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23 SES 03 B: *** Session Empty, Papers moved *** Political analyses of digital platforms and algorithms
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23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper ***WITHDRAWN*** Parents and Digital Education Platforms: a Critical Scoping Review of Research and the Discourse through which it is Framed 1: Adelaide University, Australia; 2: Helmut Schmidt University, Germany; 3: Monash University, Australia Presenting Author:Over past decades a growing upsurge of educational platformisation has substantially impacted the practices of schooling (Decuypere et al., 2021) Education platforms are increasingly being adopted to facilitate a diversity of educational activities, from school operations (Wilke et al. 2022), classroom management (Manolev et al. 2024) and assessment (Zamfiroiu & Vasile 2024), to promoting personalised learning (Bulger 2016), and enhancing school-parent communication (Apps et al. 2025). Within critical education platform research there is a growing volume of scholarship focussed on discourses of platformised education in policy and research. Such scholarship has been interested in sociotechnical ‘imaginaries’ of education (Rahm 2023) and accompanying understandings of education technology promoted or reinforced through for example, policy documents (Ferrante et al. 2024) and research publications (Sperling et al. 2025). What is evident from this scholarship is that scholars have problematised hegemonial discursive structures that frame educational platformisation as techno-optimist, solutionist, and functional and human-capitalist (Jørnø et al. 2022). Critical scholarship offers a key means of identifying and disrupting such framings, and in doing so, stresses the importance of carefully disentangling sociotechnical discourses and imaginaries, the arguments being articulated within documents and texts, and the arrangement of epistemological power asymmetries. With this paper we address an important gap in critical platform scholarship around the specific relation between education platforms and parents. We aim to map the field of research on in-depth inquiries of platforms and parents and examine the workings of power shaping knowledge production in that field. Thus, we take a specific interest in the ideas and knowledges of education platforms as they are promoted and reinforced through the research field itself. Explicit investigations into the platformised engagement of parents with schools is rare, with studies to date exploring issues such as school communication (Apps et al. 2025), data reviewing (Kelly 2025), and school administrative activities (Pangrazio et al. 2023). These initial studies suggest impacts of platforms on parents are ambiguous, and indicate the field lacks detailed investigations of, for instance, differing parental engagement contexts, platforms, and cultures. Moreover, to our knowledge, research focusing on sociotechnical imaginaries and hegemonial understandings of education platforms and parents in research discourse remains absent. It is here that we seek to offer a foundational contribution. Theoretically, we draw on critical discourse analysis (CDA) which we merge with scoping review methodology. CDA in this context should be considered broadly as a methodological theory purposed with examining questions of power and harnessing methods that support the inquiry of social problems (Wodak 2015). In particular, we use CDA to make sense of and theorise the role discourse plays in constituting and representing educational issues & problems in education research literature (Rogers et al. 2005). We draw on Wall et al. (2015) here to better understand this relationship between discourse and research, and the importance of critiquing such relationships. They remind us that research disciplines are imbued with epistemological beliefs and theoretical assumptions that are both productive and constraining to the advancement of knowledge. Review papers, they argue, can serve to expose this relationship within and across research literature by ‘reproducing ideological assumptions’ through which ideological hegemony is established and reinforced (p. 257). Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used We used a critical scoping review methodology adapted with CDA. This integrated methodology enabled us to both map the research on platforms and parents, and open ways of identifying and analysing power/knowledge relations and ideological hegemony in research literature. The approach has no methodological preference and enabled us to capture studies that used qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. It enabled us to ‘identify the taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions that dominate a body of literature’ (Wall et al. 2015 p. 262). In this way it made possible the examination of conceptual framings of education platforms and parents in the research literature and to critique such framings and the assumptions upon which they rest. The research questions used to guide the review and examine literature included: 1. How are platforms and the role(s) of parents described or explained? 