principles for reading: how judgments are made, conclusions drawn, rectification proposed, and the fields of existence made manageable and predictable. The focus will be on research in teaching and teacher education in the making of the “literate” professional teacher . The empirical objects are different clusters of identified in biometric maps drawn from web-of sciences peer journals concerned with teacher education research between 2010-2022 (Lindblad et al, 2021). Three of seven cluster identifies are examined: - instructional strategies, student teachers, and pre-service teacher education research. The most cited papers in each of the clusters is textually analyzed. Methodologically, the paper explores the principles in research generated through: (1) the distinctions and classification of the kinds of people given as the “literate” professional; such as articulated as benchmarks and standards of professional competence; (2) the affect inscribed in the notions of the literate; that is, the images and narratives of the utopic kinds of people that research is to activate as having “the good life” as a teacher; (3) the comparative reason of research that inscribes and distributes differences of who is literate and is outside of its spaces of normalcy; and (4) the phantasmagrams; that is, how the infrastructues of science are, analogous to the 17th magic lanterns, projections of creative illusions that act as real and affective sites for acting in teacher education (Popkewitz, in press). The discussion is to understand science as an actor and agential in modernity; science as a reading of the self, literacy as a technology of the self and the other that paradoxically excludes and abjects in thrusts to include in contemporary research. The calculative reasoning of the research is political; performing as spaces of action through the mapping of people that occurs in policy making, educational reform and their practical knowledge.

Lindblad, S., Nelhans, S., Pettersson, P., Popkewitz, T., Samuelsson, K., Wärvik,, G-B., (2021) "On Knowledge Organization and Recognition of Research in and on Teacher Education: Views from above." In ECER conference, Geneva, online September 6-10, 2021. 2021. Popkewitz, T. (in press). Infrastructures and Phantasmagrams of Inclusions that Exclude: International Student Assessments. International Journal of Inclusive Education.

This study explores the ways in which literature reading is motivated as something valuable in the public discourse. We specifically focus on the research-society-school interactions that enable specific dominant interpretations of reading, readers and literature, while shadowing others. Historically, reading can be understood as an activity that holds society together as well as carrying important cultural knowledge, and reading has often been motivated by humanistic ideas and ideals of understanding various dimensions of being human. Rationales for literature reading are hence often attached to issues such as the development of common cultural and historical references (see for example; Graff, 2010; Smidt, 2016; Sundström Sjödin, 2019) and the acquisition of democratic skills (Langer, 2011; Nussbaum, 2003). In our study we investigate how societal institutions, public and media discourse, local practitioners and researchers reason and make arguments about the necessity of reading literature. In this we acknowledge a possible epistemic shift in the reasons and arguments put forward - from reading motivated by humanistic ideals into emphasizing the importance of reading with the use of ‘numbers’ aggregated through various measurements and quantifications. One example of such ‘numbers’ that circulate about reading are the amounts of words that seventeen-year-olds who read a lot are said to have (50 000 words), compared to those seventeen-year-olds who do not read a lot (15 000 words). These kinds of statements are rarely questioned and they disseminate into the societal discourse of reading, but where is this kind of truth-making and knowledge created, what kind of empirical data is used for such statements and based on what legitimacy do they act? In the study we have analysed material from sites in what we call “the Swedish reading-industrial complex” (Sundström Sjödin & Persson, forthcoming). We focus on actors that specifically and publicly define themselves as promoters of reading, both from sites with traditionally governing functions and from commercial and cultural actors. Although we draw on Swedish cases, and as such they are as most situated and sensible within its own context, it resonates well with a global tendency of quantification and measurement in education. Drawing on Science- and Technology Studies, we present actors that take part in the legitimation and valuation of reading, and we show in what ways and with help of what actors reading becomes naturalized as a societal problem that school is expected to solve.

Graff, H. J. (2010). The literacy myth at thirty. Journal of Social History, 43(3), 635–661. Langer, J. A. (2011). Envisioning literature: Literary understanding and literature instruction. New York: Teachers College Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Cultivating humanity: A classical defence of reform in liberal education. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Smidt, J. (2016). Framtidas skole - med litteraturen på mørkeloftet? In S. Gimnes (Ed.), Ad libitum. Festskrift til Gunnar Foss (pp. 243–259). Oslo: Novus forlag. Sundström Sjödin, Elin. (2019). Creating the valuable: Reading as a matter of health and successful parenthood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1), 46–60. Sundström Sjödin, Elin. (2019). Where is the Critical in Literacy? Tracing performances of reading, readers and non-readers in educational practice, Örebro Studies in Education, 59, Örebro Studies in Educational Science with an emphasis on Didactics, 18.

