Conference Agenda

This workshop is designed for researchers and practitioners willing to learn about computer assisted qualitative and mixed-methods research. This hands-on session will comprise the presentation of the main options available for coding and extracting meaning from data. Workshop participants will grant the possibility of testing different options, ranging from the more traditional approaches to automation using AI tools.

The workshop will consist of a quick guided practice tour through the opening stages of a research data project. Main features and tasks will be practiced in detail, including importing data, creating and applying codes, performing searches and queries, writing memos, retrieving selected coded data segments, analyzing data, and reporting results using some of the special features available (e.g. summaries, QTT, reports, AI Assist). The main goal of this workshop is to provide an overview of the data analysis process relying on MAXQDA assistance, a state-of-the-art software package for qualitative and mixed-methods research. Upon completing the session, workshop participants will identify important options available for tackling their qualitative research data.

Participants will bring their own laptops. A temporary license of MAXQDA will be provided to participants attending the session.

Requirements - IMPORTANT:

• You are only eligible to attend this workshop if you are registered as participant of ECER.
• Please do NOT register for more than one workshop. We will cancel double bookings.
• Should you not be able to attend, please cancel your reservation, as there might be a waiting list.

In this workshop, we will address the question of what makes educational research fit within a didactics tradition. Is it about the theories, the methods or the topics we choose to investigate?

The organizer of the workshop, network 27, provides a Europe wide meeting place for educational researchers from the diverse traditions in relation to didactics and teaching and learning. Central questions from a didactical perspective are what is taught in the different school subjects, what is learned and also why, and how. A key ambition for the network is bringing together research on teaching and learning in different subject-specific domains, and discussing the generic aspects of teaching and learning on an empirical basis. In this workshop, we will ask and hopefully answer the big question of what makes educational research fit within the label of didactics. We will discuss how different research questions and different methods add to the field of didactics and how we can frame our research so that the didactical value is clear. In a collective effort, we will also consider the biggest challenges for the somewhat ”messy”, yet more and more interesting, diverse and fascinating field of didactics in an educationally turbulent Europe for the years to come.

The lecture will discuss commonality and diversification in education through a focus on the story of Europeanisation. This is a story which, much like most accounts narrating this old continent, is one of difference and commonness. On the one hand, diversity is integral to Europe, since most of what we identify with a degree of ‘Europeanness’ has always connected diverse people and ideas through movement and mobility; education, either in its institutionalised or in its less formal guises, has always been central in the distinctiveness -but also unity- of cultures, practices and peoples around Europe.

Paradoxically however, the national education ‘system’ has always been relatively closed off; seen as a bounded entity in itself, it became one of the last fortresses of the nation-state against the predicament of ‘global’ dictates and shifts. Despite borrowings and ‘policy lessons’, education has been one of the main pillars of building the ‘national’, as national stereotyping would continually separate and therefore define ‘us’ from ‘them’. At the same time, and despite its inherent fluidity and changeable nature, another relatively bounded entity was being formed: that is ‘Europe’, which in disciplinary and broader political terms emerged as an entity defined predominantly as the effort to unite the European peoples -despite divergences- in the common European ‘project’.

Therefore, this lecture will explore the dialectical relationship between commonality and difference and show its potential for a more productive analysis of the governing of Europe. It will suggest that this antithetical relationship -which has to a large extent shaped European history- between a desire to move, travel, get to know one another, yet routinely, almost subconsciously finding those ‘others’ as different and hence unintelligible, is a particularly productive setting in which to investigate the production of Europe itself. The lecture will aim to move beyond top-down accounts of the transfer of European education policy from Brussels to the national, towards more attention to the interaction of diversity and commonness as key Europeanising forces.

In Sweden, students’ choice of upper-secondary school is fiercely competitive for both students and schools. In a unique quasi-market, public and charter schools compete for students with their established reputations and specialized programs (Lundahl, 2002). Grade-nine students may choose the upper-secondary school they wish to attend but they must also be accepted by those schools who rank students by their grades. In urban settings such as Stockholm, placement at high-status schools is limited and highly competitive. Stockholm itself is socially and economically segregated, a phenomenon that is similarly seen in schools and counter to the promises of the school-choice model (Alexiadou et al., 2016; Forsberg, 2018). For recent migrants and other marginalized populations residential segregation can combine with a number of other barriers to limit school choice options (Fjellman et al., 2019). Previous research has suggested that opportunities are not equally available for all students and that social and inherited assets strongly influence educational trajectories (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016; Ball et al., 2002). Unfamiliarity with a new school system and insufficient support from schools have also been identified as reasons for recently-migrated to have fewer opportunities when transitioning to upper-secondary school (Bunar, 2010; Hertzberg, 2017). However, there is a lack of research exploring recently-migrated students’ own experiences and attitudes towards school choice (Bunar, 2010; Nilsson Folke, 2017; Svensson & Eastmond, 2013). Considering the increase in migration to Europe in recent years, a better understanding of the challenges that recently-migrated students experience can contribute to education policy that better serves their needs.

The aim of this study is to investigate the influences that recently-migrated students have toward their understanding of the upper-secondary school process and the barriers that they face when acting towards their educational aspirations. To understand the experiences of these students a number of theories are used. First, careership theory (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997) acts as a theoretical base for the study. Horizon for action, the array of options seen as possible, is a point of departure for understanding the choice process. Relating to upper-secondary school choice, a person’s horizon for action is changeable when people or experiences influence the education trajectories that are viewed as desirable and attainable. These influences, called turning points by Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997), involve a transformation of identity that guides decision making. A number of additional theories contribute to this concept. The importance and influence of information shared in social settings are framed through the concept of the grapevine (Ball & Vincent, 1998). Parents, peers and school counsellors all act as sources of information that guide and informs students while they consider different upper-secondary schools. Theories of social capital (Bourdieu, 2002; Coleman, 1988) emphasize the importance of assets that are available from membership in social networks. Finally, the existence of boundaries shapes student preference and ability to choose upper-secondary schools in the Swedish school market (Barmark & Lund, 2016).

The so called New Educational Governance – based on the two pillars of deregulation and privatization of (formerly) welfare state responsibility for education and, at the same time, stronger central control via quantitative (output) indicators – has profoundly changed educational policies and systems in normative and structural-organisational terms in many countries. In Germany, a phase of deregulation in the 1990s was followed by the development and implementation of a new national overall strategy for the development and assurance of the quality of teaching and schools (KMK 2002), employing performance studies, national educational standards, competence-oriented instruction, indicator-based education reporting and the quest for evidence-based education (KMK 2015). The starting-point for the proposed paper is that within this new regulatory framework also the issue of educational inequality, which had been lost out of sight in the 1980s, was brought back on the agenda. In ongoing reforms, the improvement of the educational success of children and young people with a migration history and/or a socioeconomically deprived family background has been declared a priority and education became a main field of “integration work” (KMK 2006: 2). Yet tensions between the school effectiveness and egalitarian educational goals became evident in many areas of school work and in the growing institutional segregation of pupils with a (flight-)migration background (SVR 2018).

The proposed paper seeks to understand more precisely the connections between the New educational governance and the reproduction of social inequalities or the possibilities of inclusive school development in the post-migration societal context. In ideal-typical abstraction, I also refer to the heterogeneous concepts, instructions and practices of New Governance as the school effectiveness approach. The school effectiveness approach operates on different levels of the discourse simultaneously: as a scientific research paradigm in the narrower sense, as a political strategy and as a set of specific instruments and practices for dealing with school-pedagogical problems.

Including empirical results of an as yet unfinished discourse analysis, the following questions will be elicited: How are aspects of inclusion, social justice and democratic participation incorporated into the New Governance at the intersection of political school reform and migration/integration discourse in Germany between the years 2000 and 2020 and thereby (re)conceptualised, distorted or excluded? How do national, culturalising or racialising differentiations (also in intersectional entanglement with other lines of inequality) inscribe themselves in politics, institutions and society in new ways through the restructuring of educational governance - including the changed relationship between educational research, politics and school practice? And what consequences result from this for the professional actions of teachers and schools as well as for the educational access and experiences of pupils and parents? In order to be able to grasp and classify the essential aspects and interrelations of this complex of problems, I will first explore relevant theoretical points of reference: the conception of epistemological politics (Ricken 2011), theories of governance and governmentality (Amos 2016). These complementary perspectives focus on how "statehood as a field of political intervention and thus the field of the political itself" (Krasmann 2007: 285) are produced as an effect of government technologies and social practices. In connection with concepts of plurality, justice and discrimination, they open up a heuristic framework for examining the extent to which discursive inclusions and exclusions and potential gateways for discrimination or new possibilities for inclusive schooling are opened up or institutionalised within the framework of the new governance in connection with the functionalisation and functionality of scientific knowledge.

Research has shown that migrant students in Europe tend to perform below their native peers, as well as have shorter and less successful school careers (Teltemann & Schunck, 2016). Despite this, little is known about the school characteristics which make a difference for them (Reynolds & Neeleman, 2021). This historical gap in knowledge within the school effectiveness field is partially justified by the repeated empirical verification of the theories of social reproduction, posed by educational and social class sociologists for the first time six decades ago. Schools have been shown to mainly reproduce pre-existing inequalities by making everyone’s performance progress (or regress) at the same rate, regardless of student or school characteristics (Strand, 2016).

This, according to Strand, denies the existence of differential school effectiveness, and points to a need to shift focus from between-school differences to within-school processes, in the search for equity outcomes. I propose, following Seawright’s definition of ‘exceptional cases’ (2016), that the study of schools which go against the trend by either diminishing or increasing inequalities amongst their students is crucial. Studying such deviant cases allows us to formulate new hypothesis, and test others proposed by previous research, regarding the conditions for the occurrence of sustained change at the organizational and systemic levels (Ibid.).

This paper summarizes the preliminary results of an exploratory study on the mechanisms behind (empirically) rare instances of differential school effectiveness for migrant students. In primary schools where these students’ chances of succeeding are consistently higher than usual, what aspects of the school culture are behind this unexpected success?

Generally speaking, a continually improving school should have (i) a professional learning community committed to clear and common goal setting, strategy definition and monitoring of student success; (ii) involvement of all members of the school community in decision making; (iii) spaces for reflection; iv) adequate technical, material and human resources; (v) a combination of transformational and instructional leadership (Reynolds & Neeleman, 2021). For migrant students, there seems to be other factors to consider. They benefit particularly from the trust their teachers place on them as students (Dewulf, van Braak & Van Houtte, 2017). Additionally, some qualitative studies suggest that raising student voice, promoting increased parental involvement, having a stable school leadership that sees the value in and promotes initiatives geared towards teacher acquisition of intercultural skills are essential in diverse schools (Hajisoteriou, Karousiou & Angelides, 2018).

Moreover, recent literature has placed emphasis on the impacts of different school approaches to diversity on migrant educational outcomes. Immigrants tend to experience more success and positive teacher relationships in schools with egalitarian or multiculturalist diversity approaches (Baysu et al., 2021; Celeste et al., 2019). This might be because assimilationist views create feelings of rejection and lower school belonging amongst migrant students, which are known to affect educational performance (Agirdag, Jordens & Van Houtte, 2014).

Little is still known about the conditions for developing multicultural sensibilities in diverse schools. There is some evidence suggesting that group threat theory might explain the lower resistance to these approaches in schools with a majority of immigrant students, and higher resistance in schools with a low immigrant intake (Strobbe et al., 2017). A school culture of openness to change, experimentation and reflection has also been put forward as an important factor (Van Der Wildt, Van Avermaet & Van Houtte, 2017).

In recent decades, university students' learning has attracted increasing interest, reflected in a growing number of publications (Batanero and Sanchez, 2005; Entwistle and Peterson, 2004; Gargallo et al., 2007; Muñoz and Gómez, 2005; Richardson, 2011; Vermunt and Donche, 2017; Vermun and Vermetten, 2004; Winne and Jamieson, 2002, among others). Most of these studies adopted a logical-positivist psychological approach, in which researchers' views were prevalent, with little space to listen to students' voices and consider the contextual dimensions of learning (Phillips, 2014) and students' conceptions and experiences.

In this context, in 2021, Educational Researcher, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) journal, published an article by Nasir, Lee, Pea and McKinney in which these authors reviewed the dominant perspectives on learning in psychology and education. They also explained what these approaches contribute, what they omit and how they complement each other. The paper also offered several contributions to what might be an interdisciplinary view that can illuminate how we approach learning and identified three learning theories with different framing foundations: behaviourism, cognitivism and social theory (social-constructivism). Each provides lenses that foreground some learning phenomena and neglect others. From a behaviourist perspective, learning is the accumulation of facts and skills learned through processes of reinforcement (e.g., behaviour management charts). From a cognitivist perspective, learning is best cultivated by active exploration in the service of real-world tasks. Teaching young people how to learn is critical to developing the habits of mind to manage their learning. A socio-cultural perspective also involves paying attention to teaching and learning social contexts; being sensitive to forms of belonging, prejudice and inclusion; respecting the variety of 'repertoires of practice' learners bring to the classroom (Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003); and focusing on the social routines and connections that support learning.

Considering Nasir et al. (2021), our paper explores the following questions based on how university students say they learn in the research project [anonymised]. More specifically: 1) How are the students' statements linked to the contributions of psychology and pedagogy to learning? 2) What insights can we draw from this study to improve our understanding of university students' relationships to learning? 3) What insights can we gain from the research participants' reflections on the situations that help and hinder their learning?

The aim of the [anonymised] research project and this paper is not only to give an account of university students' conceptions of learning but also to deepen our understanding of learning as an interdisciplinary process and bring new conceptual and methodological approaches to studying learning. In line with the invitation of Nasir et al. (2021, p. 562, paraphrased), our purpose is not only to generate new knowledge about how learning takes place. We also try to make university learning experiences emancipatory and to overcome the current boundaries and limitations imposed by deficit assumptions and research frameworks and methods that reaffirm deficits and inequalities.

Solidarity has received recent scholarly attention both in the field of education and beyond. Sleeter & Soriani (2012) show that in education, while the concept of solidarity is conceptualized in conjunction with other related concepts such as social justice and equity, the tendency is to not clearly define it. We see this as an advantage as it opens up perspectives to openly explore how participants make sense of and relate to this concept. Solidarity has been defined as building community among children or youth, especially in school settings, as empathy across differences or as civic virtue or identification with one’s own marginalized group (Sleeter & Soriani, 2012). One of the characteristics of the concept of solidarity is its relationality, its “amongness”. In this case, it is seen as a relational process modeled by the context (Gaztambide-Fernández, Brant & Desai, 2022). This means that solidarity always emerges as a phenomenon among people that relate to each other in one way or another. Another characteristic of the concept is the contextualization to the setting of the studies, meaning natural, geographical, cultural, intergenerational, socio-political layers of real life’ issues and experiences.