2. How do platform designs inscribe parents into platforms? (i.e. via user architecturing or roles assigned) 3. How are the reactions and practices of parents described? We employed a search strategy that involved the use of key search term concepts, including ‘parents’, ‘digital education platforms’, and ‘schools’. The search was run in four prominent citation databases, two multidisciplinary and two education focussed (Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, A+ Education). A manual search of research team libraries, websites of relevant key organisations, and reference lists of included studies was also conducted. The search was completed in December 2024 and produced 20,647 results that were imported into the review tool Covidence to facilitate screening. Inclusion criteria based on the aims of the study was used to support screening which occurred across three phases, 1) title and abstract, 2) title and abstract (following criteria refinement), and 3) full text. Following screening the final number of literatures included was 21. Guided by the study’s research questions data were charted and recorded in an Excel spreadsheet. Data were analysed using a hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis approach guided by the study’s research questions and CDA theory. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings Early analysis of data reveals in depth studies on platforms and parents appear to be regionally distributed with clusters evident in regions such as North America and the Middle East. Despite these clusters the research is somewhat heterogenous and is comprised of studies that contain a wide variety of design elements, purposes, and usage contexts. We identified five emerging themes across the examined literature, including 1) intended purpose of platform design, 2) platform design elements and user architecture, 3) framings of parental participation and the relation of actors, 4) activities performed by parents when using platforms, and 5) temporality. Across the themes a nuanced image of what is known about platforms and parents is emerging, both through what has been examined and what has not. For example, platforms are often studied to understand how they may enhance parental engagement, through for instance, communication and monitoring processes, yet the examination of platforms’ powerful performative effects is largely absent. Moreover, our analysis suggests hegemonial understandings of education platforms may exist, such as, framings that convey their use and effects in clearly affirmative terms, and descriptions which limit them to primarily functional operations. Correspondingly, critical research orientations are rare, and therefore, inquiries for example, examining how platforms are (re)shaping parents’ experiences with schooling (relational, knowledges, values) and the associated implications remain scarce. Overall, we argue this critical scoping review performs an important role in challenging dominant understandings of platforms and parents in a small but growing body of research and emphasises the need for greater epistemic diversity to eschew the reproduction of narrow ideological assumptions. References Apps, T., Beckman, K., Pawlicka, N., & Kidson, P. (2025). The nature of connection: parents’ experiences with school social media. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. Bulger, M. (2016). Personalized learning: The conversations we’re not having. Data and Society, 22(1), 1-29. Decuypere, Mathias, Emiliano Grimaldi, and Paolo Landri. "Introduction: Critical studies of digital education platforms." Critical Studies in Education, 62.1 (2021): 1-16. Ferrante, P., Williams, F., Büchner, F., Kiesewetter, S., Chitsauko Muyambi, G., Uleanya, C., & Utterberg Modén, M. (2024). In/equalities in digital education policy–sociotechnical imaginaries from three world regions. Learning, Media and Technology, 49(1), 122-132. Jørnø, R. L., Andersen, B. L., & Gundersen, P. (2022). The imaginary of personalization in relation to platforms and teacher agency in Denmark. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 8(1), 20-29. Kelly, T. (2025). How platformised data collection practices in state primary schools in England mediate the parent–child relationship. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. Manolev, J., Sullivan, A., & Tippett, N. (2024). Reshaping school discipline with metrics: an examination of teachers’ disciplinary practices with ClassDojo. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 45(7-8), 1146-1160. Pangrazio, L., Stornaiuolo, A., Nichols, T. P., Garcia, A., & Philip, T. M. (2022). Datafication meets platformization: Materializing data processes in teaching and learning. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 257-283. Rahm, L. (2023). Educational imaginaries: Governance at the intersection of technology and education. Journal of Education Policy, 38(1), 46-68. Rogers, R., Malancharuvil-Berkes, E., Mosley, M., Hui, D., & Joseph, G. O. (2005). Critical discourse analysis in education: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 75(3), 365–416. Sperling, K., Stenliden, L., Mannila, L., Hallström, J., Nordlöf, C., & Heintz, F. (2025). Perspectives on AI literacy in Middle School Classrooms: An Integrative Review. Postdigital Science and Education, 1-31. Wall, J. D., Stahl, B. C., & Salam, A. F. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis as a Review Methodology: An Empirical Example. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37, 257-285. Wilke, P., Gröbner, M., & Oster, N. (2002, November). A hybrid genetic algorithm for school timetabling. In Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 455-464). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Wodak, R. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. In C. Leung & B. V. Street (Eds), The Routledge Companion to English Studies (pp. 302-317). Routledge. Zamfiroiu, A., & Vasile, D. (2024). Automation of student evaluation process through online educational platforms. Procedia Computer Science, 242, 412-419. | ||