The background of this paper is the interplay between science and society in the larger field of educational research on the educational agora (cf. Nowotny et. al., 2001). The specific aim of the paper is to map the field of reading and literacy research in order to find how science ‘act’ in creating phenomena as objects of truth (Lindblad, Pettersson and Popkewitz, 2018). The paper starts with a common hypothesis on that the research field under scrutiny previously was aligned to a reasoning on reading as a mean for the formation of the educated citizen into becoming a question of creating productive individuals for the development of economical and societal desires (cf. Tierney & Pearson, 2021). In performing this task, we therefore started out with a question on if we could see this change of values represented as a tradition of ‘Bildung’ transmogrified into the notion of ‘literacy’, and with that, if ‘numbers’, normally used and tabulated on within literacy research are becoming more important than ‘words’, normally used within reading research for making arguments on reading. Another way to state this observation is to ask when quantitively explanations became more important than qualitative explorations within this field of research, and in line with this – who are they addressing and based on what scientific traditions? To investigate this, the paper performs a systematic review for investigating changes, research fronts and geographies as well as different trajectories and scientific traditions over time (1980-2022). The research articles used (n: 750) are articles within a specific scientific journal (Journal of Reading Behaviour, renamed in 1996 as Journal of Literacy Research) that are peer-reviewed, written in English, and presented within the Web of Science. In mapping, coding and analyzing the articles, maps were constructed for investigating the reading and literacy research field over time with its changes, fronts, geographies, trajectories, and traditions. The result of the study shows how reading research and literacy research develops into distinct fields based on different research traditions but also how these traditions ‘speaks’ to the society in different ways; reading research more commonly address other researchers within the same field, while literacy research to a larger extent address actors outside of the scientific field, such as policymakers, stakeholders, and politicians.

Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. (2018). Education By the Numbers and the Making of Society : The Expertise of International Assessments. New York: Routledge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press. Tierney, R. J. & Pearson, P. D. (2021). A History of Literacy Education: Waves of Research and Practice. Teachers College Press.

Reading in France is an important issue for education politics. It sustains the Republican imaginary and truth related to the 3Rs which were at the foundation of the French common school. It gives rise to conservative visions and a Republican revivalism, as shown by the recent return of dictation in primary education proclaimed by the Minister himself. It serves also an emancipation project inherited from the Enlightenment that gives great importance to the transmission of basic knowledge to shape citizenship under an influent National Curriculum Council. In education policy, reading is at the core of national assessments, taking the PISA survey as a reference, and a component of the national basic skills framework (Normand, 2022). It corresponds to an epistemic governance (Alasuutari, Qadir, 2014) institutionalized in a National Scientific Council and a Ministerial knowledge center promoting evidence-based knowledge and truth in national conferences, as well as producing reports and designing best-practice guides for primary education teachers. The communication proposes to analyze this production of knowledge and truth on reading that involve different spokespersons and spaces of interest close to the Ministry of Education. These policy assemblages (Gorur,2011) legitimize and shape literacy standards at the crossroad of evidence-based education, experimental economics, neurosciences and metrics. By following this chain of translation, from the ministry to primary schools, it is possible to show how some statements and inscriptions serve an experimental policy that increasingly considers the classroom as a laboratory (Normand, 2016). In doing so, it assumes teaching as a clinic practice, diagnosing student skills and differentiating them according to their psychological pathologies and cognitive disabilities. Then, national assessments as metrics on student learning are used to stabilize classifications and benchmarks by the ministry, to blame and put pressure on the teaching force, and to legitimize an epistemic authority. These national metrics justify other standardized interventions and comparative reasoning from other data borrowed from meta-analyses, systematic review literature and international assessments (Popkewitz, 2022).

Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014). Epistemic governance: An approach to the politics of policy-making. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 67-84. Gorur, R. (2011). Policy as assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611-622. Normand R. (2016) "‘What works?’: From health to education, the shaping of the European policy of evidence." In Trimmer K. (eds) Political pressures on educational and social research. London, Routledge, 2016. 25-40. Normand, R. (2022). PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities: A sociological perspective illustrating the French case. In Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance (pp. 48-69). London, Routledge. Popkewitz, T. (2022). Comparative reasoning, fabrication, and international education assessments: Desires about nations, society, and populations. International Journal of Educational Research, 1120. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2022.101940

This project focuses on student influencers on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the Little Red Book. It is widely known that students inhabit digital spaces. However, there is a limited understanding of how some students become influencers and the role that social media plays in shaping their student experiences and identity development and wider cultural reference points. It is known that students’ experience of higher education and their identities are increasingly digitally situated (Dyer 2020; Timmis et al. 2016). This is especially as current university-age students entering university will have been raised in a time of open access to internet, personal computers and rapid information delivery and consumption. This means that the ways in which students establish and enact their student experience and identity, as well as how they experience, negotiate and understand university as a social, academic and physical space is mediated through myriad of possibilities presented by technology.

Furthermore, from the start of their studies to the end of three years, university students go through various transitions in their identity formation. This paper takes a spatio-temporal approach to identity, emphasising the interaction between studenthood, youth culture and digital platforms. Such emphasis is vital when social media is constantly evolving with new ways to express oneself and where the student population has become younger, resulting in overlapping pressures between studenthood and youth transitions. The WHO has also announced the mental health crisis among students (Harvard Medical School n.d.), making the interaction between social media on student wellbeing pressing to explore.

This paper is centred around the following research questions:

• What are the competing narratives (produced through discourses, visuals) that construct student identities in digital spaces?

• How do these narratives differ across student lifecycle (e.g. transitioning in/out of university), background (e.g. gender, social class, ethnicity) and digital platforms used?

This project starts with the premise that identities are formed intersubjectively, through relations with others, and in our interaction with the material and virtual world. To fully appreciate the role of digital spaces in forming student identities, it is important to understand the pressures that students as young people experience in today’s society. The shift from knowledge society to digital society has been producing uncertain futures for young people with new challenges for identity construction (Bynner & Heinz 2021). For example, one is expected to sell their unwanted belongings on eBay, develop a start-up or become an Uber driver rather than rely on state support in times of need. Students are also treated as consumers, purchasing education as any other commodity (Brooks & Abrahams 2018; Raaper 2021). It is thus unsurprising that social media promotes an image of the self as an enterprise. We also argue that the psychological pressures students experience have been amplified by Covid-19, raising attention to youth unemployment and mental health disorders (Hellemans et al. 2020; Partington 2020) and creating concerns for social media addiction (Tarrant 2021).

We conceptualise social media as virtual spaces of collective knowledge/content production, and as contexts where identities are shaped relationally out of interaction with other users and the platforms themselves (Chen 2016; Braidotti 2013). Digital participatory cultures produce ‘new forms of power, status and control’ (Jenkins et al. 2016, 12) but are also themselves co-produced by the ‘imagined community’ of users (cf. Anderson 1991; Miller 2011). Part of our ambition will then be to investigate the ways students forge assemblages with electronic technologies and how they interact with other users and politico-economic structures that shape the formation of their identities.

Student voice is, of course, fundamental – who could argue against democracy? It is important that we do not return to a time where students were seen and not heard and positioned as subordinate figures but at the same time, do teachers suffer because of this democracy? Although student voice policies can represent positive developments, it would be naïve to be overly celebratory of pro-voice policies. I share the view of Amanda Keddie that despite presumptions that student voice is a positive notion we must view it critically (Keddie 2015). Critical researchers have an obligation to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions (Holloway 2021) and this paper, as elsewhere (Skerritt, O’Hara, and Brown 2021), is intended to build on critical scholarship that highlights some unsavoury aspects of student voice (see for example Page 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Charteris and Smardon 2019a, 2019b; Black and Mayes 2020; Skerritt 2020).

Influenced by sociologists such as Carol Vincent and Stephen Ball, I feel it is important that my position in relation to this research is made explicit (Vincent and Ball 2006) and I will ‘place’ myself in relation to it (Vincent and Ball 2007) by acknowledging who I am, my background, and my connection to it. Research comes with, for example, stories and histories that shape our work (McDermott 2020) and I expound my own in an autoethnographic account. What is coined the ‘I(nterest) behind this research’ means that student voice is not taken at face value or as an unquestionably positive initiative but something that can, even unintentionally, be more sinister. There is no claim to objectivity here, and it is subjectivity that comes to the fore – major emphasis is placed on my own experiences shaping my outlook.

