Conference Agenda

In recent years, European primary and secondary schools and classrooms have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech ecosystems and their promises to seamlessly interconnect physical devices, educational software and apps, and cloud services. With companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple tightening their grip on classrooms’ transition into digital environments, Big Tech is asserting control over the material infrastructures, discursive framings, and economic logics undergirding educational digitalisation. As noted in recent scholarship (Kerssens & Van Dijck 2021), the notion of platformisation provides a useful conceptual tool to grasp the societal implications of this dynamic – namely the transformation of educational content, activities and processes to become part of a (corporate) platform ecosystem, including its economies (data) infrastructures and technical architectures (Srnicek 2016). Yet while the current scholarship on platformisation provides critical signposts for problematising the present, it offers little guidance for re-imagining digital education design beyond established platform logics (Macgilchrist et al. 2024).

Looking at problematisations of platforms and platformisation in education research, the broad field of study encompassed under the sociologies of education provides fertile soil for critically analysing the roles and impact of digital technologies in/on educational ideas and materialities (Selwyn 2019). Through the analytical lens of platformisation, recent work has examined Big tech influence in public education (Kerssens, Nichols & Pangrazio 2023), including the power of corporate cloud companies in educational governance (Williamson et al. 2022). Other studies have examined specific platforms as new infrastructures for pedagogy (Perrotta et al. 2020). Another strand of research has examined how platformisation of schools affects the day-to-day relations of teachers and students and conceptions of teacher autonomy (Cone 2023).

Yet as the monetary models, materialities, and embodied effects of Big Tech platform education come under increasing scholarly, political, and regulatory scrutiny, the apparent disaffection permeating much of the literature on platforms and platformisation begs the question of how and where to look for alternatives – both from a practical, administrative, and theoretical viewpoint. This question is, in turn, the starting point for the papers and discussions that form the present symposium proposal: What are the theoretical, empirical, and technical conditions for imagining and enacting alternative digital education ecosystems? And what role can sociologies of education play in affirming alternative approaches to and configurations of digitality, infrastructure, codes, and other related issues?

With this symposium, we seek to give space for empirical presentations and theoretical frameworks that can nurture such forms of questioning of post-platform classrooms and thereby mobilise the European educational research community around the critical study of platformisation, and the prospects of imagining and developing alternative digital ecosystems. The symposium includes four papers, representing four different national perspectives (Catalunya, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) that explore possibilities for grounding digital education in other forms of pedagogical and sociological reasoning, infrastructural arrangements, and forms of governance that can challenge the status quo of the platform as the default for educational digitalisation.

This paper explores different dilemmas faced by the Education Administration and schools from Catalonia between “Googlification” of education (Kerssens & Van Dijck, 2022) and the search for alternatives. At the political level, during the pandemic, the Catalan Administration had to choose between improving Moodle – the main platform already used in schools despite getting little public investment – or facilitating the adoption of Google Classroom, which was offered to the administration free of charge (Jacovkis et al., 2023). Since both platforms were authorised, the final decision depended on each school. Therefore, principals faced the dilemma of adopting Google or keeping Moodle. In result, teachers from schools where principals decided to adopt only Google had no alternative: they could use Google or stop using a digital platform at all. Many teachers expressed great concerns regarding the use of Google’s educational ecosystem but felt pressured to adopt it. We identify two sources of resistance to the use of the Google ecosystem in schools. One related to strong political positionings of school management boards and another started by families that demanded an alternative (Rivera-Vargas et al., 2024). A collaboration between family associations, principals, and the organisation XNET created and implemented an open-source suite called DD in some schools in Barcelona with the support of the city council. However, due to the combined effect of decisions made during the pandemic, a lack of financial support, and unrealistic technical expectations from teachers, the previous decisions became barriers. The initiative failed to provide a viable alternative. The case of engaging digital ecosystems in Catalonia begs a series of questions that are key to understanding both the conditions of platformisation as the dominant arrangement of digital ecosystems globally as well as the situated possibility to imagine alternatives. To what extent were pedagogical reasons considered in the process of platformisation? How did Google Classroom attain a seemingly hegemonic position in recent efforts to materialise a digital education ecosystem in Catalonia? If not pedagogical, what are the logics and discourses driving discussions off school digitalisation? After responding to these questions, we argue that situating pedagogical elements at the center of the discussion can lower teachers’ technical expectations and make it possible to use a larger spectrum of digital technologies that can respond to specific pedagogical needs and amplify digital sovereignty in terms of infrastructure, data, and tools design.