Following Sleeter & Soriani (2012) we consider that investigating solidarity in educational settings can lead us to question “mainstream knowledge and interpretations” of students, and place their perspective and meanings above conventional practices and ways of understanding. Another concept in relation to which solidarity is used is sustainability and future orientation (Torbjönsson & Molin, 2015), an association that leads us toward looking at solidarity as a civic virtue for participatory citizenship. From this perspective, youth and children, as well as teachers can learn to see humanity as “sharing common concerns”. Based on this conceptualization Santora (2003) discusses how she teaches her students to become participatory citizens in a diverse community/society. She understands it as reciprocal understanding, based on trust that goes beyond individual interests that helps students experience “selfhood, diversity and community”. Yet, solidarity can also co-exist tensely with notions of diversity as it is generally built on a common sense of belonging to a community (be it via citizenship or of other shared characteristics). Children have often been represented as passive recipients of solidarity, for example through humanitarian representations that show them as ‘speechless victims’ (Mallki, 1996) or as objects of teachers’ solidarity practices. However, the new sociology of childhood (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998; Epstein et al, 2006) has problematized the representation of children as passive subjects, recentering children’s perspectives and agency as a way of overcoming adultist approaches to how children understand the world around them. Alanen’s (2014) intergenerational approach of childhood highlights children’s co-participation in the daily reproduction and/or transformation of intergenerational practices.

Creating a context for children to reflect on relational acts of solidarity can help overcome the adultist perspective on childhood and the distancing, hierarchical perspectives on solidarity so common in the contemporary European imaginary (Chouliaraki, 2013), and further our knowledge on children`s particular understandings. In our project we ask: How do children understand and engage in practices of solidarity in the present situation in Europe? The present situation is marked by both the consequences of the inflation and price crises that risk rendering vulnerable large segments of the population, as well as the war on Ukraine and the broader context of looming environmental crises. That is why our case studies are situated in Romania, a country with historically high levels of economic inequality and of poverty in a European perspective (Gazibar & Giulgea, 2019), moreover Romania is a neighboring country to Ukraine that has since the onset of the war received high numbers of refugees.

Most of the time, children are no central actors when it comes to discuss societal futures, be it in political or academic arenas. We can observe a widely held belief that children are not capable of reasoning about future because they are said to have only limited capacities to understand temporal, and factual realities. Biographical research based on narrative inquiry with children challenges those beliefs as there are long-standing experiences, since at least the nineties, of asking children about their future visions in biographical interviews (Siebholz, 2020). The paper has three parts. First, it starts with an overview of the attempts, and experiences in biography research with children focusing elicited statements about future. The second part asks about the results: What do we know about the futures that children with different social backgrounds and diverse experiences perceive, and anticipate? What do we know about the future visions of children from different parts of the world? How do children relate to societal transformations, uncertainties, and crises when they tell their life stories, and connect past, present, and future? What can we learn from comparisons between biographical future visions of past, and present children? Third, the paper summarises the reflections on the conducted research, and discusses the question: What are, on the one hand, the possibilities, and potentials, and what are, on the other hand, the limitations of biographical research with children when we are interested in their perspectives on societal futures that are marked by global changes, and challenges?

Context is arguably one of the most ubiquitous terms and concepts utilised in educational research in Europe and beyond. Nearly every article published in recent decades in the European Educational Research Journal, for instance, attends to context in some fashion, though understandings of and engagements with notions of context vary widely. Researchers working in sociology and comparative education in particular have long emphasised the role of context and its centrality to comparative inquiry (Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014). Moreover, innovative approaches to policy sociology are reshaping our understandings of how policies and practices flow and mutate across networks, levels, and actors, calling into question previous understandings of what context entails across time and scales, and how to research (within) it (e.g., Addey & Piattoeva, 2022; Lingard, 2021). The time is thus ripe to turn renewed attention to the role of context in European and international research and, importantly, how it relates to the methodological approaches employed.

This symposium features three papers focused on the role of context in sociological and comparative education research. The first paper by Brown and Schweisfurth sets the stage by tracing the historical trajectory of context in global educational research, and how conceptualisations of it have evolved. The paper then explores how Massey’s notion of relational space addresses some of the weaknesses in how context has been conceptualised and operationalised, using examples from empirical research in Tanzania to more broadly highlight the utility of this approach to context. Next, Verger and Fontdevila examine how process tracing as a methodological approach within policy sociology and comparative education research can enable a more fine-grained analysis of context and contingency in policymaking. National case studies from the REFORMED project (e.g., Netherlands, Norway, Spain) highlight both the promises and challenges of using process tracing across diverse geopolitical and educational systems, calling further attention to context in studying policy processes and outcomes. The final paper by Luoto and Thomas explicitly considers how researchers employing observational research have interpreted, employed, or ignored context in sociological and comparative studies. Drawing on examples from empirical studies conducted in Europe, Africa, and North America, they explore three ways context has ‘mattered’ in observational research, linking thematically back to the first paper of the symposium. In sum, the symposium collectively raises new questions about what we mean by attending to ‘context’ in educational research and how it implicates and intersects with our methodological decisions.

One of the foundational principles for comparativists researching pedagogy is that what happens inside classrooms is shaped by what is outside – that is, the full range of contexts within which teaching and learning are situated. Context is important across a range of scales, from institutional and local to regional and global, and includes potentially infinite influences, from policy drivers to cultural traditions. However, knowing which things, how they matter, and to who, and also how they also affect each other, places challenging demands on comparative researchers. Historically and across different research traditions, attempts to tame the complexity of context have led to a range of approaches, each of them a useful tool but ultimately unsatisfactory in its own way. Methodologically, context often becomes a relatively inert background, packaged in methodological nationalism or other containers for social action, with scales larger or smaller than the national remaining beyond the scope of enquiry. In this paper we start by outlining briefly how comparativists over time and from different research paradigms have come to terms with context. We consider what these conceptualisations have allowed us to see and to do, and what limitations and challenges they present in accounting for the intersections of different contextual influences and actors or the mechanisms through which they entangle in the world of the classroom. We look to other disciplines which have perhaps been quicker to grapple with and theorise these complex entanglements in ‘the spatial turn’. Where ‘context matters’ has become a mantra in sociology and comparative and international education, ‘space matters’ has become a recent adage across the social sciences more broadly (Ferrare & Apple, 2010). In the final section, we turn to an exploration of Massey’s (1994, 2005) conceptualisation of relational space, and how it was utilised in a recent study of learning across home, neighbourhood and school spaces, and the implications for pedagogy in Tanzanian primary schools (Brown, 2022). No single theory or approach can operationalise context in a way that both embraces its complexities and analyses and presents them in meaningful and digestible ways. However, we see in the work of Massey promising avenues for accounting for how context not only contains but creates social action, for managing the burden of choice in selecting aspects of contexts to explore, and for opening up and representing the dynamic and polyscalar nature of context and the multiple histories embedded in it.

Brown, R.B. (2022). Perceptions and experiences of urban school, home and neighbourhood learning spaces, and implications for pedagogy in Tanzanian primary schools. A comparative case study. PhD, School of Education, University of Glasgow. Ferrare, J., & Apple, M.W. (2010). Spatializing critical education: Progress and cautions. Critical Studies in Education 51(2): 209-221. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage Publications.

Process tracing has a great (but largely untapped) potential in sociological and comparative education policy analysis. Process-tracing (PT) can be defined as an analytical strategy aimed explicitly at unearthing the process behind an outcome of interest and identifying its causal mechanisms (George & Bennett, 2005). A distinct feature of PT is its reliance on fine-grained descriptions and the concern for sequencing of events; that is, a preoccupation for the unfolding of a given phenomenon over time (Collier, 2011). Process-tracing analysis aims at reconstructing key sequences of events within a given case with the purpose of identifying the causal mechanisms shaping it. As we argue in this presentation, PT can contribute to sociological and comparative education policy analysis in different ways. Hence, PT can both “ameliorate the limitations” of the conventional approach to comparative analysis (i.e., the method of agreement and difference) and contribute to expanding the range of questions we can ask (Simmons & Smith, 2021; see also George & Bennett, 2005). By examining in detail the factors leading to a particular policy outcome, including actors’ rationales, interests, and decision-making processes, PT can help identify causal mechanisms shaping education policy processes, helping to build theory in the field of comparative policy analysis. It can be used to compare policy-making processes across different regulatory and professional regimes, and thus test hypotheses on the contextual factors that shape policy outcomes. Indeed, if long policy periods are considered, PT allows for a more nuanced understanding of the role of context and contingency in policy-making, as it allows researchers to examine the conditions under which a policy was adopted, implemented and revisited through feedback loops. Our empirical examples include country cases conducted in the context of REFORMED, a multi-year research project analysing the instrumentation and enactment of school autonomy with accountability reforms in multiple educational settings (www.reformedproject.eu). The project relied on a case-centric variant of PT (Beach & Pedersen, 2016) that does not lend itself to generalization or extrapolation purposes, but suggests certain patterns and regularities have great potential from a comparative analysis perspective. The review of the REFORMED case studies will allow us to examine the potential of PT for theory-building and theory-testing purposes in comparative education research, but also to reflect on the challenges posed by the need to translate PT principles into methodological strategies, and the compatibility of PT with the methodological and theoretical pluralism inherent to comparative education policy studies.

Beach, D. & Pedersen, R.B. (2016). Causal case study methods. Foundations and guidelines for comparing, matching, and tracing. University of Michigan Press. Collier, D. (2011). Understanding process tracing. Political Science & Politics, 44(4), 823–830. George, A.L., & Bennet, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. MIT Press. Simmons, E.S., & Smith, N.R. (Eds.). (2021). Rethinking comparison. Cambridge University Press.

Conducting observations in natural settings—including within classrooms, schools, and educational organisations—is a common and fruitful approach in sociological and comparative education research. Indeed, insights gained from observations in situ often highlight how actions and social relations manifest in and across various contexts, including within a singular community or across multiple classrooms and countries. Approaches to conducting observations vary widely depending on their purpose, however. Highly structured observations typically apply standardised observation systems to capture and compare specific behaviours across many contexts, such as international studies of teaching quality (Bell et al., 2019). These studies generally seek to correlate observations and produce generalisations about large data sets, sometimes combined with student/teacher characteristics or achievement data (e.g., OECD, 2020). Ethnographic studies otherwise tend to prioritise prolonged engagement within a narrower field, where researchers may act as participant-observers and make in-depth fieldnote observations. A key purpose of these studies is to better understand the logics and experiences of individuals involved in the (arguably deeply sociocultural) processes of teaching and learning (e.g., Anderson-Levitt, 2004; Maseman, 1982). There are of course many other approaches to observation, too, some of which combine aspects of these two and draw on a similarly diverse set of epistemological and theoretical paradigms. Despite these stark differences, what all approaches to observational research have in common is some reckoning with the notion of context. In this paper, then, we draw on examples from a range of empirical studies conducted in and beyond Europe to explore three ways context may be interpreted, employed, or ignored in sociological and comparative studies utilising observation. First, context is sometimes perceived eco-systemically as occurring across macro (cultural, economic, social), meso (school, community), and/or micros levels (classroom, students) (see also Bray & Thomas, 1995). The extent to which studies engage with and across these ‘levels’ varies widely, however; some merely acknowledge their existence in passing. Second, context may refer to the specific purposes for conducting observations, sometimes beyond research projects. Structured classroom observation protocols, for example, are increasingly utilised for teacher evaluation or feedback (Liu et al., 2019). Third, context may relate to the conceptual lenses we use to understand and analyse observational data (Martinez et al., 2016), and the positionalities and standpoints of the researchers themselves. In discussing these three interpretations of context, then, we highlight in this conceptual paper how attending to ‘context’ permeates all aspects of observational studies, whether acknowledged or otherwise.

Anderson-Levitt, K. M. (2004). Reading lessons in Guinea, France, and the United States: Local meanings or global culture? Comparative Education Review, 48(3), 229-252. Bell, C.A., Dobbelaer, M.J., Klette, K., & Visscher, A. (2019). Qualities of classroom observation systems. School effectiveness and school improvement, 30(1), 3-29. Bray, M. & Thomas, R. M. (1995). Levels of comparison in educational studies: Different insights from different literatures and the value of multilevel analyses. Harvard Education Review, 65(3), 472-490. Liu, S., Bell, C.A., Jones, N.D., & McCaffrey, D.F. (2019). Classroom observation systems in context: A case for the validation of observation systems. Educational assessment, evaluation and accountability, 31(1), 61-95. Martinez, F., Taut, S., & Schaaf, K. (2016). Classroom observation for evaluating and improving teaching: An international perspective. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 49, 15-29. Masemann, V.L. (1982). Critical ethnography in the study of comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 26(1), 1-15. OECD. (2020). Global Teaching InSights: A video study of teaching. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/20d6f36b-en.

This conference contribution aims to present a conceptualization of educational technology brokers (henceforth ‘Edtech Brokers’) and their practices of mediation, focusing on case studies of Belgium and the U.K. Edtech brokers are defined as organizations that guide local schools in the procurement, adoption, and pedagogical use of edtech. This guidance occurs at the level of both hardware (laptops, tablets, smartboards) and software (apps, platforms, data infrastructures).

Brokering actors have been studied in educational policy contexts (Grek et al., 2009; Williamson, 2014), and different effectiveness-oriented streams of research have pointed out the potential of brokers for bridging the research-practice gap in classroom settings (Neal et al., 2019; Neal et al.2022). Equally, critical work has previously scrutinized how brokers make specific forms of educational transformation thinkable, intelligible, and practicable (Bandolla-Gill, Grek & Tichenor, 2022; Ball, 2019; Hartong, 2016; Williamson, 2014).

Despite their potential to alter the nature of classroom practices around edtech and to reshape the boundaries between the private industry of edtech and state education, to date almost no studies have examined edtech brokers specifically as intermediary organizations between school settings and the edtech industry. As such, this paper aims to fill this gap by presenting the results of an up-close empirical examination of edtech brokers, their distinctive sub-categories, and their concrete effects in local school settings.

More precisely, the paper presents a categorization of three types of edtech brokers (ambassador, search engine, and data brokers) and shows their main practices of mediation. This categorization accounts for the multifariousness of brokers regarding their composition, influence on local school systems, and level of connectedness with wider policy and industry sectors. By focusing on practices (see Decuypere, 2021), we aim to investigate the concrete doings of broker organizations and gain insight into their distinctive operations as they unfold in specific contexts. The paper claims that edtech brokers’ practices of mediation materialize a set of possibilities, conditions, and constraints, for edtech usage in schools at the levels of (i) infrastructure, (ii) evidence building, and (iii) professional identity of the teacher.