Conspiracy theories pose a major threat to democracy and cohesion in society because they undermine trust in state institutions and jeopardize the credibility of scientific knowledge (Mancosu et al. 2017). Social crises such as the war in Ukraine serve as a particular breeding ground for conspiracy theories (Lamberty et al. 2022). Among young people in particular, it is therefore a key task of the education system to counteract the spread of conspiracy theories. In order to undertake targeted educational policy measures, it is important to identify factors that promote the spread of such narratives among adolescents. However, studies to date have primarily focused on adults (for a review, see Douglas et al. 2019). This study addresses this research gap with the following research question: What social and political factors promote the emergence of conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine among youth?

Primarily social psychological research on factors conducive to conspiracy theories distinguishes between psychological and socio-political factors. The first group includes psychological disorders such as negative attitudes toward authority, low self-esteem, and even schizotypal personality disorders. The second group describes demographic factors and personal values and attitudes, making it particularly relevant to educational science. The literature on determinants of conspiracy theories among adults shows that especially people who feel socially excluded, have low income, or belong to marginalized groups (e.g., Muslims) are prone to conspiracy theories (Uenal 2016; Uscinski & Parent 2014; Wilson & Rose 2013). In addition, supporters of far-right parties as well as individuals with a strong national identity and a great distrust in political institutions show high approval ratings for conspiracy theories (Edelson et al. 2017; Imhoff & Bruder 2014). Finally, some authors emphasize the importance of historical context (Nattrass 2013). Based on these findings on adults, we derive the following hypotheses on the prevalence of conspiracy theories on the Ukraine war among adolescents:

H1: Adolescents who feel socially marginalized are more inclined to conspiracy theories.

H2: Adolescents with perceived low income are more inclined to conspiracy theories.

H3: Muslim youth are more likely to engage in conspiracy theories.

H4: Adolescents who are supporters of the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (alternative for Germany) (H4a) and adolescents with a pronounced national identity (H4b) are more likely to engage in conspiracy theories.

H5: The greater the distrust in political institutions among young people, the greater the belief in conspiracy theories.

H6: East German youths are more inclined to conspiracy theories than West German youths.

The aim of the article is to use the example of the current war in Europe to show what dangers current political developments can pose for the development and deepening of conspiracy beliefs among young people and thus for democracy. In view of the political developments in many European countries, the results are not only relevant for Germany and can be transferred in parts to other national contexts.

Through the ratification of the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), diversity, inclusion, and inclusivity have been elevated to one of education’s central ideals (cf. Neuhaus & Vogt, 2022); as a central agent of the educational system as well as contemporary societies (cf. Powell, 2015), schools have tremendously been addressed by the inclusivity and diversity agenda.

Simultaneously, inclusion and inclusivity have oftentimes been considered fuzzy concepts as they appear to be - depending on the organizational, geographical, cultural, and temporal context - ambiguous and thereby underdefined. However, inclusion and diversity can be considered part of a larger development or framework which aligns itself with central normative demands articulated, primarily, by Western present-day societies (cf. Reckwitz, 2019). As such, inclusion is the latest cipher for a struggle that has prior been negotiated under the label of freedom, democracy, or participation (cf. Boger et al., 2021, p. 9).

