Conference Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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