Jacovkis, J., Parcerisa, L., Calderón-Garrido, D., & Moreno-González, A. (2023). Plataformas y digitalización de la educación pública: Explorando su adopción en Cataluña. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 31. Kerssens, N., & van Dijck J. (2022). Governed by edtech? Valuing pedagogical autonomy in a platform society. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 284-303. Rivera-Vargas, P., Calderón-Garrido, D., Jacovkis, J. & Parcerisa. L. (2024). BigTech digital platforms in public schools. Concerns and confidence of students and families. NAER, Journal of new approaches in educational research. 13(1). In press

In their transition to digital education, Dutch primary classrooms have become enormously dependent on Big Tech digital ecosystems of infrastructure and platform services, with far-reaching implications for schools’ control over the design of their online learning environments (Kerssens and Van Dijck 2022). To safeguard schools’ power to organize their digital classrooms “viable alternatives are required” (Veale 2022, 73). However, given the substantial costs and labor-intensive nature of developing alternatives to mainstream platforms, success may depend on collective responses to platformisation on national and sectoral levels of education. This paper discusses both strengths and limitations of such a cooperative response by the field of public education in the Netherlands. First, it will discuss the strengths of its contribution to the development of a digital education ecosystem anchored in public values. Like many other European countries, public values form a cornerstone of the organisation of the Dutch education system. Also in their transition to digital education, schools are supported to safeguard public values, including social equity, meaningful human contact and institutional control over data and pedagogies. Equally important, values-based digitisation unfolds through advanced “cooperative responsibility” (Helberger et al. 2018) involving dynamic interactions and allocations of responsibilities between Dutch schools, sectoral organisations, and private edtech developers, supported by national government. Such collaborations are key for creating governance frameworks (e.g. trust agreements and normative standards) as fundamental support frames for developing open and interoperable digital platforms and infrastructure that meet public value requirements. Examples include the creation of digital services for sharing and reusing digital educational content, open technical standards for data interoperability between educational platforms, and an open AI language model. Second, this paper discusses current limitations of the Dutch cooperative effort to effectively assemble these more or less isolated digital services and their governing frameworks into a coherent future digital education 'ecosystem'. To move towards the creation of a digital learning landscape for primary education dependent on the organizational power of schools rather than platform companies, the paper argues for enhancing forms of cooperative design in relation to its so far non-existent ‘architectural blueprint’. This plan for the design and construction of a public digital education ecosystem should specify its underpinning 'architecture of interoperability'. One which identifies and maps the (nature of) relationships between essential digital services, fundamental support frames based on the requirements of public education, and the responsibilities of schools, sectoral organisations, and private edtech developers.

Helberger, Natali, Jo Pierson, and Thomas Poell. 2018. "Governing online platforms: From contested to cooperative responsibility." The Information Society 34 (1):1-14. Kerssens, Niels, and José Van Dijck. 2022. "Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society." Harvard Educational Review 92 (2):284-303. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-92.2.284. Veale, M. (2022). Schools must resist big EdTech – but it won’t be easy. In: S. Livingstone & K. Pothong (Eds.), Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulatory and Practical Reflections. 5Rights Foundation; Digital Futures Commission.

The pervasive involvement of technologies in education has raised questions about the authority of digital platforms in shaping the future of educational practices. Through datafied surveillance, predictive analytics, automated teaching, digital platforms exercise their power not only on the infrastructures of pedagogy, but also on the political configurations of what counts as pedagogical knowledge (Cone, 2023). This paper aims at developing a research agenda to pursue alternatives to commercially driven logics underpinning current platformisation of education. In our proposal, this entails challenging habitual narrations of both humanism and technology-driven educational change to shift the focus from instrumental perspectives to collective and ethical stances (Pischetola, 2021). In relation to wonted assumptions of humanism, we argue, an ethical stance is characterised by its emphasis on the embodied and historical nature of digital education as something that requires situated judgements about the different forms of living that are coming into the world (Masschelein & Simons, 2015). Such judgments involve looking at the history of digital platforms and analysing both the materiality of what appears to be without material consequence – concepts, policies, tools, practices – and the discursivity of what appears to be fixed and passive – classroom settings, whiteboards. Pedagogy, in this view, becomes a posthuman practice directed toward drawing forth the forces at play in human becoming – rather than an attempt to realise certain pregiven ideas of becoming human (Biesta, 2011). As for assumptions around technology-driven change, our proposal to begin from pedagogy and ethics pushes beyond discourses that place technology at the vanguard of educational innovation, as this ultimately replicates modern ontologies and colonial epistemologies (Karumbaiah & Brooks, 2021). At every appearance of a new technology, utopian and dystopian narratives emerge – listing benefits and dangers, opportunities and risks, potentials and limitations – and by so doing, they avoid addressing more complex issues of distributed oppression, institutional materialisations of power, and exacerbation of structural inequalities. Post-platform schooling, we suggest, can be imagined only by understanding digital platforms as part of an ecosystem made of human and material actors (Pischetola & Miranda, 2020), and by exploring how technologies can become environmental forces for affirmative political transformation (Zembylas, 2023). On these grounds, a research agenda for post-platform education requires not merely investing in digital literacy, critical skills, and human empowerment, but also unveiling political and ethical stances that platforms present for education, with discussions about embodied intersubjectivity, responsibility, agency and justice.