Following this reasoning, the specific realization of a given school setting, which - due to normative pressure - represents a central part of modern-day (Western) society, will always fall short of the ideal. This is particularly true for the ideal of diversity and inclusivity. Yet, failure cannot be confessed in public as this would shatter the trust not just in the educational system but, by association, also in central societal claims. Taking this as a starting point, this panel wants to address the issue by presenting a philosophical concept labeled as ‘Verdeckung’ (engl. cloaking, masking, concealment) (cf. Vogt & Neuhaus, 2021) which can be read as a response to the aforementioned tensions. The dynamic(s) of ‘Verdeckung’ will be outlined by three studies as presented in the symposium - the first will outline core ideas related to ‘Verdeckung’ and connect these to further theories, the second presentation investigates (with a historical focus) the unarticulated processes in the identification of deviant children, and the third talk focuses on current-day occurrences in the field of physical education. After having approximated a tentative concept of ‘Verdeckung’ and having enriched it with tentative research outputs, it will be attempted to synchronize these dynamics with ethnographic research results (presentation 4) which have described similar dynamics in classroom interactions as “masking” (cf. Ludwig, 2022) or “cloaking” (Schäffer-Trencsényi, 2023, forthcoming). The papers will look at this topic from an international comparative perspective with material and data from Germany, the UK, Italy, and Canada. By approaching the tensions stemming from inclusivity’s demands and the limitation of the actual world as well as the suspected responses from different perspectives and with diverging national backgrounds, this panel hopes to develop an innovative figure of thought which could be transferred to further settings, dynamics, occurrences, and disciplines as - and this is the key thesis of the panel – ‘Verdeckung’ is a constitutive mechanism of a plethora of processes. Yet, before being made fruitful for different discourses, ‘Verdeckung’ needs to be further specified regarding its workings, employed mechanisms, aims, and actors. This panel hopes to provide such a first mapping (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1974) of ‘Verdeckung’ as well as related concepts. This makes ‘Verdeckung’ highly compatible with ECER’s general theme as processes of ‘Verdeckung’ might thus undermine and prevent a targeted and overarching reflection on diversity in the context of inclusion and hinder its implementation.

This paper develops fundamental theoretical and empirical perspectives on the ‘Verdeckung’ concept concerning Diversity in Education and Educational Research. It prepares an insight which deepens ‘Verdeckung’ regarding diversity-sensitive didactic and diagnostic contexts. Particularly concerning the interplay between education, educational research, diversity, and modern-day (Western) society. Following the results of a research initiative (Bender et al., 2023a), a contingency-theoretical perspective on contemporary democratic societies is developed as a first step. Meaning that modern democratic societies cannot and do not want to claim any final justication for themselves that legitimizes certain structures of social orders (Flügel-Martinsen, 2021). Instead, it is assumed that these orders are fundamentally contingent. Therefore, especially in the context of education and diversity, contemporary democratic societies are confronted with extensive demands for participation and inclusion. For example, the UN CRPD stands for the assumption that social orders, as well as educational practices and systems, are fundamentally changeable and diversity-sensitive and thus adaptable to individual subjects and population groups (Meseth, 2021). Assuming contingency of democratic contemporary societies, it must also be presupposed that democratic modern-day societies have also emerged from hegemonic conflicts (Laclau & Mouffe, 2020; Nonhoff, 2019). These orders that invoke contingency, equality, and participation are expected to be power-based. Consequently, specific relations of inclusion and exclusion accompany them. Structurally, the experience of inclusion is thus always linked to the experience of exclusion (Bender et al., 2023b). Even if ‘Verdeckung’ is not unique to democratic modern-day societies, it seems to play a central role there. When these societies have to legitimize themselves as orders of egalitarianism and multiplicity (Ranciere, 2002) despite inescapable inclusions and exclusions, ‘Verdeckung’ is added as a mechanism for dealing with the resulting tensions. Separate methodological considerations are necessary to understand ‘Verdeckungen’ as a component of Education. After all, the methods established in educational research predominantly aim at the orders' reconstruction itself. It means looking for the outcome of hegemonic clashes and the inclusions and exclusions they produce. In contrast, research on ‘Verdeckung’ in the diversity and inclusion context seems to focus primarily on the relationship between concrete orders of meaning and their promises of inclusion or the relationship between being and ought (Weber, 1988). With this view, it is possible to trace appearances of ‘Verdeckung’ in different contexts. Ultimately, this will be exemplified by an example of cultural education - an educational practice designed to be particularly diversity-sensitive (Kolleck et al., 2022; Keuchel, 2019).