To explore these questions, we find theoretical support in the work of Bruno Latour and Sheila Jasanoff in defining edtech brokers as mediators (in contrast to ‘intermediaries’). According to Latour (1994; 2004), an intermediary “is what transports meaning or force without transformation” (Latour, 2004, p. 39). By contrast, mediators “transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour, 2004, p. 39). This distinction is particularly relevant for the case of edtech brokers, since it allows us to propose that they do not only neutrally “implement” or “apply” technology in education, but in doing so, they transform present and future possibilities for edtech usage and shape exchanges between schools and the industry.

Importantly, mediators also push forward fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic. Jasanoff (2015) refers to these fabulations as sociotechnical imaginaries and defines them as “collectively held, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (p.4). This is central to understanding that mediations of edtech brokers invoke and materialize, through concrete practices, certain futures about education while rendering alternative options unlikely, undesired, or even impossible.

The research questions that guide this contribution are:

• What are brokers’ distinctive practices of mediation and in which ways do they shape edtech usage in schools?
• What are the sociotechnical imaginaries about education promoted by edtech brokers through their mediations?

In the field of education, there are a diversity of international organisations functioning as policy actors (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). On a global level, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has become one of the most influent agents of transnational education governance (Grek, 2009). Due to the de-nationalization of educational policy (Sundberg & Wahlström, 2012), organisations such as OECD has had an increasingly greater impact on the day-to-day policy and practice in Europe, as well as on a national level (Grek, 2020). Since the emphasis on evidence in education have increased (Levinsson & Prøtz, 2017) various of initiatives have been taken in order to support the use of research in policy and practice. OECD’s (2022) project “Strengthening the Impact of Education Research” can be considered as one such example. Acting at the boundary of various policy actors’ interests, values and perceptions, OECD are conceptualized as a boundary organisation (Grek, 2020), facilitating cooperation and communication between research and policy (Parker & Crona, 2012).

Drawing on Guston (2001), the boundary organisation is a way of illustrating and understanding organisations mediating role to reduce tensions between research and policy (Guston 1999; 2001). The boundary organisation obtains its stability from ‘being accountable and responsive to opposing, external authorities’ (Guston, 2001, p. 402) and could be understood as a series of “delegations of authority from principals to agents within or between organizations” (Ibid. p. 401). While cooperation is an important adaptive strategy, when boundary organizations incorporate representatives of external groups into their decision-making structures, it is always carried out by projecting authority ‘by appealing to either face in a strategic fashion’ (Guston, 2001, p. 405). Since various stakeholders place diverse, and sometimes conflicting demands on the boundary organization, Parker and Crona (2012) highlight the importance of ‘boundary management’ as an adaptive, navigating, and negotiating continuous process to handle these dynamic tensions over time. What distinguish boundary organisations from other types of organisations is their capacity to reduce these tensions by meeting three criteria; first the use and creation of boundary objects and standardised packages, second the participation from both side of the boundary where they serve a mediating role, third the existent of activities where both politicians and researchers have shared partnership (Guston 2001, p.400-401).

Even if OECD, by others, is conceptualised as a boundary organisation OECD use the term broker agency when describing organisations mediating between heterogeneous groups of researchers, policy makers and educators. One such organisation, among many, that OECD call a broker agency is the Swedish Institute for Educational Research (SIER). SIER was established by the Swedish government in 2015, with the mandate to synthesise research that can provide knowledge support for professionals at various organisational levels. This task includes cooperation between research and professionals where SIER serve a mediating role. The term broker agency was coined by OECD in 2007 and since then the term is disputed, due to its origin within the field of business and finance (OECD, 2022). Brokering is defined by OCED as “initiatives aimed at bridging the divide between policy makers and researchers as well as assessing the quality of evidence available” (2007).

The terms boundary organisation and broker agency have different origin and are built on diverse logic and different expectations on knowledge management. This paper aims to deepen the understanding of the diverse logic and perceptions on knowledge management built in respective term; boundary organisation and broker agency, and the possible merit and shortcomings of either definition for describing the cooperation at SIER acting in-between politic, research and practice in the educational sector.

Dashboards, progression curves, benchmarks, and traffic lights. All are examples of data visualizations used to mobilize data about educational institutions and their students. Data visualizations are graphic representations of digital data which summazise large amounts of data to patterns and trends within data sets. Data visualizations signpost the emergence of educational institutions and students as data objects, which can be observed and compared on a computer screen. They are thus shaping educational administrators’ and teachers’ socio-technical ways of ‘seeing’ educational quality and learning (Selwyn et al., 2022), and it is crucial to investigate their world making capacities and their ‘social life’ in educational worlds. As the main ‘interface’ through which educational administrators and educators access data, they are an underlooked but central aspect of the datafication of education.

This symposium investigates the role of data visualizations as a distinct way of making ‘education’ or ‘learning’ tangible and knowable. Although praised for making data accessible and interpretable, data visualizations also imply a distancing from data. Issues relating to how data is categorized in a database and how statistical techniques are performed on data are not included in visualizations (Ratner & Ruppert, 2019). The software developers of data visualizations make numerous design choices rendering some things absent and others present (Greller & Drachsler, 2012). While visualizations may appear factual and transparent, data visualizations provide neither direct nor neutral access to the object they are deemed to represent. Rather, they may be seen as persuasive and value-laden devices that privilege certain viewpoints (Latour, 1990).

This symposium examines data visualizations as entry point for discussing issues related to power, governance and automation. Dashboards visualizing the performance of educational institutions are today mundane artifacts in educational governance and require actors at different levels of governance hierarchies to turn performance gaps into improved outcomes (Decuypere & Landri, 2021; Ratner & Gad, 2018). Here, visualizations may have an affective dimension with e.g. rankings encouraging a dynamics of faming and shaming (Brøgger, 2016; Sellar, 2015), which, in turn, may situate education in a wider political context of competition and accountability. We may also examine questions of automation through data visualizations. With data visualizations increasingly presenting pre-fabricated interpretations of data, they now conduct some of the professional judgment formerly done by teachers (e.g. identifying low performing students). This may naturalize new forms of knowledge such as ‘at risk students’. It also maps out new responsibilities for teachers, such as ‘acting on’ visualizations to improve student learning. It is thus likely that visualizations both shape what counts as educational quality and signal to administrators and educators what they should prioritize. This raises important questions about how data visualizations reconfigure human judgment and decision-making in a digital and datafied age. While powerful, however, data visualizations can never fully determine the social contexts they are part of. Users may take them up in unanticipated ways. Thus, it is equally important to examine how educators and administrators make sense of data visualizations, ignore them, resist them or put them to other uses than those anticipated by the designers.

This conference symposium will explore the role of data visualizations in education across Europe and beyond. It does so by comparing different European and international cases of how data visualizations are used in education, including historical and contemporary examples. The symposium includes contributions examining both the production and consumption of data visualizations. Across the different contributions, it will also discuss conceptual and methodological questions arising from the study of educational data visualizations.

Recognizing that EdTech is increasingly shaping the teaching profession through the datafication and visualization of student learning, this paper advances an analytical framework for eliciting the “politics” of data visualizations. With inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS), well-suited for analyzing the co-constitution of technology and society, the paper suggests a framework for analyzing data visualizations’ ‘aesthetics’, ‘agencies’ and ‘alternatives’ as important if we are to understand their implications for teachers’ expertise. Rather than assuming the ‘technical’ and ‘social’ to be separate domains, STS invites an ‘infrastructural inversion’ (cf. Bowker & Star, 2000) where questions of politics, ethics, and knowledge are examined through infrastructural entities. Specifically, the notions of ‘aesthetics’, ‘agencies’ and ‘alternatives’ allow eliciting how the aesthetics of data visualizations also entail an interpretation of data, how visualizations configure expertise across human and machine agencies, and how visualizations themselves are contingent results of ongoing negotiations of their makers (Coopman, 2014; Ratner & Ruppert, 2019; Schaffer, 2017; Suchman, 2007). This approach thus casts light on the power of data visualizations as a device for shaping expertise but also appreciate them as cultural and social artifacts that could be otherwise. The paper demonstrates these analytics through a qualitative case study of a widely used digital mathematics platform for the primary and lower school (“folkeskole”) in Denmark, ‘MathTraining’. Launched as an adaptive and self-correcting platform in 2010, MathTraining today has become one of the most popular Danish platforms in mathematics. The analytical sections show, respectively, 1) how the aesthetics of data visualizations shape expertise by calculating and also interpreting student learning on behalf of the teacher; 2) how data visualizations configure expertise across human and machine agencies, automating student assessments and attracting teachers’ attention towards student engagement and progression, and 3) map out the alternative visualizations that never became part of the platform, demonstrating the contingent aspect of data visualizations, in terms of how different actors in the EdTech company have different ideas about how and which data should be visualized. Examining both the intentions inscribed into the visualizations as well as ongoing mundane negotiations about which data to visualize and how, allow us to better appreciate the normative dimensions of unsettled and ethical questions about the role of automated digital systems in education, including how they reconfigure teachers’ socio-technical way of ‘seeing’ and attending to learning.

Bowker, G., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press. Coopmans, C. (2014). Visual analytics as artful revelation. In C. Coopmans, J. Vertesi, M. Lynch, & S. Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited (pp. 37–59). MIT Press. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-151377 Ratner, H., & Ruppert, E. (2019). Producing and projecting data: Aesthetic practices of government data portals. Big Data & Society, 6(2), 2053951719853316. Schaffer, S. (2017). Introduction. In S. Schaffer, J. Tresch, & P. Gagliardi (Eds.), Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Suchman, L. (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Education is, for many educational theorists, inherently uncertain, open-ended and risky (Biesta 2013, Allert et al. 2017). Yet the algorithmic systems of today‘s datafied world increasingly prioritise ‘certainty and the promise of guaranteed outcomes’ (Zuboff 2019: 497). It is widely known that AI-powered predictive systems have high margins of error. However, the data visualisations of algorithmic systems across health, social work, policing, government and other social fields tend to visualise certainty, thus invisibilising the underlying approximations and uncertainties of both the algorithmic systems and the social settings in which these systems operate. This can have harmful consequences for people, in particular minoritised populations. For example, while software providers and policy makers assure the public that algorithmic systems merely provide suggestions, and that users make the final decisions, research has shown that civil servants and other practitioners find it difficult to override algorithmic recommendations, even in their area of expertise (Eubanks 2019, Allhutter et al. 2020). Critical algorithm studies have hence raised questions about how (valid) knowledge is produced and circulates through algorithmic systems, and how truth claims are made (Jarke et al. forthcoming). In this paper, we argue that data visualisations and their production of certainty play a crucial role in devaluing situated knowledges that embrace the inherent uncertainty and open-endedness of our world. After introducing this field of research, we analyse a corpus of data visualisations from English- and German-language predictive analytics platforms for education. We explore the extent to which they show uncertainty. Findings indicate that data visualisations of uncertainty in education are exceedingly rare. The paper then discusses the implications when educators make decisions based on these visualisations. It reflects on the dashboard construction of ‘at-risk’ students (Jarke & Macgilchrist 2021), the distribution of benefits and harms to students, and the constitution of possible futures. It discusses three moves to contest the encoding of certainty into spaces of educational uncertainty: First, increased algorithmic literacy, which, however, individualises responsibility for action and transformation with the user. Second, artistic data visualisations which highlight uncertainty, which, however, tend to remain within the same frame in which data are collected about individuals. Third, then, the paper draws on a feminist/critical perspective to propose data visualisations of uncertainty that move beyond individualised data to show, for instance, structural inequalities, and that are embedded in collective (sociotechnical) practices. The paper concludes by identifying methodological challenges and open questions for future research.

Allert, H., Asmussen, M., & Richter, C. (2017). Formen von Subjektivierung und Unbestimmtheit im Umgang mit datengetriebenen Lerntechnologien – eine praxistheoretische Position. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 21(1), 142-158. Allhutter, D., Cech, F., Fischer, F., Grill, G., & Mager, A. (2020). Algorithmic Profiling of Job Seekers in Austria: How Austerity Politics Are Made Effective. Frontiers in Big Data, 3. Biesta, G. (2013). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Paradigm Publishers. Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin's Press. Jarke, J., Prietl, B., Egbert, S., Boeva, Y., Heuer, H. (forthcoming). Algorithmic Regimes: Methods, Interactions, Politics. Amsterdam University Press Jarke, J., & Macgilchrist, F. (2021). Dashboard stories: How the narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education. Big Data & Society, 8(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025561 Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

Writing from a new materialist perspective, Kosciejew (2017) proposes the concept of material-documentary literacy, reminding us that one of the main functions of documentation is to materialise information. He points out that ‘information’ is commonly regarded as being an abstract, dematerialised entity, distanced from its materiality which is regarded as secondary. In contrast, he foregrounds the materiality of documentation, to ‘help (re)configure our understanding of information, as something not immaterial and intangible, but something material and tangible’ (Kosciejew 2017: 97). Drawing on Suzanne Briet’s (1951) groundbreaking work on the nature of documentation, and his concept of informative material objects, this paper will examine datafication and data visualisation in higher education, avoiding the limitations of mainstream analyses in educational research so far. The concept of the informative material object allows us to analyse information and data visualiation as material phenomena which are embedded in specific sociomaterial instantiations and enmeshed with human agency, in contrast with the dominant paradigm of data and information being abstract, disembodied entities. This, I propose, is a subtle but important distinction which moves the focus onto the entanglement of human, material, digital and analogue agency which constitutes the ‘datafied’ university. I will examine a specific case of data visualisation via the production of representations of student engagement via ‘learning analytics dashboards’, a pedagogical practice which has been described in terms of tracing students’ ‘digital footprints’ (Sclater et al. 2016: 4). I will focus on the visual digital tracing of students, discussed via critiques of neoliberal uses of algorithms in society at large (e.g. Aneesh 2009, Beer 2019), of digital higher education (e.g. Prinsloo 2017, Jarke & Breiter 2019, Joksimović, Kovanović & Dawson 2019, Selwyn & Gasevi 2020), and of surveillance studies (e.g. Lyon 2018). I will argue that these critiques and theoretical resources, although invaluable, do not go far enough in their conception of data visualizations’ world-making capacities, in particular, in terms of their constitutive force, focusing particularly on student subjectivities in this case. My argument will be that the act of tracing undertaken via visual representation in learning analytics is an act of documentation in Briet’s terms, which fundamentally shifts how we might understand this educational practice, moving from a notion of surveillance towards a conception of ontological change – even violence – in which the student is rendered into a document. The implications for theory and practice will be discussed.

