Conference Agenda

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.