Bender, S., Flügel-Martinsen, O. & Vogt, M. (2023a). Verdeckung. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Einschlüs-se und Ausschlüsse. transcript. Bender, S., Flügel-Martinsen, O. & Vogt, M. (2023b). Über die Verdeckung. Zur Analyse von Ein- und Aus-schlussverhältnissen unter Bedingungen gesellschaftlicher Kontingenz. Flügel-Martinsen, O. (2021). Kritik der Gegenwart - Politische Theorie als kritische Zeitdiagnose. transcript. Keuchel, S. (2019). Kulturelle Bildung und gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt – Kitt oder Korrektiv? KULTUREL-LE BILDUNG ONLINE. Kolleck, N., Büdel, M. & Nolting, J. (Eds.) (2022). Forschung zu kultureller Bildung in ländlichen Räumen. Me-thoden, Theorien und erste Befunde. Beltz Verlag. Laclau, E., Mouffe, C., Hintz, M., Vorwallner, G., & Passagen-Verlag. (2020). Hegemonie und radikale Demo-kratie: Zur Dekonstruktion des Marxismus. Beltz Verlag. Meseth, W. (2021). Inklusion und Normativität – Anmerkungen zu einigen Reflexionsproblemen erzie-hungswissenschaftlicher (Inklusions-)Forschung. In B. Fritzsche, A. Köpfer, M. Wagener-Willi, A. Böhmer, H. Nitschmann, C. Leitzmann & F. Weitkämper (Eds.), Inklusionsforschung zwischen Normativität und Em-pirie. Abgrenzungen und Brückenschläge (pp. 19–36). Barbara Budrich. Nonhoff, M. (2019). Hegemonie. In D. Comtesse, O. Flügel-Martinsen, F. Martinsen & M. Nonhoff (Eds.), Radikale Demokratietheorie. Ein Handbuch (pp. 542–552). Suhrkamp. Ranciere, J. (2002). Das Unvernehmen. Politik und Philosophie. (Neuauflage.). Suhrkamp. Weber, M. (1904/1988). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (7. ed.). Mohr Siebeck.

Special needs assessment procedures (SNAPs) determine whether a child can regularly be schooled or has to be supported and/or segregated (Sauer et al., 2018). This utterly important decision (cf. Pfahl & Powell, 2016) is made by experts from different fields, mostly from the pedagogical profession, special needs realm, medical area, as well as (in some SNAPs) the psychological domain (cf. Vogt & Neuhaus, 2023). As such, SNAPs can be read as manifestations regarding the definition, understanding, and subsequently value of inclusivity and diversity (Neuhaus & Vogt, 2022). As these procedures are organized and structured by the state, the specific realization of a SNAP is a direct comment on the value of diversity as some forms of diversity are considered acceptable while others require labeling, treatment/support, or supervision (cf. Kottmann et al., 2018). This study focuses on the historical development of SNAPs in different regions. By comparing specific realizations of SNAPs with later versions in the same geography but also by comparing cross-culturally, this study wants to serve two aims: Firstly, it will be attempted to identify national idiosyncrasies and to tie these to larger patterns. Secondly, this study will attempt to identify commonalities among the different kinds of SNAPs. It will be tried to identify a grammar of special needs assessment. This grammar will then be interrogated from a standpoint of 'Verdeckung' to identify mechanisms and workings of SNAPs which contribute to the 'Verdeckung' of incoherencies as well as internal contradictions. To serve these goals, this study works with SNAP forms from different localities, namely from Görlitz (GDR), Frankfurt a.M. (FRG), Canada/Ontario, as well as Milano (Italy). These documents cover the time from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. Further, additional documents, such as the archetypes of specific SNAPs (i.e. Magdeburger Verfahren, 1942, Germany), school administrational guidelines, scientific reports etc. The documents have been analyzed with qualitative methodology, mostly by document analysis (cf. Schmidt, 2017), qualitative content analysis (cf. Mayering, 1994), as well as critical historical as well as reconstructive/contextualizing (Vogt, 2015) approaches. As part of the overall results, this study could identify the mechanism of de- and recontextualization of knowledge as a key driver of interdisciplinary communication but also as a constitutive moment of (complexity) reduction, the latter could be read as an instance of 'Verdeckung' in which disciplinary borders, expert’s insecurity, and incoherencies in the child’s assessment are made invisible.