Biesta, G. (2011). Philosophy, Exposure, and Children: How to Resist the Instrumentalisation of Philosophy in Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 305–319. Cone, L. (2023). Subscribing school: digital platforms, affective attachments, and cruel optimism in a Danish public primary school, Critical Studies in Education. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2023.2269425 Karumbaiah, S. & Brooks, J. (2021). How Colonial Continuities Underlie Algorithmic Injustices in Education. Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology. Philadelphia, USA, 2021, pp. 1-6. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2015). Education in times of fast learning: the future of the school. Ethics and Education, 10(1), 84–95. Pischetola, M. (2021). Re-imagining Digital Technology in Education through Critical and Neo-materialist Insights. Digital Education Review, 40 (2), 154-171. Pischetola, M., Miranda, L. V. T. (2020). Systemic Thinking in Education and a Situated Perspective on Teaching. Ciência & Educação, 26 (31), 1-15. Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136 Zembylas, M. (2023). A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: Strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(1), 25-37.

Digital platforms are often seen as given and established parts of educational systems, also in critical research questioning their impact (Nichol & Garcia, 2022). If we instead consider that frictions and resistance are integrally part of their process of becoming (Bowker & Star, 2000; Bates, 2019), new research possibilities open up for investigating counter-positions and unexpected effects of platformisation in education. In this paper, we explore how official platforms for home–school communication met resistance from parents and caretakers in Sweden. The paper will analyse two empirical examples that demonstrate two different positions with regards to parent resistance – and forms of enacting frictions – vis-à-vis the platform-based school. First, based on analyses of media reporting, we discuss an initiative of programming-savvy parents in Stockholm who created an independent, open-source home–school communication app as a response to frustrations with the complexity and information exchange deficiencies of the formal parent communication platform (Skolplattform) issued to schools from a municipal level. While the parent initiative exposed a controversy about the citizen perspective on the platform issue, the municipal school organisation responded with a police report of a data breach by parent software developers that received international attention (Burgess, 2021). Second, based on free-text responses from a survey of more than 700 Swedish teachers conducted in the Nordic SOS project (sosproject.dtu.dk), we analyse how parents have been regularly excluded from platforms despite formal ambitions that they should be able to take part in their children's schooling (Swedish Education Act, 2010), but also explore how alternative ways to grant parents access are realised by teachers or ‘shadow IT’. Through both examples we illustrate how attending to tensions and frictions makes visible the sociomaterial ‘shadow infrastructure of care’ that forms part of digitised welfare sectors today (e.g. Power et al., 2022), also in education (Zakharova & Jarke, 2022), where it replaces or complements official platforms that were supposed to constitute the home–school communication infrastructure. Shadow infrastructures therefore include the reparative work that both shadow IT and social agents do to fulfill ‘democratic purposes’ or rather the ‘coerced digital participation’ (Barassi, 2019) of welfare platformisation. Importantly, our study shows the extent to which processes of platformisation depend on such sociomaterial shadow infrastructures that can cover up or compensate for frictions around accessibility and participation, which in turn raises concerns about the implications of distributing core welfare services to permanent but non-resilient shadow infrastructures.

Barassi, V. (2019). Datafied citizens in the age of coerced digital participation. Sociological Research Online 24(3), 414–429. Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things out: Classification and its Consequences. MIT Press. Burgess, M. (2021-11-04). These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops. Wired. Bates, J. (2019). The Politics of Data Friction. Journal of documentation 74(2), 412–429. Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform Studies in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 209–230. Power, E. R., Wiesel, I., Mitchell, E., & Mee, K. J. (2022). Shadow Care Infrastructures: Sustaining Life in Post-Welfare Cities. Progress in Human Geography, 46(5), 1165–1184. Swedish Education Act (2010). Skollagen 2010:800. Sveriges riksdag. Zakharova, I., & Jarke, J. (2022). Educational Technologies as Matters of Care. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(1), 95–108.