Aneesh, A. (2009). Global labour: algocratic modes of organization. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 347-370. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01352.x. Beer, D. 2019. The Data Gaze. London: SAGE. Beer, T. (Ed.) (2022). The Social Power of Algorithms. London: Taylor and Francis. Briet, S. (1951) 2006. What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text. Day, R., Martinet, L. and Anghelescu, H. (Eds.) Toronto: Scarecrow. Jarke, J. and Breiter, A. 2019. The datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology 44(1), 106. Joksimović, S., Kovanović, V. and Dawson, S. 2019. The journey of learning analytics. HERDSA Review of Higher Education 6, 37-63. Kosciejew, M. (2017). A material-documentary literacy: documents, practices and the materialization of information. Minnesota Review 88, 96-111. Lyon, D. (2018). The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Polity. Prinsloo, P. (2017). Fleeing from Frankenstein’s monster and meeting Kafka on the way: algorithmic decision-making in higher education. Elearning and Digital Media 14(3), 138-163. Sclater, N., Peasgood, A. and Mullan, J. (2016). Learning Analytics in Higher Education: A Review of UK and International Practice. Bristol, UK: JISC. Selwyn, N. and Gasevi, D. 2020. The datafication of higher education: discussing the promises and problems. Teaching in Higher Education 25(4), 527-540.

Educational dashboards are increasingly prevalent, commended, and diverse visualising technologies that display outcomes of datafied educational processes to help students and pedagogical actors ‘keep track’ of learning pathways, alert for deviations, and make interventions, so students remain ‘on track’ (Gašević et al., 2022). Dashboards have long been connected to learning management systems and gained momentum as promising tools in learning analytics, an interdisciplinary field seeking to produce and deploy data-driven technologies and methods for improving education (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al., 2021). Descriptive and pre-emptive dashboards, for instance, are believed to enhance students’ self-monitoring and reduce dropouts as they allow students to reflect on their visualised learning (Safsouf et al., 2021). In response to the heightened attention for educational dashboards and the datafication of education generally, critical scholarship has investigated assumptions and consequences of data-driven technologies in education and called for research that details how such technologies engender (un)foreseen effects in situ (e.g., Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021). With this contribution, we aim to scrutinise how educational actors relate in the production and deployment of higher distance education dashboards. Distance learning has a history of being organised through (digital) technologies, and existing issues intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. As educational dashboards were used at universities to alleviate problems, research has predominantly focussed on (dis)advantages of dashboards for distance learning rather than their usage in distance learning (Celik et al., 2022). We examine dashboards from a Dutch university because they are telling cases about data visualisation for and in distance learning. Therefore, this article takes a science and technology studies (STS) approach to critically investigate modes of ordering and their effects (Law, 1994): specific ways of relating to visualising technologies situated in wider educational settings. We focussed on different relations with visuals, i.e., employees doing techno-scientific work to produce visuals and learners learning with the deployed visuals (Burri & Dumit, 2008). We followed insights from visual/digital ethnography during our fieldwork because the pandemic required us to pay close attention to the daily, technology-intensive practices of participants and ourselves (Pink, 2021). The results show modes of producing and learning with higher distance education dashboards in the Netherlands. The cases exemplify a ‘dashboarding of learning’ as well as a ‘learning to dashboard’, meaning that data visualisations enter educational practices and encourage – though not always with success – learners to understand and realise their education in close proximity to the underpinning techno-pedagogical ideas of production teams.

Burri, V., & Dumit, J. (2008). Social studies of scientific imaging and visualization. In J. Hackett, O. Amserdamska, M. Lynch, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 297–318). The MIT Press. Celik, I., Gedrimiene, E., Silvola, A., & Muukkonen, H. (2022). Response of learning analytics to online education challenges during pandemic: Opportunities and key examples in higher education. Policy Futures in Education, 1–18. Gašević, D., Tsai, S., & Drachsler, H. (2022). Learning analytics in higher education: Stakeholders, strategy and scale. The Internet and Higher Education, 52(1), 1–5. Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., Gómez-González, C., Rojas-Murphy Tagle, A., & Lorca-Vyhmeister, A. (2021). Learning analytics in higher education: A preponderance of analytics but very little learning? International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 18(1), 1–19. Jarke, J., & Macgilchrist, F. (2021). Dashboard stories: How narratives told by predictive analytics reconfigure roles, risk and sociality in education. Big Data and Society, 8(1). Law, J. (1994). Organizing modernity. Blackwell. Pink, S. (2021). Doing visual ethnography. SAGE Publications. Safsouf, Y., Mansouri, K., & Poirier, F. (2021). TaBAT: Design and experimentation of a learning analysis dashboard for teachers and learners. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 20, 331–350.

Dashboards, progression curves, benchmarks, and traffic lights. All are examples of data visualizations used to mobilize data about educational institutions and their students. Data visualizations are graphic representations of digital data which summazise large amounts of data to patterns and trends within data sets. Data visualizations signpost the emergence of educational institutions and students as data objects, which can be observed and compared on a computer screen. They are thus shaping educational administrators’ and teachers’ socio-technical ways of ‘seeing’ educational quality and learning (Selwyn et al., 2022), and it is crucial to investigate their world making capacities and their ‘social life’ in educational worlds. As the main ‘interface’ through which educational administrators and educators access data, they are an underlooked but central aspect of the datafication of education.

This symposium investigates the role of data visualizations as a distinct way of making ‘education’ or ‘learning’ tangible and knowable. Although praised for making data accessible and interpretable, data visualizations also imply a distancing from data. Issues relating to how data is categorized in a database and how statistical techniques are performed on data are not included in visualizations (Ratner & Ruppert, 2019). The software developers of data visualizations make numerous design choices rendering some things absent and others present (Greller & Drachsler, 2012). While visualizations may appear factual and transparent, data visualizations provide neither direct nor neutral access to the object they are deemed to represent. Rather, they may be seen as persuasive and value-laden devices that privilege certain viewpoints (Latour, 1990).

This symposium examines data visualizations as entry point for discussing issues related to power, governance and automation. Dashboards visualizing the performance of educational institutions are today mundane artifacts in educational governance and require actors at different levels of governance hierarchies to turn performance gaps into improved outcomes (Decuypere & Landri, 2021; Ratner & Gad, 2018). Here, visualizations may have an affective dimension with e.g. rankings encouraging a dynamics of faming and shaming (Brøgger, 2016; Sellar, 2015), which, in turn, may situate education in a wider political context of competition and accountability. We may also examine questions of automation through data visualizations. With data visualizations increasingly presenting pre-fabricated interpretations of data, they now conduct some of the professional judgment formerly done by teachers (e.g. identifying low performing students). This may naturalize new forms of knowledge such as ‘at risk students’. It also maps out new responsibilities for teachers, such as ‘acting on’ visualizations to improve student learning. It is thus likely that visualizations both shape what counts as educational quality and signal to administrators and educators what they should prioritize. This raises important questions about how data visualizations reconfigure human judgment and decision-making in a digital and datafied age. While powerful, however, data visualizations can never fully determine the social contexts they are part of. Users may take them up in unanticipated ways. Thus, it is equally important to examine how educators and administrators make sense of data visualizations, ignore them, resist them or put them to other uses than those anticipated by the designers.

This conference symposium will explore the role of data visualizations in education across Europe and beyond. It does so by comparing different European and international cases of how data visualizations are used in education, including historical and contemporary examples. The symposium includes contributions examining both the production and consumption of data visualizations. Across the different contributions, it will also discuss conceptual and methodological questions arising from the study of educational data visualizations.

Due to the expanding use of visualisations in the digital sphere, our sensemaking of the world increasingly depends on how information and data is assembled for display (Kennedy et al., 2016), also in the field of education. Over the past years, growing critical attention has consequently been put on practices of design, which lie behind these visualisations and consist of a multi-layered process, reaching from strategic decisions and the involvement of various actors over the development of data-architectures to the creation of visual experiences that effectuate the behaviour of educational actors (Decuypere, 2021). Taking this crucial role of design for visualisations as a starting point, our contribution focuses on how three different schools in Hamburg, Germany, (re-)designed the interface of a Moodle-based learning management system (LMS) according to their pedagogical and organisational ideas. The case of Hamburg’s LMS is particularly interesting since the system´s original design on the one hand gives a lot of freedom to schools to visualise their individual ideas due to its open-source structure. On the other hand, the LMS design was deliberately pre-limited by the educational agency, thus inscribing particular ideas of schooling and its potential visualisation into the product. Assuming that platforms are no self-contained units, but rather constantly (re)enacted through interaction with their specific environment (Karasti & Blomberg, 2018), we worked with the three schools and media educators, following a Participatory as well as Critical Design approach (Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022), to design individual and context-related LMS interfaces.1 Integrating teachers and students as future users into the design process, the central idea was to empower them to understand the technology and, consequently, to develop a reflected and creative engagement with what it displays (Cumbo & Selwyn, 2021). Combining ethnographic insights from these co-design processes (Pink et al., 2022) with platform walkthroughs (Light et al., 2018), this contribution shows how oftentimes invisible design practices substantially influence the visual manifestations of LMS and, thus, the resulting data-based enactment of ‘the school’. Still, those practices can be partially made visible using a critical co-design approach and, in doing so, empower schools to constructively deal with datafication.

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, Special Issue: Instituting socio-technical education futures: Encounters for technical democracy, data justice, and post-automation, 1–13. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2156538. Cumbo, B., & Selwyn, N. (2021). Using Participatory Design Approaches in Educational Research. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 45 (1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2021.1902981. Decuypere, M. (2021). The Topologies of Data Practices: A Methodological Introduction. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 10 (1), 67-84. https://doi.org/10.7821/naer.2021.1.650. Karasti, H., & Blomberg, J. (2018). Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 27 (2), 233–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9296-7. Kennedy, H., Hill, R. L., Aiello, G., & Allen, W. (2016). The Work That Visualisation Conventions Do. Information, Communication & Society, 19 (6), 715–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1153126. Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The Walkthrough Method: An Approach to the Study of Apps. New Media & Society, 20 (3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438. Pink, S., Fors, V., Lanzeni, D., Duque, M., Strengers, Y., & Sumartojo, S. (2022). Design Ethnography: Research, Responsibility, and Futures. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003083665.

This article explores how data visualizations come to matter, and how different types of data visualizations are ascribed different modes of existence. Data and visualizations of data are widespread within education (Decuypere & Landri, 2021; Williamson, 2016; Wyatt-Smith et al., 2021), however different types of data and their visualizations take different forms, meanings and have different journeys. In this article I pay attention to the data visualizations found in digital learning materials in the Danish primary and lower secondary school system. For the oldest students in the Danish primary and lower secondary schools, digital learnings materials have largely replaced analogue learnings materials and books. Some of these digital learning materials offer teachers graphic overviews about student performance during and/or after lessons. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Danish schools and among Danish teachers, I have studied how teachers interact with, make sense of, and how they use these visualizations. Data visualizations in digital learning materials vary from other types of data visualizations, e.g., from national tests, and international large-scale assessments. They typically do not travel as far as the abovementioned types of data (and their visualizations) but are engaged more intimately by individual teachers. Yet, they are entangled in wider eco-systems or assemblages beyond the teachers that interact with them including both humans and nonhumans (like school leadership, technologies, local municipalities, and policies). In order to explore how the data visualizations come to matter, I build on and draw inspiration from feminist new materialist work (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2022; Haraway, 2008, 2016). I build on the conceptualization of data (and their visualizations) as more-than-human phenomena invested with diverse forms of vitality (Lupton, 2020). Data are performative (Staunæs et al., 2021), they are local and inextricably entangled (Loukissas, 2019). By paying attention to the situated, local, and embodies experiences of teachers engaging data visualizations (in digital learning materials), I explore how teachers make and enact data (and their visualizations) and how the data make and enact teachers (Lupton, 2020). I argue that data visualizations come to matter in different ways and that they are ascribed different modes of existence. Some visualizations become ‘comatose’ – abandoned and almost dead, while others become ‘vibrant’ – full of life and influence. At the same time, I look at how (some) visualizations also contribute to teacher becomings.

Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2022). Posthuman feminism. Polity. Decuypere, M., & Landri, P. (2021). Governing by visual shapes: University rankings, digital education platforms and cosmologies of higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1720760 Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Loukissas, Y. A. (2019). All data are local: Thinking critically in a data-driven society. The MIT Press. Lupton, D. (2020). Data selves: More-than-human perspectives. Polity. Staunæs, D., Juelskjær, Malou, Bjerg, Helle, & Olesen, Kristian Gylling. (2021). Datasans: Etisk skole- og uddannelsesledelse med data (1. udgave). Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Williamson, B. (2016). Digital education governance: Data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments. Journal of Education Policy, 31(2), 123–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1035758 Wyatt-Smith, C., Lingard, B., & Heck, E. (Eds.). (2021). Digital disruption in teaching and testing: Assessments, big data, and the transformation of schooling. Routledge.

Sub-paper had to be withdrawn.

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The desire to optimize and control education by predicting the future plays an increasing role in contemporary educational governance. Today, economic forecasts of future labor market needs constitute one type of governance technology of importance for educational governance, and a technology of future-making (Wenzel, 2022). Through websites and reports, visual images of forecasted futures stage higher education in relation to a desired future and furthermore imply particular policy decisions to be rational and timely in order to achieve this future. In these visual images, the uncertainty of the future is often masked, as visual shapes of intervals and areas are replaced by lines and bars. Whereas lines and bars indicate an exact prediction, intervals and areas indicate a range of more or less probable future outcomes, which is more in line with the statistical forecasting methods developed by economics (Elliott & Timmermann, 2016). Based on two case studies, including a Danish and a Norwegian economic forecasting of labor market needs, and the methodological and analytical concept of topology (Allen, 2016; Decuypere, 2021; Decuypere, Hartong, & van de Oudeweetering, 2022), this paper explores different visual approaches to future-making in such technologies and the implications of these for the promotion of particular policy-driven concepts of the future of education and rational and timely policy decisions. The cases include forecasts of the future educational profiles of Norwegian graduates, produced by Statistisk Sentralbyrå in Norway (Statistisk Sentralbyrå, 2020), and forecasts of the future educational profiles of Danish graduates combined with forecasts of the labor market needs of the public sector in Denmark, produced by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Research (Committee on Better University Programs, 2018). These technologies are conceptualized as topological forms that via their ways of visually connecting data points describing the past with data points describing the future have particular temporalizing effects. They will be studied in terms of their architecture (Decuypere 2021), including how the different data points in each technology are generated, how they relate to each other, and how they are extended into the future, combined with studies of their interface (Decuypere 2021), including how this is visualized differently in forecasts disseminated in foreground policy texts and in background methodology texts. The analysis will furthermore draw on interviews with experts who have been involved in producing the forecasts. The findings will be analyzed in light of the higher education policy circumstances characterizing Denmark and Norway respectively.