Kottmann, B., Miller, S. & Zimmer, M. (2018). Significances of diagnostics and assessments in inclusive edu-cation. Zeitschrift für Grundschulforschung, 11, 23–38. Mayring, P. (1994). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse, 14, 159–175. Neuhaus, T. & Vogt, M. (2022). Historical and International-Comparative Perspectives on Special Needs Assessment Procedures–Current Findings and Potentials for Future Research. Reading Inclusion Divergently, 19, 35–48). Emerald Publishing. Pfahl, L. & Powell, J. J.W. (2016). "Ich hoffe sehr, sehr stark, dass meine Kinder mal eine normale Schule be-suchen können". Pädagogische Klassifikationen und ihre Folgen für die (Selbst-) Positionierung von Schü-ler/innen. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 62, 58–74. Sauer, L., Floth, A. & Vogt, M. (2018). Die Normierung des Primarschulkindes im Hilfsschulaufnahmeverfah-ren–Eine historisch-vergleichende Untersuchung von Schülerpersonalbögen aus der BRD und der DDR. Zeitschrift für Grundschulforschung, 11(1), 67–83. Schmidt, W. (2017). Dokumentenanalyse in der Organisationsforschung. In S. Liebig, W. Matiaske & S. Ro-senbohm (Eds.), Handbuch Empirische Organisationsforschung (pp. 443–466). Springer Reference Wirt-schaft. Vogt, M. & Neuhaus, T. (2023). Der Wandel sonderpädagogischer Wissensordnungen in Überprüfungsver-fahren – Ein Vergleich zwischen DDR und BRD (1959 – 1975). Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 69(2),186–199. Vogt, M. (2015). Professionswissen über Unterstufenschüler in der DDR: Untersuchung der Lehrerzeitschrift" Die Unterstufe" im Zeitraum 1954 bis 1964.Klinkhardt.

The normative pedagogical demand for equal participation formulated as a result of the implementation of the CRPD (2009) proves to be a significant challenge for physical education. Because physical education focuses on the body, physical-motor differences in performance and opportunities for participation become directly visible. Especially in competitive games, when a team’s success depends on the ability of all team members, there is a danger that higher-performing students make the different physical conditions of the students an issue (cf. Hovdal et al., 2021). In phases of P.E. in which the principle of competition dominates, the claim to equal participation and acceptance of all students is endangered. Different studies from Germany show the excluding character of P.E. (Braksiek, 2022). Furthermore, from the student's perspective, it is not enough to be part of a team; they need to feel that they are legitimate participants who contribute to the game (Spencer-Cavaliere & Watkinson, 2010). P.E. teachers can use various didactic-methodical measures to enable students with different (physical) conditions to participate in competitive activities on an equal footing (Tiemann, 2013). This paper argues that such measures represent efforts to unify the opposing claims of inclusion and competition, in which moments of ‘Verdeckung’ are not infrequently revealed (Kastrup & Fast, 2022). This paper asks whether and how P.E. teachers communicate their didactic decisions to students or leave them uncommented upon, thereby (unconsciously) creating ‘Verdeckung’. This question is examined using the communication model of Cachay et al. (2022) because it can demonstrate that events involving ‘Verdeckung’ can be located in the communication process between P.E. teachers and students and in the course of enabling equal participation. Communicative practices and events involving ‘Verdeckung’ are analyzed by combining video and audio recordings with interviews based on them Stimulated Recall (Messmer, 2015). By matching the problem-centered interviews (Witzel, 2000) with the P.E. teacher and the students, any events involving ‘Verdeckung’ can be identified, described, and analyzed. The first analysis results of recordings of inclusive physical education with students aged 12-15 years and the conducted interviews show that P.E. teachers use forms of ‘Verdeckung’ intentional-ly, e.g., to either mask performance weaknesses in students or to use ‘Verdeckung’ strategies to enable joint participation. It also shows that ‘Verdeckung’ can have (unintended) consequences. For example, it can increase stigmatization.

Braksiek, M., Meier, C. & Gröben, B. (2022). „Das ist doch nich‘ schwer!?“ Inklusion im Sportunterricht. In M. Braksiek, K. Golus, B. Gröben, M. Heinrich, P. Schildhauer, & L. Streblow (Eds.), Schulische Inklusion als Phänomen – Phänomene schulischer Inklusion (pp. 19–41). Springer VS. Cachay, K., Borggrefe, C. & Hofmann, A. (2022). Integration in und durch den organisierten Sport. Kommuni-kations- und netzwerktheoretische Überlegungen. Sport und Gesellschaft. Hovdal, D. O. G., Haugen, T., Larsen, I. B. & Johansen, B. T. (2021). Students’ experiences and learning of social inclusion in learn activities in physical education. European Physical Education Review, 27(4), 889–907. Kastrup, V. & Fast, N. (2022). Verdeckung – Eine Strategie zur Verwirklichung inklusiver Ansprüche im Sportun-terricht? In J. Schwier & M. Seyda (Eds.), Bewegung, Spiel und Sport im Kindesalter (pp. 169–179). transcript. Messmer, R. (2015). Stimulated Recall as a Focused Approach to Action and Thought Processes of Teachers. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 16(1). Spencer-Cavaliere, N. & Watkinson, J. (2010). Inclusion understood from the perspectives of children with disability. Adapted physical activity quarterly, 27(4), 275–93. Tiemann, H. (2013). Inklusiver Sportunterricht. Ansätze und Modelle. Sportpädagogik, 37(6), 47–50. Witzel, A. (2000). The Problem-centered Interview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 1(1).

