Conference Agenda

The expansion of digital platforms in education has been a process characterised by discretion, speed, and acceleration in the wake of the COVID pandemic19 and the closure of face-to-face education (Barbour et al. 2020). The introduction of large-scale digital platforms is transforming teaching and learning processes and school governance (Decuypere et al., 2021). Despite their rapid implementation in education systems in a wide range of countries, we still have little evidence on the factors and reasons behind the adoption of digital platforms from large technology corporations in public education systems.

In this article we explore how digitisation policies in education have been adopted in Catalonia. To do so, the analysis is based on Jessop's (2010) contributions to the study of policy adoption processes. The author identifies three moments of reform processes to analyse the interaction between material and ideational drivers of change. Following this logic, the article reconstructs this process through which 1) a crisis emerges, and a problem is identified (moment of variation), 2) policy solutions are chosen over others (selection) and 3) a particular policy is deployed (retention).

While the empirical research is developed in Catalonia (Spain), the analytical approach contributes to unveil the tensions underlying the process of digitalisation of the education system (Landri y Vatrella, 2019) and understand how international, European, and national drivers contribute to set the scene for the adoption of some political strategies and for the exclusion of other possible alternatives.

Like organizations across Europe and North America, successive governments in Ontario, Canada, have pointed to online learning as a means of “modernizing” and transforming its public education systems (Roumell & Salajan, 2016, p. 381; Williamson, 2021). The province’s online learning strategy was launched in 2006. It was one many reforms introduced to elevate the economic and vocational purposes of education to help ensure Ontario and its residents could successfully compete in the global marketplace and digital economy. Many of these policies promote values and practices of the private sector and shift responsibility for funding, delivering, and governing education to private actors (Hedges et al., 2020). These policies often rationalize this shift by deferring to international education discourse on 21^st century learning, within which countries are positioned to compete.

Our paper presents findings from research that asked: what has been the trajectory of e-learning policy in Ontario, Canada?

Theoretical Framework: Our study is grounded in (critical) policy sociology, which emphasizes reflexivity, historical study, and policy actors, rather than decontextualized documentation that limits focus on the formal mechanisms of government (Ozga, 1987, 2021). What makes policy sociology critical is its emergence “within and against the dominant political culture,” and its attention to “underlying assumptions that shaped how a ‘problem’ was conceptualised and how solutions’ were selected (and who did the defining and selection)” (Ozga, 2021, p. 294).

We view policy processes are neither linear nor complete. They are sites of struggle over in which meaning is encoded and decoded in complex ways and are shaped by policy actors’ “history, experiences, resources, and context” (Ball, 1993, p. 11). As texts, policies are “textual interventions into practice,”, however, their meanings are contested rather than fixed and delivered, serving as problems posed to subjects “that must be solved in context” (Ball, 1993, p.12). Policy texts are also (and constituted by) discourse: “Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus, certain possibilities for thought are constructed.” (14) Practice is part of a definition of policy, though this paper focuses on textual representation of policy and its constitution of/by discourse.

We bring our critical orientation and understanding of policy as text and discourse to our study of the policy trajectory of online learning in Ontario. Policy trajectory is an approach that, following Trevor Gale (2001), draws on the heritage of policy historiography (among others) to ask:

(1) what were the ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ within a particular policy domain during some previous period and how were they addressed?; (2) what are they now?; and (3) what is the nature of the change from the first to the second? Critical policy historiography adds to these a further two: (4) what are the complexities in these coherent accounts of policy?; and (5) what do these reveal about who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged by these arrangements? (pp. 385–386)

Gale (2001) explains that the term historiography refers to temporary hegemonic policy settlements that can contain crises or interact with other settlements defining policy production. He introduces the dimension of ‘policy as ideology’ to describe the interdiscursive politics in which dominant discourses are sustained as settlements that are “asymmetrical, temporary and context-dependent” (p. 401). Our paper, in examining three historically specific phases of online education policy settlement, explains the issues and troubles of these periods in Ontario with emphasis on those impacted by this change.

In Sweden, teaching and learning materials were nationally regulated and reviewed during the 20th century. As for today, the teaching and learning materials available in schools relies on by the school’s budget, the producers marketing skills and the teacher’s competence. Hence, the access to and quality of teaching materials varies from school to school. This is worrying as it likely leads to a more unequal education (Graeske, 2021). To study the consequences of this situation the Swedish government instigated an investigation, which final report currently is under review by stock-takers (SOU 2021:70). At the same time, there is increased school stress in children and young people, reduced goal fulfillment and a failing equivalence (Högberg, et al., 2020; Nygren, 2021). This can be related to segregation tendencies and is a societal challenge that needs to be dealt with in every school and by the education sector. Lack of equality affects and is affected by teachers' opportunities to support students' learning (Skolverket, 2012, 2017), and teaching materials are central in this respect.

We claim that it is of great importance to critically review the foundations on which policies are created to show how they can condition the opportunities for all students learning. In relation to students in need of support for their learning, digital teaching and learning materials often work as adaptions of teaching and as personal aids, at the same time, these students specific learning needs and inclusion is in the core of the proposal. There is a lack of availability to adapted materials, and there is ambivalence regarding digital materials and adapted or alternative materials (Bagger, Ålander & Karlsson, accepted abstract). Hence, the teaching materials investigation's proposal (SOU 2020:70) has a potential to influence how and if students are offered an equivalent education, or not, especially for students in need of support for their learning. Furthermore, we derive from an understanding that learning materials sometimes function as an institutional barrier for inclusive education, unless critical perspectives are taken into consideration when selecting education material (Leask, 2015). Following from this, the purpose of the following proposal is to display and explore (dis)connections between the schools governing documents on students in need of support for their learning, and how these students and their learning is depicted in the proposal and the responding bodies answers.

This presentation is connected to the Swedish part of an EU-project on digital inclusive teaching materials DigiLLM. Also, it resembles a part study in the project Teaching materials and their quality – as aspects of inclusion. This has also been presented at NERA but then out from research question 1 in the project, which concerns “…how the policy proposal (and the responding bodies) condition aspects of inclusion and to consider how the issue of quality and access relates to all students' learning” (Bagger, Ålander & Karlsson, accepted abstract). In the study at hand, we have instead put our focus on the projects research question 2; “How does this (the policy documents conditioning of inclusion and teaching materials) relate to the school's mission to support all students' learning and the school's support efforts?” This mean that we have correlated governing documents on students in need of support and the newly implemented curricula LGR22 – to the proposal and especially regarding digital aspects of teaching and learning materials. In prolongation, the project contributes to systematizing knowledge about how the availability and quality of learning materials is conditioned, how it conditions the learning opportunities through institutional barriers and how the availability and quality in teaching and learning materials for all students can be secured.