Allen, J. (2016). Topologies of Power: Beyond territory and networks. London: Routledge. Committee on Better University Programs. (2018). University Programs for the Future [Universitetsuddannelser til fremtiden]. Retrieved from https://ufm.dk/publikationer/2018/filer/rapport-universitetsuddannelser-til-fremtiden.pdf Decuypere, M. (2021). The Topologies of Data Practices: A Methodological Introduction. Journal of new approaches in educational research, 10(1), 67-84. doi:10.7821/naer.2021.1.650 Decuypere, M., Hartong, S., & van de Oudeweetering, K. (2022). Introduction―Space-and time-making in education: Towards a topological lens. European educational research journal EERJ, 147490412210763. doi:10.1177/14749041221076306 Statistisk Sentralbyrå. (2020). Framskrivinger av arbeidsstyrken og sysselsettingen etter utdanning mot 2040. Retrieved from Oslo–Kongsvinger: Wenzel, M. (2022). Taking the Future More Seriously: From Corporate Foresight to “Future-Making”. Academy of Management perspectives, 36(2), 845-850. doi:10.5465/amp.2020.0126 Elliott, G., & Timmermann, A. (2016). Economic Forecasting. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ Press.

Education today is challenged to address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and migration, intensifying shifting patterns of settlement and a growing diversity all over the globe. The words “sustainability” and “diversity,” in this context, had become standard public, organizational and policy injunctions and a normative call in academic research. The ubiquitous use of the terms “sustainability” and “diversity” signals also ways in which social heterogeneity and environmental changes are problematized and governed, especially in the Global North. In consequence, the terms of “sustainability” and “diversity” became increasingly flexible and plastic, besides becoming notions through which or in the name of which to govern, regulate and educate, “something that needs to be understood, managed, acted upon, celebrated, considered, rethought…” (Matejskova & Antonsich, 2015, p. 2.). This symposium seeks to highlight first, the flexibility and plasticity of these terms as they appear in various early childhood and continuing education curricula as well as in children’s understanding of the world, reproducing notions of the “other” and human exceptionalism. Second, we pay special attention to how these notions intersect with ideas of the nation, nature and childhood, highlighting the oddness, contradictoriness and de/politicization of these terms in policies, curricula and the prescribed practices they produce. In general, this symposium returns to the classical sociological question as to how current challenges, environmental and societal conditions, result in specific educational policies, ideas and processes (Weber, 1921; cf. Becker, 2019).

The three papers are tied together with their specific focus on the nation-state as the prime organizing political and social force (Gans 2003) and nationalism as an effort to create commonality in a group of people by promoting national subject formation and inculcating the aspirations of citizenship. A focus on the nation helps us to question current national education discourses in light of diversity and sustainability, levels of inclusiveness in society and how responses to these national discourses can and do occur, and how debates about diversity and exclusion take shape (first and second papers). It also helps us to highlight how intersections of nation and nature, on the one hand, contours national subject formation through nature, and how through the curricula attachments to the national land or ‘nature’ are being shaped. On the other hand, we show the contradictions between nature and nation discourses within the frames of sustainability and diversity (second and third papers).

Historically, the state’s interest in children and its citizens has always been about a nation’s future (Millei & Imre, 2016). Today, the multiple existential threats that we have brought upon ourselves question the very possibility of a future for humanity. This necessitates education to be reimagined and reconfigured beyond the nation and stewardship for nature (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). The heterogeneous relations included in diversity needs to be expanded to include “more-than-human socialities” (Tsing, 2013). Social justice expanded to ecological social justice that pertains to ‘how we live in the world’ and ‘how to create conditions for life’ in an interdependent manner with other-than-human companions. Education enlivened with these kinds of worldly relation making entails “the recommunalizing, reconnecting, relocalizing, de-individualizing, in short, re-realizing ourselves otherwise” with this new politics of relationality (Escobar, 2021, p. 8). Agency in this politics of education radically reconfigures the nation as a more-than-human sociality, expands solidarity, and replaces exceptionalism – human or national – with terms of a radically inclusive and interdependent world.

International migration is, as argued by de Haas, Castles and Miller (2020) one of the most emotive issues of our times, raising intense feelings in relation to national identity and belonging, as well as security issues. Since long back, integration of newly arrived migrants has been a debated issue and courses for newly arrived adult migrants have been offered, most building on learning the language of the new country. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, courses with the aim of strengthening and transmitting the new countries’ norms and values have been increasingly introduced and has become one of the dominant migrant integration policies in Western Europe (Heinemann, 2017; Joppke, 2007). This paper aims to bring empirically based knowledge in this educational field, building on participant observations in civic orientation classes for newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden (see von Brömssen et al., 2022; Milani et al., 2021). This case study explores the overarching constructed discourse about the Other through language, pronoun patterns and the attribution of positive and negative judgements about society and ways of living and being (Statham, 2022). The overarching discourse constructs Sweden as a “success story” where most things are arranged and regulated (Hirdman, 2000) by the Swedish state and its welfare systems. We will present this overall structured nationalist discourse by drawing on examples from interactions about nature, religion and education in the civic orientation classes. This research is particularly relevant at this historical juncture because such educational initiatives have become tied to citizenship requirements (Borevi, Jensen & Mouritsen, 2017; Larin, 2020). This is also the case in Sweden where the neo-nationalist “Tidö-agreement” signed by the newly elected government states that civic orientation and knowledge of Swedish will become legal requirements for permanent residence and Swedish citizenship. We argue in this paper that civic orientation courses for newly arrived migrants reproduce an overarching discourse about the Other, which is embedded in nationalist and neo-nationalist sentiments and hardly can contribute to integration into the Swedish society.

Borevi, K., Jensen, K. K. & Mouritsen, P. (2017). The civic turn of immigrant integration policies in the Scandinavian welfare states. Comparative Migration Studies, 5, 9. von Brömssen, K., Milani, T., Spehar, A. & Bauer, S. (2022). “Swedes’ relations to their government are based on trust.” Banal Nationalism in Civic Orientation Courses for Newly Arrived Adult Migrants in Sweden. Futures of Education, Culture and Nature - Learning to Become, 1(1), 71-88. de Haas, H., Castles, S. & Miller, M. J. (2020). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world, 6th ed., Bloomsbury Academic. Heinemann, A. M. B. (2017) The making of ‘good citizens’: German courses for migrants and refugees, Studies in the Education of Adults, 49(2), 177-195. Hirdman, Y. (2000). Att lägga livet tillrätta: studier i svensk folkhemspolitik. Stockholm University, Sweden. Larin, S. J. (2020). Is it really about values? Civic nationalism and migrant integration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(1), 127-141. Milani, T., Bauer, S., Carlson, M., Spehar, A. & von Brömssen, K. (2021). Citizenship as status, habitus and acts: Language requirements and civic orientation in Sweden. Citizenship Studies, 25(6), 756-772. Statham, S. (2022). Critical Discourse Analysis. A Practical Introduction to Power in Language. Routledge.

Drawing on a project carried out by an international group of scholars, this presentation aims to discuss the ways in which childhood, nature and nation are entangled in early childhood education curricula in Australia, the Nordic countries (Sweden and Norway) and post-socialist countries experiencing the revival of nationalistic tendencies (Hungary, Poland). While the links between both children/childhood and nature, and children and nation have been long explored in research (Gullestad, 1997; Millei & Imre, 2016), we situated our analysis in the context of the multiple crises, foremost the climate crisis, that the planet now faces. The aim was to reflect on the question whether the conceptualizations of childhood, nature and nation entanglements in the curricula enable the recreation of education for societies experiencing multiple crises (CWRC, 2020), and to develop alternative imaginaries of naturecultures for early childhood education curricula where politics focuses on terra that sustains life on Earth. Several conceptualizations of linkages between children, nation and nature can be reconstructed in the curricula. Most of them uphold human exceptionalism and a notion of nature as homeland tied to patriotism and empty of life. These include: - nature directly linked to the nation, with children learning about their countries' natural environment, developing admiration for its beauty and engaging in activities carried out in nature that deem to constitute the national identity, which can be interpreted as instrumentalizing nature in the ‘pedagogy of nation’ (Millei, 2018); - nature as an object for children to learn about rather than learning with, which works to retain the nature/culture and learning subject/learnt-about-object binaries (CWRC, 2020; Malone, 2016); - nature as something to be protected through actions based on human-invented technologies, including by children posited as nature's carers who safeguard it, a conceptualization that limits the children-nature relationship to stewardship (Taylor, 2017); - children as connected with and belonging to nature, in a wider network of interconnected living organisms and abiotic environment, a conceptualization that potentially opens up the possibility to move beyond the human- and nation-centric approach to nature and start learning to become with the world (CWRC, 2020). We argue that in the context of the planetary environmental crisis, the narrow conceptualizations on nature within the national boundaries and as an outside object of children's learning and care that dominate in the curricula are untenable. For education to respond to the current situation, new ways of thinking about children and nature are required.

Common Worlds Research Collective (CWRC). (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report. Gullestad, M. (1997). A passion for boundaries. Reflections on connections between the everyday lives of children and discourses on the nation in contemporary Norway. Childhood, 4(1), 19–42. Malone, K. (2016). Posthumanist approaches to theorizing children’s human-nature relations. In K. Nairn & P. Kraftl (Eds.), Space, place, and environment (pp. 185–206). Springer. Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Eds.). (2016). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. 10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452

Early childhood / educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world. Education, however, needs a new political attractor during anthropogenic climate change that differently orient political engagement with the world for education. We think with the four political attractors Latour (2018) describes: the national, global, planetary and Earth, and Cobb’s (1977) notion of the child’s primary relatedness to the world. We explore children’s environmental imagination in their drawings and associated stories to highlight the kinds of politics present in their views promoted by current imaginations. Then, we spin these stories further with speculative experiences of our own relation with the world together with Latour’s ideas and point to a new political object the Earth and Earthly politics for education.

Cobb, E. M. (1977). The ecology of imagination in childhood. Spring Publications Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Oxford UK: Polity Press.

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

This proposal focuses on forms of education that exist in contemporary initiatives to recover Europe and consequences that these forms have for action in our common decision over education. The research case is various recovery plans of Europe after Covid. Interestingly, education appears in two forms: a means and an end of recovery. Through the social topology of agency, I scrutinise the patterns that enabled or prevented some action looking at a whole range of elements involved in it – positions for action, actors, audiences, rationalities, logics of work, and justifications.

During the Covid pandemic, various European-scale initiatives for recovery appeared, notably the European Commission’s program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which is explicitly aimed at the “recovery of Europe which works for everyone”. This recovery is strongly pedagogised (of and through education) and connected to technology as a solution and as an end (digitalisation). This recovery project models the educational future significantly since it is connected to generous funding and, formally, to the national governments.

However, the case of taking up the NGEU by local governments involves many new relations among actors, labour, technics, and reason. These new relations unsettled the taken-for-granted geographies and jurisdictions and revealed that the problem of agency and the problem of existence of Europe(s) are entangled and relational precisely in connection to education. The new relations of distancing and reaching (Allen, 2020) among actors, positions, rationalities, and audiences have consequences for a specific division of education. Not only various Europes may exist but also various worlds of education – and this division is not necessarily balanced and equal (Mitescu-Manea et al., 2021). Through field research in the public debates and desk research of media entries and documents, I will demonstrate how education as means and as an end brings two worlds while excluding the latter from public action. Specifically in the Czech context, if education is the solution to something else, it is less of education (Wirthová & Barták, 2023). However, this argument needs more comparative research. Modern topographies of education and especially positions of educational actors are changed within these recoveries – the possibility of agency is inscribed in different coordinates (and this also troubles how to imagine human agency in it because modern imaginaries are based on subject). Therefore, I am focused on the new ecology of agency which distances and diversifies education as a means and an end.

My theoretical approach is driven by recent social topology (Allen, 2016; Decuypere et al., 2022; Massey, 2005), but I connect it with two scholars’ accounts on subjectivity for the purpose of accessing to the relation between forms of action and forms of education which is enacted/materialised through production and placing of subjectivity. Engaging in the late thinking of Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher dealing with the existence of Europe (Francesco Tava & Meacham, 2016; Patočka, 1999, 2018) and space (Patočka, 2016), we can see that modern objectivity and rationality is impossible without subjectivity; and who has the subject can seize the object, which was generalised to the degree of “falling Europe”. Engaging in the thinking of relational sociologist Jean-Sébastien Guy, we can see, however, that subjectivity and identity are produced in so-called non-metric forms (Guy, 2019), which generates groups, not in metric forms generating flows. In that, only those may “have the object” who are in non-metric forms, while flows do not produce identities. I will demonstrate how these topological practices of subject/action is entangled in the division of education into worlds of the flow of toilers of the education and the group of men of change which do not overlap with traditional jurisdictions.

In this contribution, I argue that building on the diversity and combined strengths of different approaches and perspectives to citizenship education (CE) is essential to creating a sense of shared, public responsibility for both the new generations and our common world, which appears to be lacking in the current, crisis-driven approaches to CE. I will argue that looking for a common ground between sociological and pedagogical accounts of the reality of schooling in citizenship education, might provide a fertile starting point.

In democratic societies, questions about democracy have always been closely intertwined with questions about education: asking what kind of education would best prepare the people (demos) for their participation in the ruling (kratos) of their society (Biesta, 2006). Today, however, a myriad of ‘crises’ and issues is raising questions about how we can continue to (co)exist and govern our (co)existence democratically, and young people or new generations find themselves confronted most directly by the extraordinary challenges and questions these crises present (Riddle & Apple, 2019). One such crisis, the Covid pandemic, has reinvigorated calls on both the European and global level to rethink or renew citizenship education (CE), as a crucial contribution to a better world and global recovery after the pandemic (Unesco Institute for Lifelong learning, 2021). In this regard, Matjaž Gruden, Director of Democratic Participation for the Council of Europe (n.d) stated for instance that developing democratic competences through CE can “help learners adapt to the current crisis in a positive and constructive manner, avoiding the pitfalls of social fragmentation and extremism.” I will argue that such a common focus of CE as adapting young people while leaving out the responsibilities of other actors and contexts in CE, rather deepens than avoids such pitfalls. My argumentation will be based on three main theoretical underpinnings. First, a reflection on the notion of crisis and its educational implications. A crisis does not necessarily refer to a negative event, but rather to a decisive moment or a point that provides the opportunity “to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter” (Arendt, 2006/1961, p.171, emphasis added). In the specific case of responding to the Covid crisis through citizenship education in schools, this essence can be said to be equally political and pedagogical of nature. Whereas sociological and political approaches to CE stress its political character, pedagogical perspectives can contribute to the recognition that it is also, and foremost, a pedagogical undertaking.