Drawing on ethnographic research observations from Germany and the UK, this paper takes up the theoretical concept of 'Verdeckung' (or ‘cloaking’) to explore the way exclusionary practices get hidden in officially inclusive schools. While the implementation of an inclusive school system has undisputedly become a global norm (cf. Biermann & Powell, 2014), findings from both countries show that educational inequalities have not disappeared even in inclusive and diversity-oriented teaching (cf. Fritzsche, 2014). The findings irritate the 'loud' claims of inclusive and diversity-oriented approaches and point out the need to consider inclusion in relation to everyday schooling practices. Existing research suggests that marginalizing practices and asymmetric power relations continue to exist in ‘inclusive’ classroom settings (cf. Fritzsche, 2018; Raey, 2017; Rißler, 2015; Youdell, 2012). There has been a lack of research to date. Therefore, we offer a transnational perspective on this phenomenon and explore what this gap between official inclusion discourses and exclusionary classroom practice means for how schools might engage differently with these issues. Our findings are inspired by an emerging debate on the masking of potentially exclusionary effects in inclusive settings (e.g. Ludwig, 2022). Data from a secondary school in Germany focuses on a music lesson where teachers and students get to know each other. In the process, markers of origin that relate to both teacher and students are addressed by the students but their observations are systematically prevented by the teacher who does not want to discuss this. We compare this with data from a UK primary school which records a conversation between students about which countries they come from which is stopped by a teacher who insists there is no time for the discussion. We understand the teachers’ practices in our data as exclusionary in the sense that they foreclose and delegitimize students’ articulation and exploration of difference. Simultaneously, these exclusionary practices are masked by reference to the rules of the school. In other words, the social order in school seems to be more important than the recognition of diversity. We argue that student practices that should be celebrated according to the official inclusion and diversity policies of schools are in fact excluded and undermined. We also raise the question of whether official inclusion policies and practices can, in fact, make addressing issues of diversity and difference as they arise in classrooms, more difficult.

Biermann, J./Powell, J.J.W. (2014): Institutionelle Dimensionen inklusiver Schulbildung - Herausfor-derungen der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention für Deutschland, Island und Schweden im Ver-gleich. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 14 (7), 679-700. Rißler, G. (2015): (Un-)Ordnung und Umordnung – Theoretische und empirische Suchbewegungen zum Verhältnis von Differenz(en), Materialität(en) und Raum. In: Budde, J./Blasse, N./Bossen, A./Rißler, G. (eds.): Heterogenitätsforschung. Empirische und theoretische Perspektiven. Wein-heim: Beltz Juventa, 211-238. Fritzsche, B. (2014): Inklusion als Exklusion. Differenzproduktionen im Rahmen des schulischen Anerkennungsgeschehens. In: Tervooren, A./Engel, N./Göhlich, M./ Miethe, I./Reh, S. (eds.): Ethnographie und Differenz in pädagogischen Feldern. Internationale Entwicklungen erzie-hungswissenschaftlicher Forschung. Bielefeld: transcript, 329-345. Fritzsche, B. (2018): “Doing equality” als “doing inclusion”. Kulturvergleichende Rekonstruktionen schulischer Normen der Anerkennung. In: Behrmann, L./Eckert, F./ Gefken, A./Berger, P. A. (eds.): ‚Doing Inequality‘. Prozesse sozialer Ungleichheit im Blick qualitativer Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 61-82. Ludwig, L. (2022): „Genau, er ist Deko“ – De-Thematisierungs- und Maskierungspraktiken im Unter-richt eines inklusiven Gymnasiums. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 827-845. Reay, D. (2017): Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes. Bristol: Policy Press. Youdell, D. (2012): ‘Fabricating 'Pacific Islander': Pedagogies of Expropriation, Return and Resistance and Other Lessons from a 'Multicultural Day'’. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 15(2), 141–55.