Second, I explore this dual nature of CE through the lens of both critical and post-critical theoretical perspectives on education, citizenship education and their role in a ‘better future’ and pursuing social justice (Hodgson,Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2018). In short, I will explore how (citizenship) education can find its starting point, not in deploring what not-yet is or what we fear and condemn about the present state of the world and education, but rather in the good that is already there, and the things that we cherish and value (Hodgson et al., 2018). However, we also need to acknowledge that schools do have a responsibility and a role to play in striving for a more equal and just democratic society, by educating young people to take part in that society, for instance through CE. Thirdly, I separate political ends from pedagogical processes of CE, and political from pedagogical responsibilities, based on Simons and Masschelein’s (2010) distinction between political and pedagogical subjectivation and Biesta’s (2010, 2020) triad of the aims and functions of education as qualification, socialization and subjectification.

This paper offers a work of a theoretical nature aimed to problematize the notion of “commons” in the field of education in the light of a specific experience of commoning in education: the Bachilleratos Populares (henceforth BPs) in Argentina. For this purpose, it deploys the neo-Marxist approach to the commons as a theoretical-analytical grid in light of the movement of BPs. The BPs are free and self-managed high schools created by grassroots social organizations after the Argentine crisis of 2001 to provide an option for youth and adults to finish their secondary education as a response to the gap the neoliberal reform left in this educational modality during the 1990s. After some BPs received state recognition to issue degrees in 2007, their number increased rapidly to almost a hundred BPs in 2015. Drawing upon this empirical experience, this paper discusses the limits and possibilities of commoning experiences in education to enhance social justice and promote social transformation.

The “common” has been explored in the last decade —with several formulations, such as “the commons”, “commoning”, “the common good” or “the communal”— as a loose category to explore alternatives to the neoliberal reform in education (Collet & Grinberg, 2022; Revista de Educación, 2022/395). This project draws upon a specific conception of the commons developed within the neo-Marxist approach (for an overall review of this approach, see Pérez & Zamora, 2022). This perspective gained prominence in the European context after the 2008 crisis. However, commons experiences took shape beforehand in Latin America, within the cycle of social struggle in the 1990s, through a big number of community-popular initiatives —commoning— that were autonomous from the state and the market, self-managed, and horizontal to respond to the (re)production needs of life that the capitalist order systematically threatens (Gutiérrez, 2017). These initiatives include soup kitchens, popular economy cooperatives, recovered companies, and Popular Education initiatives, such as the BPs in Argentina. In this way, these community-popular initiatives are a hopeful reservoir of knowledge in movement built and accumulated in the South.

From the neo-Marxist approach, the commons are defined in opposition to the processes of enclosure (commercialization and privatization), as “the bonds that we build to continue being, to make life be life; links that cannot be limited to institutions or things (water, land, nature)” (Zibechi, 2019, p. 59). Without aiming to establish a replicable model, Federici and Caffentzis (in Federici, 2019) list several features of commoning practices: utopian character, horizontality, equitable access to satisfying social needs, and direct democracy formulas. Based on these principles, the commons claim their autonomy from the market and from the state. Thus, the commons distance themselves from “the public”, understood as ‘which is owned, managed, controlled, and regulated by and for the state’ (Federici, 2019, p. 96).

From the neo-Marxist perspective of the commons, the neoliberal educational reform of the last four decades constitutes an enclosure movement on education and schooling (Saltman, 2018). As a constructive response to this neoliberal enclosure, this approach has explored the guiding principles that should inspire educational commons (democratic, feminist, decolonial, or eco-socialist). However, far little research has connected this theoretical perspective with empirical observation, and none have systematically addressed the intersections between the educational commons and the state. This is a significant gap given the crucial role of the state in the construction, control, and high regulation of the formal education space (Green, 2013).

This paper is framed in the research project EduCommon. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101027465.

The recent curriculum reform in Norway brought critical thinking about power relations to the fore, establishing this as a «core element» in social studies education (The Norwegian directorate of Education and Training, 2020). Previous analyses have argued that Norwegian social studies curriculum promote a «selected critical thinking» (Børhaug, 2014), that may contribute to obscuring the reproduction of racist and nationally exceptionalist archives of knowledge (Eriksen, 2021; Jore, 2022). Of particular significance is the absence of Norway`s colonial history related to the colonization of Sápmi (Eriksen, 2018). Furthermore, this is interrelated with how race, racism and whiteness are currently dismissed as relevant analytical concepts for understanding Norwegian society today, manifested in educational discourses (Fylkesnes, 2018).

The aim of this paper is to explore how the ignorance in imaginaries concerning Norwegian history and society inform and shape the options for critical thinking in social studies. How can the acknowledgement of Norways colonial legacy contribute towards better understandings of power relations in todays` society? Can this strategic exploration of the “dark sides” of history and sociability be done without depriving any sense of hope for the future with the students? The analytical framework for this paper is based on post- and decolonial perspectives, making possible analyses of coloniality. As Quijano (2000) describes, colonialism did not end with historical colonialism based on territorial occupation. It installed enduring power and knowledge structures known as coloniality. Coloniality is thus a full dependence of the models of thinking, making, and interpreting the world based on the norms created and imposed by/in Western modernity. Our research question is thus: How can post- and decolonial perspectives help analyze and inform critical thinking in social studies?

We apply empirical examples, described as “telling cases” (Andreotti, 2011), to discuss central theoretical and didactical insights. The empirical base for the article is four such cases, derived from two doctoral studies investigating social studies education at level 5-10 (Eriksen, 2021; Jore, 2022). The analysis of these cases reveal that critical thinking is displayed and present in the classrooms, not least in the students` abilities to ask critical and creative questions. At the same time, we argue that many opportunities for critical thinking remain lost related to the lack of acknowledgement of coloniality.

A variety of scholarships shed light on how the significance of colonial legacy is made invisible in the Nordics (Lóftsdottir & Jensen, 2012), but implications for education are little explored. This article's objective is to explore what post- and decolonial perspectives may contribute to curriculum and educational practices, particularly concerning critical thinking. As projects for critical thinking, post- and decolonial are indebted to Saidian critiques of power and knowledge (1995). The approaches highlight systematical absences and sanctioned ignorances in narratives about history and society (Spivak, 1988), ambivalences, and dismissal of western modernity as an alleged universal epistemological and political project (Santos, 2018). Post- and decolonial analyses share the contestation of the colonial world and knowledge production established with and through European colonialism and an emphasis on understanding the emergence of modernity in the historical contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. However, the theoretical traditions also hold distinctions. It has been suggested as a difference that postcolonial critiques focus more on agents of colonial cultures, while the world-system critiques of the modernity/coloniality school emphasize structures of capital accumulation and injustice (Bhambra, 2014). In this paper, we acknowledge the differences and internal theoretical debates, we apply tools from both strands of theory that we see as particularly relevant for analyzing and informing educational discourses and practices. Hence, we apply the concept “analyses of coloniality” throughout the article.

Globally, we are seeing a resurgence of white nationalism and white supremacist extremism that is becoming more mainstream, such as in recent European election results. In schooling, this has been seen in the voting against Critical Race Theory informing curriculum or being taught in schools in the USA and the UK (Gatwiri & Anderson, 2021). And at the same time interconnected movements for Indigenous sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, refugee justice and anti-racism offer a reckoning with multiple forms of racial domination and injustice. In the project from which this paper is drawn (Sriprakash et al, 2022) we aimed to understand how contemporary white domination is part of a long and enduring system, rather than something new or just recently noticed.

This paper takes as its focus the relationship between the settler colonial state and education (both formal education institutions and informal education practices). While focused on the context of Australia, we see this paper as connected to analyses of colonial orders globally. Indeed, our paper is premised on the need for dialogue across contexts on questions of colonialism and race and informed by Goldberg’s (2009) notion of racisms as related and reliant on each other across the globe.

The processes and practices of the settler colonial state are steeped in racial hierarchies, inherited from colonialism and racial capitalism. Taking as a starting point Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) analysis of the settler colonial state as invested in patriarchal white sovereignty, we examine the efforts made by the settler state to create and uphold Australia as a white possession in the face of unceded Indigenous sovereignty.

Importantly in this project we understand whiteness to be a structural formation, shaped by material interests of racial domination under colonialism and capitalism and constantly negotiated and enlivened through the governance of social and political life (Sriprakash et al, 2022, 14). Thus whiteness in Australia and other British settler colonies is formed through settler colonial networks of social and cultural power. Understanding whiteness in these material, social and cultural terms and as part of a power hierarchy enables awareness of the mutability and contingency of whiteness, that it is not something reducible to a fixed identity or even a physical appearance.

In this paper we present a theoretical framework we have developed to investigate and understand racial dominance in settler colonial contexts and the role of and implications for education. The framework brings together racial capitalism (see Melamed, 2015), epistemologies of white ignorance (see Mills, 2007) and feeling-states (drawing on Ahmed 2004; Kenway & Fahey, 2011; Boler, 1999; Attwood, 2017) along with the theorising of the white possessive (Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

This symposium focuses on new forms of value in digital education and the role of the educational technology (Edtech) industry in constructing these forms. Edtech is fast evolving, which we can notice from the fast-rising number of established companies over the past decade (Komljenovic et al., 2021), increasing investment, particularly venture capital investment, in Edtech start-ups (HolonIQ, 2022), rising number of Edtech unicorns, i.e. companies valued at more than $1 billion (Brighteye Ventures, 2022), and increase in acquisitions in the industry (ibid).

Edtech products and services are already adopted by schools and universities as institutional users, as well as students and parents as individuals (Hartong & Decuypere, 2023). Edtech is also increasingly prominent in and supported by supra-national, national and institutional policies around the world (Williamson and Hogan, 2020). Emerging critical research finds that Edtech structures teaching and learning processes and determines how education is governed (Decuypere et al., 2021). It, therefore, matters what kind of Edtech is being innovated and rolled out into education. However, surprisingly, critical research is still scarce to study Edtech, its actors, practices and processes (cf. Macgilchrist, 2021). This symposium tackles this research gap with a specific focus on value of and in Edtech – a crucial matter in any form of economic exchange, but thus far not often explicit object of critical educational research (Doganova, 2018).

Papers in this symposium collectively argue that we need new theoretical and conceptual tools to understand digital platforms, digital data and their governance in education. We do not satisfy ourselves with traditional macroeconomic lenses, such as neoliberalism (Baltodano, 2012) or commodification (Amaral et al., 2018), because they do not have explanatory power to explain and study new trends, such as the shifting nature and newly emerging forms of educational governance. Here we notice a shift in the realisation of value away from an exchange in the market (as with commodities where there is an exchange of ownership rights) towards paying economic rents (as with assets, for example, where digital users pay a subscription to access an app and the app owner keeps the ownership and control over it). The symposium introduces the theoretical lens of assetization (Birch and Muniesa, 2020) aligned with a broader research strand of valuation studies that study ‘valuation’ as a social practice, and value in general as “the outcome of a process of social work and the result of a wide range of activities (from production and combination to circulation and assessment) that aim at making things valuable” (Helgesson & Muniesa, 2013:6).

The symposium addresses key themes and trends of how value is constructed in or extracted from the education sector. First, the papers analyse new (human and non-human) actor constellations in the field of edtech, including Edtech start-ups, investors and market intelligence agencies. Second, the symposium unveils underlying mechanisms and tensions that arise with the emergence of these new actor types and Edtech services and products, such as injustice and racialisation, that arise in the wake of such new evolutions. Third, the symposium discusses dimensions of valuation, including temporality, in/stability, innovation and expectations. Fourth, we study various ways in which valuation creates new sorts of temporalities (past, present, and future). Finally, we present a variety of methodological approaches to studying value and Edtech (team ethnographies, database analyses, rapid interviews, document analysis) and research sites (trade fairs, news, Internet sources, databases). In doing so, the symposium at once systematizes our knowledge of how value is being produced, extracted, and ‘done’ in and by the edtech sector and aims to give new impetus to better understanding the specificity of the edtech sector as a whole.

This paper is situated in the field of critical edtech studies that aim to gain nuanced empirical understanding of recent developments in the edtech scene (Decuypere & Hartong, 2022; Macgilchrist, 2021). One example hereof is the edtech start-up sector; a sector that has thus far hardly received any scholarly attention (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2022; Tripathi et al., 2019). Seeking to obtain a more profound understanding of this sector, this paper presents a team ethnography conducted with an international team of 8 researchers at the end of 2022, in a trade fair that was exclusively focused on edtech start-ups. Our main research interest is what makes the edtech start-up sector a specific sector distinguishable from the general edtech sector, as well as how it seeks to create and extract value out of the educational sector. As such, our contribution seeks to contribute to emerging scholarship on the importance of analysing trade fairs in education (e.g., Player-Koro et al., 2022; Gulson & Witzenberger, 2022). Analytically, our analysis is focused on the discursive construction of value through stories, rhetorical constructs (e.g., ‘unicorns’; ‘ecosystems), and sociomaterial artefacts present in the trade fair (ibid.; Birch, 2022). The preliminary results of our analysis indicate different areas of value creation. First, even though the edtech start-up sector strives for global reach, we can at the same time discern a very localised ‘geography of tech production’, in which the hosting city of the fair seeks to extract value for the city itself as ‘innovation complex’ (cf. Zukin, 2020). Second, we see that venture capital is made central in the education sector, by means of projecting future value into the present (cf. Birch, 2022). Third, we discern the rising importance of ‘meta-organisations’ that create value for the edtech start-up sector by adopting intermediary positions between start-up corporations and schools. Fourth, and last, we can approach the fair itself as creating expert knowledge for start-ups: amongst all types of valuations, expert knowledge on the specificity of the educational sector – as a sector very distinct from traditional sectors to invest in – is the one that matters most. In conclusion, the paper argues that education is a very specific field, characterised by unique features (e.g., harder to ‘access’ and ‘scale’) that need to be taken into account if we want to fully edtech start-ups as new actors in the edtech scene.

Birch, K. (2022). Reflexive expectations in innovation financing: An analysis of venture capital as a mode of valuation. Social Studies of Science, 03063127221118372. Decuypere, M., & Hartong, S. (2022). Edunudge. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-15. Gulson, K. N., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Repackaging authority: artificial intelligence, automated governance and education trade shows. Journal of Education Policy, 37(1), 145-160. Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? Three responses. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 243-249. Player-Koro, C., Jobér, A., & Bergviken Rensfeldt, A. (2022). De-politicised effects with networked governance? An event ethnography study on education trade fairs. Ethnography and Education, 17(1), 1-16. Tripathi, N., Seppänen, P., Boominathan, G., Oivo, M., & Liukkunen, K. (2019). Insights into start-up ecosystems through exploration of multi-vocal literature. Information and Software Technology, 105, 56-77. Williamson, B., & Komljenovic, J. (2022). Investing in imagined digital futures: the techno-financial ‘futuring’ of edtech investors in higher education. Critical Studies in Education, 1-16. Zukin, S. (2020). Seeing like a city: how tech became urban. Theory and society, 49(5), 941-964.

This paper argues that the racialised extraction of value is central to education technology that uses forms of artificial intelligence. Rather than suggest that racialisation is a problem to be ameliorated in EdTech, this paper contends that racialisation is essential to both the operation of AI supported EdTech, and its capacity to garner market share. To make this argument the paper has two parts. The first part of the paper outlines the centrality of racialisation to the operation of AI supported Edtech, focusing on two areas that underpin systems that use facial recognition technologies. The first area examines the links between race and training sets, including issues of exclusion and misrecognition of people of colour (Crawford & Paglen, 2021). This is now a common focus where addressing bias is seen as a key remedy for racial bias. Conversely, this paper draws on work that highlights that including people of colour in training sets can create more accurate systems, but not less pernicious ones as inclusion can be deleterious for historically marginalised and surveilled populations (Benjamin, 2019). The second area is algorithmic. While most focus on the links between race and technology are on data, there is an important but underexamined dimension in the historical racialisation of machine learning methods and algorithms. This includes machine learning methods used in common AI technologies in EdTech such as facial recognition. For example, facial recognition technologies use the Mahalanobis similarity measure which has racial origins in colonial rule in India (Taylor, Gulson, & McDuie‐Ra, 2021). The second part of the paper focuses on the notion of racialised extraction of value, drawing on critical theories of race and technology, including those related to racial capitalism (McMillan Cottom, 2020). This notion of racial capitalism provides insights in this paper to the way education technology derives both social and economic value through racialised data and algorithmic practices (e.g., Henne, Shelby, & Harb, 2021). In education technology this can include the production of market value, simultaneous with the production of allocative and representational harms, such as racial profiling while using education platforms (Nichols & Garcia, 2022). This paper concludes by contending that the racialised extraction of value is both necessary for including people of colour in Edtech (e.g., being able to use the products in the markets of the majority, non-White world), and yet also reinforces the historical and pernicious surveillance of people of colour in education.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity. Crawford, K., & Paglen, T. (2021). Excavating AI: the politics of images in machine learning training sets. AI & SOCIETY, 36(4), 1105-1116. doi:10.1007/s00146-021-01162-8 Henne, K., Shelby, R., & Harb, J. (2021). The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211055898. doi:10.1177/20539517211055898 McMillan Cottom, T. (2020). Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 6(4), 441-449. doi:10.1177/2332649220949473 Nichols, T. P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform Studies in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 209-230. doi:10.17763/1943-5045-92.2.209 Taylor, S., M., Gulson, K. N., & McDuie‐Ra, D. (2021). Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India: Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South. Science, Technology & Human Values, 1-27. doi:10.1177/01622439211060839

The educational technology (EdTech) industry as we know it today is relatively young and developed in the early 2010s when the number of newly established Edtech companies started sharply increasing (Komljenovic et al., 2021) and Venture capital (VC) investment in Edtech rising from $500 million in 2010 to more than $20 billion in 2021 (HolonIQ, 2022). The industry is now consolidating, as indicated by the rising value of individual investments into particular companies (Brighteye Ventures, 2022), a rising number of acquisitions (Brighteye Ventures, 2022), and the emergence of ‘Big Edtech’ (Williamson, 2022). EdTech is increasingly prominent in HE by structuring teaching and learning processes, determining how education is governed, and reframing educational purposes (Decuypere et al., 2021). In such context, it matters what kind of EdTech is innovated and rolled out into the sector, and what kind of value it brings to its key actors. This paper focuses on three key stakeholders in EdTech, namely universities, EdTech companies, and investors in EdTech. It presents some of the results from a larger ESRC-funded project ‘Universities and unicorns’ (Komljenovic et al., 2021), that collected and analysed more than 2,000 documents and more than 50 interviews with university, company and investor leaders. It argues that there are discrepancies and tensions in how these three actors perceive and construct value of EdTech in HE. For investors, EdTech is an investment category that should bring a return on investment. For companies, EdTech brings specific niche benefits, mostly focusing on institutional efficiencies, and automation and personalisation of learning. Universities value EdTech as a means for boosting recruitment, reputation, and student experience, as well as a potential source of organisational and pedagogical innovation. Some of the key tensions between these orientations are temporality (investors, especially venture capital, want rapid scale and fast returns; while universities work on longer cycles), stability (start-ups might aim to be sold to another company or change price and service in the near future, but universities need stability and longevity), nature of innovation (who participates in innovating and what are the pedagogical and ethical premises), and expectations (investor and company discourse promotes ideas of data-rich operations such as AI, but universities experience only unsophisticated EdTech products with basic feedback loops at best). For EdTech to be useful for students, staff and other HE actors, and sustainable, these discrepancies should be addressed.

Brighteye Ventures. (2022). The European Edtech Funding Report 2022. https://docsend.com/view/jz3gpvpdibmqqqt7 Decuypere, M., Grimaldi, E., & Landri, P. (2021). Critical studies of digital education platforms. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 1–16. HolonIQ: https://www.holoniq.com/notes/global-Edtech-venture-capital-report-full-year-2021 Komljenovic, J. (2021). The rise of education rentiers: Digital platforms, digital data and rents. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1891422 Komljenovic, J., Sellar, S., & Birch, K. (2021). Mapping Emerging Edtech Trends in the Higher Education Sector: Companies , Investment Deals & Investors. Universities and Unicorns project Report 2 of 4 (Issue November). https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/universities-and-unicorns/UU-Phase1-Quant-Report2of4-final.pdf Williamson, B. (2022). Big EdTech. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(2), 157–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2063888 Williamson, B., & Hogan, A. (2020). Commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19 (Issue July). Education International.

The future of education is a site of struggle and contestation among a vast variety of actors, organisations and interests (Robertson 2022). Dominant visions of education futures are often framed by technocratic elites that can mobilise ideational and material resources and anticipatory expertise to delineate authoritative scenarios and visions (Facer & Sriprakash 2021). Educational futures are currently being inscribed in discursive visions of ‘digital transformation’ by political, industry and financial actors (Clark 2023), furthermore underpinned by quantitative valuation claims about the prospective economic returns from educational technology (edtech) investment (Williamson & Komljenovic 2022). The specific methods of market prediction used to calculate future edtech value, how these valuation methods inform visions of digital educational transformation, and the promissory politics that infuse such efforts are the original focus of this paper. Sociological work on expectations and futures examines the practices and political contests through which ‘promissory authorities’ construct and circulate visions (Tutton 2017). ‘Techniques of futuring’ refer to the practical ways selected futures are constructed, attract interest, and foster investments as ‘authoritative orientations for action’ (Oomen et al 2022). Futuring techniques span from creative and imaginative practices to calculative, rational and scientific methodologies like predictive forecasting and modelling, and are part of a ‘politics of expectation’ (Beckert 2016). Our contribution conceptualises ‘algorithmic futuring’ as the design and use of data-driven technologies and methods to predict educational futures and animate actions in the present towards their materialisation. Algorithmic futuring is part of a contemporary tendency to apply predictive techniques to societal problems, materialised in ‘technologies of speculation’ through which ‘social problems are made conceivable only as objects of calculative control’ (Hong 2022). We identify and examine promissory authorities where futures are constructed through algorithmic futuring methodologies in terms of edtech value, including management consultancies, think tanks and market intelligence agencies. Their algorithmic futuring methods include edtech market prediction with machine learning, natural language processing and clustering algorithms, aimed at directing venture capital investments towards high-value yields; and data-scientific predictions constructed by think tanks and consultancies to convince politicians and policymakers to invest in digital education as a route to long-term economic value. Algorithmic futuring constitutes a methodological practice that combines technologies of speculation with calculative and predictive practices of valuation. It functions to delimit the desirability of educational futures in terms of prospective future edtech value, exemplifying the speculative technologies, methods and promissory politics involved in performing predictive futures into existence.

Beckert, J. (2016) Imagined futures: Fictional expectations and capitalist dynamics. Harvard University Press. Clark, D. (2023) The construction of legitimacy: a critical discourse analysis of the rhetoric of educational technology in post-pandemic higher education. Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2022.2163500. Facer, K. & Sriprakash, A. (2021) Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification. Futures, 133, DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2021.102807. Hong, S.-H. (2022) Predictions without futures. History and Theory, DOI: 10.1111/hith.12269. Oomen, J., Hoffman, J., & Hajer, M. A. (2022) Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative. European Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 252–270. Robertson, S. (2022) Guardians of the Future: International Organisations, Anticipatory Governance and Education. Global Society, 36(2), 188-205. Tutton, R. (2017) Wicked futures: Meaning, matter and the sociology of the future. Sociological Review, 65(3), 478–492. Williamson, B. & Komljenovic, J. (2022) Investing in imagined digital futures: the techno-financial ‘futuring’ of edtech investors in higher education, Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2022.2081587.

Research in human genetics is increasingly enacted with advanced digital technologies, with genomics methods now being introduced into international research on the biological underpinnings of educational outcomes. Molecular genomics methods using bioinformatics hardware and software are highly data-intensive and depend on complex sociotechnical infrastructures of digital technologies, scientific epistemologies and methodologies, social relations and practices, which play an active role in shaping genomic data into knowledge (Stevens 2016). In data-intensive genetic sciences, knowledge about human lives, bodies, and behaviours is produced by large-scale initiatives using biosensor equipment, laboratory computer networks, databases, automation and analytics algorithms, generating novel renderings and understandings of internally-embodied states and processes (Vermeulen 2016). In the genetic sciences, human bodies, lives, and actions are understood in ‘bioinformational’ formats, as codes, networks and programming, which are made legible with data scientific methods of searching and pattern detection (Koopman 2020).

In the last 15 years, genomic methods have been repurposed for analysing educationally-relevant biological processes and structures, particularly the ‘genetic associations’ and ‘genetic architectures’ claimed to underpin learning and achievement, and the environmental factors that mediate them (Malanchini et al 2020), by international networks of scientists in two distinctive fields. Behaviour genetics has a long history in education, including controversial involvement in intelligence testing (Panofsky 2015), and has begun using molecular genomics methods to 'discover' the biological substrates of learning, cognition and school achievement (Kovas et al 2016). Since around 2010, the new interdisciplinary synthesis known as social science genomics, or sociogenomics, has combined expertise in social statistics and bioinformatics to study the genetic bases of social and economic outcomes (Bliss 2018). Utilizing vast ‘biobanks’ of genomic bioinformation and data scientific methodologies, sociogenomics aims to ‘finally open the black box of the genome’ in order to ‘delve into the biological mechanisms and come up with a better understanding of the pathways from cells to society’ (Conley and Fletcher, 2017, 35).

A key research target of sociogenomics to date is the biological associations, architectures and mechanisms underpinning educational outcomes and the environmental factors that mediate them (Martschenko et al 2019). Scientists have generated dozens of studies and scientific articles by utilizing molecular genomics methods to analyse bioinformational samples in the millions and producing new knowledge claims about the genetic bases of educationally-relevant traits, behaviours and outcomes (Plomin 2018; Harden 2021). As such, recent research in behaviour genetics and sociogenomics signifies the emergence of ‘educational genomics’ as a domain of international research, knowledge production, and potential policy influence (Visscher 2022).

As the materialization of a ‘new biological rationality in education’ with its own distinctive methodologies and truth claims (Gulson and Baker 2018), educational genomics is an emerging science with potentially profound consequences for educational research, policy and practice internationally. This paper presents an analysis of the formation of the ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics, drawing on an ‘infrastructure studies’ approach to datafied knowledge production (Bonde Thylstrup et al 2019). A knowledge infrastructure is a relational and sociotechnical system consisting of people and organizations, epistemologies and practices, and technologies and methods that underpin knowledge production (Edwards et al 2013). Theoretically, the paper is informed by science and technology studies conceptualizations of ‘data-centric biology’ (Leonelli, 2016) and a ‘postgenomic condition’ characterized by datafied, molecular explanations of human life (Reardon 2017). Such studies illuminate how the specific software, hardware, algorithms and data structures of bioinformatics analysis, in association with the conceptual schema of scientific communities, are reshaping how biological science is enacted and the kinds of knowledge it produces, with significant consequences in terms of biomedical explanation, public understanding, and political intervention (Chow-White and García-Sancho, 2012; Stevens 2016; Rajagopalan and Fujimura 2018).

New kinds of data-driven activities carried out in school configure people, practices and pedagogies. “Datafication”, or the transformation of the social and natural world into machine-readable format (Williamson, Bayne and Shay, 2020), signifies how complex digital systems that sort, order and classify, are routinely used to predict and channel behaviours in ever-more intensive and opaque ways. The impact of datafication in the schools sector, however, has largely been examined in speculative terms; this paper offers a detailed ethnographic analysis of how data are enacted in schools, focusing on the formation of new data epistemologies of schooling.

Internationally, datafication has intensified the amount of pupil information collected, modelled and analysed by a plethora of technologies supporting teaching, learning and school administration. The government of education in systems around Europe and beyond has become a system of governance in which non-state organisations and commercial actors have gained agency in decisions over the purpose and direction of a public domain under market conditions (Ozga, 2009).

The marketisation of education via quantification is considered to have changed both pedagogies and people (Ball, 2003). A focus on attainment, targets and comparative metrics occasioned the rise of “teaching to the test” and a concentration of instructional effort on students at examination pass borderlines (Hardy and Lewis, 2017). With burgeoning amounts of data to grapple with, teachers are now encouraged, not simply to become data-literate, but to translate the “profoundly emotional and human process” (Castañeda and Williamson, 2021) of education into a series of calculative operations (Grant, 2022; Selwyn et. al., 2021).

A focus on metrics is significant for the meaning and quality of education as it teaches a “hidden curriculum” (Mertala, 2020) that coveys a reductive episteme of knowing by numbers. Jarke and Breiter assert that,

The education sector is one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication, because it transforms not only the ways in which teaching and learning are organised but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data. (2019, p.1)

To examine the formation of new data epistemologies in the secondary school sector, this paper is informed by sociomaterial theory and post-qualitative methodology (Orlikowski, 2007, Lather and St Pierre, 2013). Sociomaterial or relational ontologies emphasise the performative nature of measurement that works to constitute the phenomena it purports to represent. Such an appreciation means that no neutral position of exteriority exists from which to observe, analyse and report on things, including the research itself. Instead, the observer, the observed and the means of observation are combined in constitutive relations that collapse the distinction between ontology and epistemology and call for rethinking humanist binaries and traditional research boundaries.

Post-qualitative sensibilities are cultivated because they trouble notions of a privileged human subject and data as neutral and straightforwardly representative. They recognise the fallibility and partiality of all knowledge accounts and attempt to work productively with uncertainty and multiplicity. The post-qualitative is intent on unpicking the “epistemic codes” underpinning traditional qualitative research and all knowledge regimes “which posit ‘truth about’ and ‘power over’” (Taylor, 2017, p.313) and is apposite for research into epistemic claims for education.

Despite little agreement on how to conceptualize resistance in Critical Education and Leadership Studies (CEPaLS), its working is generally recognized as a ‘struggle against/with’ something, which is practically treated as coming before. It works through opposition: an act or a ‘counter-conduct’ that is opposed to a previously settled gesture, directive or policy. This way of intending ‘resistance’ has contributed to substantial accumulation of knowledge about individuals or collectives who challenge a dominant form of power.

The same understanding of power/resistance finds rich literature in the Critical Studies of Digital Education, where powerful digital platforms are often presented as effecting processes of subjugation of school subjects, among which school leaders. Many studies, in this frame, produces knowledge about the strategies and tactics the latter adopts for subtly coping or overtly struggling against/with the former.

This is a critique that is based on taking a distance from the world to exactly discern what is bad and what is good: bad policies and the good, rare counter-conduct, bad platforms and the good heroic opting-out school. Following Latour, this way of judging the world in completely negative terms has ‘run out of steam’ and has become useless and not so different by conspiracy theories: it promotes a sort of flat discredit about how the world is going on that gives no justice to the multiple, varied and differentiated realities that live in everyday practices. This is even more relevant when talking about the educational world, so crucial for the possibility of pedagogically countering the effects of the current complex scenario, marked by the same negativity and deconstructivist tendencies that animate the negative critique: CEPaLS do not simply talk about educational leadership, but performatively construct it. An additional plane is crossed when coming to the digitalization of educational leadership because it is a process intertwined with the capitalist acceleration in the educational world. So, what we need ‘is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts’, in order to perform alternative educational possibilities.

In this presentation, we will explore the positive and affirmative consequences of considering resistance as something that ‘is in some way before what it resists’ when critically researching digital educational leadership. In a neo-materialist and vital frame, we use Deleuze’s re-reading of Foucault’s concepts of knowledge as ‘two-fold’ and power as ‘a diagram’ to turn upside-down the power/resistance conceptual couple. By this reversal, we adopt a resistance/power perspective: resistance emerges as the multiple ways in which things are going on in the world before and despite the attempts of normalization promoted by institutions through codifying knowledges.

By using data produced for a qualitative study on the introduction and the impact of the digital governance of education in Italy, we show that resistant leadership is a widespread practice emerging as a situated and contingent assemblage of the human, the digital, and the analogic, whose daily effort in leading a school is repeatedly challenged by digitalization policies.

This methodological paper explores the application of network ethnography—a novel and ‘developing’ approach put forth by Stephen Ball (2016)—within a larger empirical research project on the ‘ILSA industry’, a study of contractors involved in international large-scale assessments and, more broadly, of education privatisation.

In the last two decades, education policy, practice, and research have been transformed by the appearance and growing influence of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs). Alongside growing participation in ILSAs, the global ILSA industry is also expanding and becoming more complex. While scholars have extensively studied the impact of ILSAs on education practice and policy, they have largely ignored the contractors involved in developing ILSAs: mainly private companies, including for-profit and not-for-profit; research institutes; and universities.

During the first part of this project, we used network ethnography techniques to map the global ILSA industry by identifying the actors involved in the development of ILSAs, their roles, and their network relationships. Here, our particular aim is to analyse ways in which we, as scholars, ‘become with our methodology’ (Law 2004) and come to terms with the ‘messiness’ of research (Addey and Piattoeva 2022). While most methodologies in the social sciences are presented as standardised procedures that, when applied, lead scholars to the same findings and conclusions, we use our application of network ethnography as a case study of the complex, subjective, and deeply personal process of research. We explore how our methodological choices are influenced by the nature of the research field, our access to it, and our perception of it—and how these choices shape us, our research process, and the knowledge we produce. In doing so, we propose that ‘heterogeneity and variation’ (Law 2004) are an inherent part of any methodological application.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand the constitutive role of methodology and the performativity of knowledge-making, intervening in the world but also in the researcher (Law & Singleton 2013, Rimpiläinen 2015), we ask questions such as: How does our encounter with the ILSA contractors and space generate practices of method that shape the way we make knowledge? How are we deeply implicated in our epistemological practices and the worlds in which we are intervening? This approach shows how our methodology is performative: as we take decisions about our practices of method, it constructs what we are studying and ourselves. With an STS approach to our application of network ethnography, we present the complex and provisional nature of knowledge.

Finally, we discuss the challenges of visually representing the network of ILSA contractors. We apply Galloway’s (2011) notion of ‘conversion rules’ to make explicit the categories and relationships which give structure to this network, as well as accounting for absence and what went unrepresented in our attempt. We conclude by exploring what value might be drawn from this set of visualisations and, looking forward, what new approaches might be inspired by its limitations.

Global education actors like the OECD exemplify the ways in which the notion of diversity is so often engaged in contradictory ways. While its ‘Strength Through Diversity’ project suggests a celebratory embrace of diversity, its established commitment to global testing standards is arguably aimed at bringing national systems of educational thinking, policy, and practice into line with a vision for ‘One World’ (Auld et al, 2019, p.213). Similarly, the concern with numbers, impact, and ‘best practice’ in the Higher Education sector results in policies that ‘flatten and homogenise institutional forms and knowledge systems’ (Mills, 2022, p.475). While the social justice basis to much of the rhetoric in support of diversity suggests a commitment to finding ways to live together well for a sustainable future, the dominant neoliberal evidence-based, “what works” logic governing education seems to contribute to a vision of a singular, deterministic future. In this paper we argue that global education agendas around diversity are subject to ‘the perils of the one’ (Gourgouris, 2019) which results in a failure to address pressing societal issues and questions of human flourishing for the common good.

In a previous paper, we explored utopia as method, inspired by the work of Ruth Levitas, as a possible approach to interrupt and resist the “what works” logic that does not seem to work. Through the exploration of utopia as method, and its three modes: archaeology, ontology and architecture, we attempted to create possibilities for engaging in futures-forming practices that are informed by principles of relationality, interconnectedness and solidarity. This orientation towards possibility instead of problem solving puts imagination and self-organisation at the centre. However, utopian agendas have often been criticised as imposing (singular) blueprints for a better world. Utopia, it is sometimes argued, imagines a transcendentalised, universal, future. In this paper, we wish to build on our previous work on utopia as method by problematising the ‘monotheism’ (Gourgouris, 2019) that underpins organisations such as the OECD. We argue that utopia, when conceptualised and enacted as a process and a method, can act to resist the homogenising effects of the neoliberal paradigm. Utopia as method can function as a catalyst for futures-forming practices in education, offering possibilities for the emergence of alternative futures across the diverse lived experiences of individuals and communities. We consider the vital role of imagination as an individual as well as a collective practice and self-organisation and autonomy as the mode and being of collective practices toward alternative futures.

Our central question is thus: How can imagination and self-organisation contribute to the work of education researchers and practitioners who wish to engage in futures-forming practices? In our conceptual exploration, we draw on the work of Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Cornelius Castoriadis, Chiara Bottici, and Stathis Gourgouris, among others, to reclaim the imagination from the clutches of deterministic neoliberal thinking. Careful consideration of how we conceptualise the imagination, we argue, is required for education researchers and practitioners who wish to contribute to plural, participatory and inclusive futures, starting from actions in the present. Ethical and organisational principles rooted in anarchist philosophy, drawing on thinkers such as David Graeber and Rudolph Rocker, among others, helps us to formulate how autonomous self-organisation can be approached in the face of (neoliberal) authority, enabling a genuine commitment to diversity as a political and ethical response. We will offer an in-depth conceptual exploration and, together with the audience, work through the productive tensions that emerge from the much-needed futures-forming practices with which education researchers and practitioners should be concerned.

Public education has increasingly become a domain for nations and supranational entities to push for digitalization, which is often accompanied with promissory visions aiming at improvements in terms of e.g. ensuring more equitable schooling through digital technologies and infrastructures (European Commisson 2020). However, digitalization also potentially reconfigures 'socio-digital inequalities' (Helsper 2021) in schools, which are "systematic differences between individuals from different backgrounds in the opportunities and abilities to translate digital engagement into benefits and avoid the harm that might result from engagement with ICTs". Following this line of argument, socio-digital inequalities play out and are reconfigured depending on the context as digital infrastructures, equipment, curricula, teaching/learning strategies and competences found in practice vary greatly among and within nations. This study aims to provide situated and local accounts of the unfolding of socio-digital inequalities in practice in two economically and technologically strongly positioned nations, Sweden and Germany. It therefore contributes to current discussion points in critical educational technology research, where the roles of educational platforms, algorithms, infrastructuring or datafication practices in relation to the re/production of inequality are increasingly questioned.

Sweden and Germany both position themselves as technological and digital 'pioneers' in the European community of nations and consider digitalization as positive and a way to address inequalities (Ferrante et al. 2023 under review). However, how that might manifest in local practices differs, as the schooling landscapes vary greatly: In Sweden school digitalisation has unfolded as part of a marketization that includes free school choice and for-profit schools funded by the state that run alongside existing municipally run schools (Svallfors & Tyllström 2019). Educational technologies, platforms and software are generally procured but provided by commercial actors, similar to (data) infrastructures. Overall, this has led to increasing concerns about segregation and inequality despite generally well-resourced schools (Ljungqvist & Sonesson 2021). In Germany on the other hand, digitalization has traditionally been focused on privacy concerns and an orientation to open-source solutions, that are built rather than bought (Macgilchrist 2019). Even after German schools started inviting more commercial actors and their digital products in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the digitalization of schooling remains a slow procedure because of underfunding and the federal organization of the education system (Cone et al. 2021). Structurally, Germany has been criticised as having the most unequal education system in Europe, due to its tripartite school system that can block social mobility. Therefore, Sweden and Germany are rich contexts for this study to unpack the local and nuanced unfolding of socio-digital inequalities in practice.

However, inequalities are difficult to grasp, and as previous research has highlighted, they are difficult to approach ethnographically (Emmerich und Hormel 2017). Therefore, socio-digital inequalities in this study are approached through Marion Fourcade's account of different 'classificatory judgements' (Fourcade 2016) which serves as guiding lens. According to Fourcade, classification processes have different qualities and can be understood as either cardinal, nominal or ordinal classifications. While cardinal classifications refer to the numeral value of things (and are of lesser importance in this study), nominal classifications aim at the essence of things in a horizontal distinction and ordinal classifications refer to the value of things in a vertical, hierarchical distinction. With the help of this conceptual framing, everyday school practices could be observed and analysed in ethnographic field research, especially with regard to which 'differences' (in the sense of nominalisation) they produce between actors and which 'inequalities' (in the sense of ordinalization) result from them.

Accordingly, this paper asks firstly how digital technology is encountered in Swedish and German school practice and secondly how such practices relate to re/productions of socio-digital inequalities.

This paper attempts to study how school and classroom characteristics shape educational inequalities in Luxembourg. Mainly focusing on unequal distributions of educational resources and opportunities, educational inequality has been in the spotlight of educational sociology. The concept of educational inequality is framed around “systematic variations in several aspects of educational attainment structured by ascribed attributes of students derived from their social group memberships, such as gender, ethnicity, immigrant background and class (axes of inequality)” (Gross et al., 2016, p. 12). Explicitly, a study of variation in educational attainment, according to Jacobs (1996), might embody a disparity in educational trajectories, educational experiences and outcomes (including gained competencies, earned grades and certificates) among students from diverse backgrounds. Unfortunately, educational inequality related to certain axes such as social origin, race, or ethnicity appears to be rather persistent. Thus, it is still a relevant concern in many modern societies.

A prominent study conducted by James S. Coleman and his colleagues (1966) on the examination of schools and student achievement might be considered as a turning-point in the field of educational inequality. The conclusions of the renowned researchers stressed that the primary drivers of student performance are student demographics such as familial resources and race, and also the influence of peer composition in classrooms, rather than the school inputs including school quality and teacher qualifications. These conclusions on the highly underlined influence of a student’s parental resources had a profound impact in the field and shaped the discourse towards general inequality theories on social and cultural factors and on how educational systems reproduce socioeconomic inequalities from the perspectives of Boudon (1974), Bourdieu (1986), and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977). Meanwhile, the conclusions on mostly negligible school effects resulted in a rise of studies in the field of school effectiveness research to unveil effective characteristics of schools on educational achievement with the essential aim of diminishing the achievement gaps of disadvantaged students (Angus, 1993; Burušić et al., 2016; Scheerens, 2016). Consequently, many researchers have hitherto contributed to our modern understanding of how educational inequality perpetuated either by the contributions of individual social, economic, and cultural factors, or by higher level influences such as social compositions in schools and other school inputs regarding many aspects.

Regarding the endurance of educational inequality throughout time and geography, Luxembourg, as one of the most diverse countries in Europe, has its own assets and complications. On the positive sides, its commitment to promoting educational equality, its attempts to provide high-quality school environments, and its society accommodating more than 170 nationalities while operating with three official languages (Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Children and Youth, 2021) are some examples of its unique assets. Yet, as also highlighted in some international and national educational reports (OECD, 2019, 2021; SCRIPT & LUCET, 2018), in this diverse and wealthy country, students from distinct backgrounds still face some common struggles to keep up with their peers from advantageous backgrounds when their gender, language proficiencies, and socioeconomic backgrounds are taken into consideration (Hadjar et al., 2015, 2018). Within the framework of a ministerial project aiming to ensure the continuance of providing equal educational opportunities to students in primary schools of Luxembourg, this study taps on longitudinal patterns of classroom and school impacts on educational inequality. Relying on the results of this study, not only will educational policy makers of the country have grounded scientific evidence to continue to work towards developing policies that can potentially reduce these educational disparities in early stages of Luxembourgish primary schooling, but also the researchers might unveil modern mechanisms to contribute to the field of school effectiveness research and sociology of education.