Conference Agenda

This symposium will examine the relationships between methodology and critique in the context of the emerging field of Critical Edtech Studies (see Decuypere et al. 2025). Four papers, from Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, will offer different European perspectives on methods for researching the intersections of education and technology, with the aim of encouraging discussion about how methodology can both delimit and open-up possibilities for renewed critical understanding.

As an evolving and loosely bounded area of research, work in Critical Edtech Studies has demonstrated a variety of empirical approaches, including, for example, in-depth ethnographic observations of teaching and learning (Macgilchrist 2024), critical readings of policymaking (Williamson & Piattoeva 2019), as well as rich accounts of the social justice implications of ed tech (Swist et al. 2024). However, collectively, it is an area of research that, due to its commitment to a critical understanding of the intrinsic relationships between technology and society, often converges around particular theoretical assumptions that can circumscribe the orientation to methodology and methods. This symposium therefore proposes to surface for discussion what we suggest are three interrelated tensions between criticality and methodology relevant to the continued development of Critical Edtech Studies.

First, the legacy of influential fields such as Science and Technology Studies, and more recently, Critical Data Studies, has, on the one hand, opened possibilities for a more expansive understanding of the relationships between technology and society than those typically deployed in education research, while on the other, orienting Critical Edtech Studies towards an inheritance of methods from the ‘outside’. This motivates questions, not only about the suitability and purpose of methods – often concerned with ‘exposing’ the intricacies and relational conditions of wider sociotechnical systems – within a more bounded and normative educational domain, but also about the extent to which Critical Edtech Studies can develop its own methodological sensitivities and directions.

Second, a tension between the wealth of insights that the critique of instrumental views of technology can produce, and the resulting suspicion of statistical and computational technologies in the research process itself. Given that research in Critical Data Studies has often focused on, for example, the deleterious impacts of datafication on education itself, it is perhaps no surprise that a similar caution is noticeable in deployment of quantitative methods, or indeed more novel computational approaches, in research. However, this motivates important questions about how particular commitments to criticality are carried forward into research design, and what kind of insights might become invisible to the field as a result.

Third, a tension between, on the one hand, the creative methodologies of affirmative, speculative, and reparative critique (e.g. Sriprakash et al. 2024; Mulcahy & Higham 2025) while on the other, the increasing inaccessibility of proprietary technologies and the commercial tech sector in general, combined with a growing public interest in ‘banning’ access to particular technologies in schools. In other words, while ‘post-critical’ methodologies offer valuable ways of, for example, expanding the voices, and sense of agency, that can contribute to decision-making about educational futures, such approaches can seem at times to move in the opposite direction of concrete access to the workings of technical systems, algorithms, and data. Such a tension, we suggest, motivates questions about the directions in which Critical Edtech Studies might develop, and how the forces of commercialisation, which motivate much current research, can be examined and understood.

The four papers will demonstrate the intersection of these tensions, before the discussant will draw together related themes in order to support a discussion of how Critical Edtech Studies can maintain a reflexive approach to methods as it develops as a field of research.

Classrooms are already deeply digitalized, but this does not mean that digital education functions seamlessly. On the contrary, critical EdTech research has repeatedly shown that digital technologies depend on continuous human labour and maintenance to work in practice (e.g. Selwyn et al. 2017). Both these aspects – the pervasive digitalization of education, and the everyday work performed by students and teachers to make digital technologies function – can be challenging to study. In highly digitalized educational environments, digital tools and systems tend to be taken for taken for granted and slip into the background, while the work performed by teachers and students to make these technologies function is often experienced as so mundane that it escapes attention. This presentation discusses visual ethnography (Pink 2021) as a critical method with potential to capture the complexity of how digital technologies are negotiated and configured in specific local educational contexts. Drawing on a case of a municipal edtech development in which virtual reality (VR) was used to enable museum visits for school classes (Forsler, 2025) it discusses how teachers, students, and local developers perform different workarounds to align technologies with pedagogical goals, institutional conditions, and infrastructural constraints. This kind of articulation work (Suchman, 1995) is further shaped by the expectations placed on technology, often stemming from industry narratives and promises of more engaging and effective teaching. The difficulties of fulfilling these promises have been widely criticized in both research and in the public debate and have in some case also lead to more restrictive digitalization policies for education (e.g. Forsler et al., 2025). The gap between dominant innovation narratives and everyday classroom practices can, however, also be understood as evidence of the need for different kinds of EdTech that build on the situated experiences and needs of teachers and students. By discussing visual methods as a way to foreground the mundane, often invisible labour performed by educational professionals, this study contributes to ongoing discussions about critical methods that can be used to support such participatory and context-sensitive forms of edtech research and development.

Forsler, I. (2025). Virtual Reality in Education and the Co-construction of Immediacy. Postdigital Science and Education, 7(2),502–522. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s42438-024-00492-2. Forsler, I., Hayes, S., Jandrić, P., Macgilchrist, F., Selwyn, N., & Hansén, S. (2025). Hijacking the Digital Backlash in Education. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00601-9. Pink, S. (2021). Doing visual ethnography. 4th Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Selwyn, N., Nemorin, S., & Johnson, N. (2017). High-tech, hard work: An investigation of teachers’ work in the digital age. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(4), 390–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2016.1252770. Suchman, L. (1995). Making work visible. Communications of the ACM, 38(9), 56–64. https://doi.org/10.1145/223248.223263

Using computational social science approaches in critical edtech research has received scant attention. Instead, such approaches have been subjected to significant critique. Researchers highlight, for example, the extractive, biased and oppressive forms of data collection that form the basis of many machine learning models (Birhane et al., 2021; Crawford, 2021); and the problematic behavioural assumptions often embedded within them (Knox et al., 2020). In this talk we discuss the desirability of the use of computational approaches as part of a critical research agenda in studies of education and technology, given such fundamental problems. The reasons for considering this are threefold. First, a focus on computational approaches may offer alternative data sources and methods that can potentially lead to substantive insights that may further a critical agenda in education. Second, these approaches may enable critical researchers to more directly enact positive social change via engagement with policy makers and data scientists, using methodological approaches that both groups value. Third, more in-depth engagement with computational approaches may offer new forms of critique and ways to challenge the use and application of such approaches in education. Drawing upon work within the fields of Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies, we discuss the possibilities and challenges of reimagining computational methods for critical research in education and technology, reflecting on two examples of projects that use computational methods in education to explore questions of equity and justice. The first case, based on research on school ratings/reviews websites, offers an example of using computational approaches to highlight and map inequalities in education systems. The second case, based on research on school boundaries, offers an example of using computational approaches as part of participatory, justice-orientated research. We argue that both examples might offer insights into questions of importance to critical scholars of education and technology and may represent a reclaiming and reimagining of computational methods. We suggest that when used critically computational approaches might help expand the capacity of researchers to highlight existing inequalities, make visible possible approaches for beginning to address such inequalities, and engage marginalised communities in designing and ultimately deploying these possibilities. Nevertheless, such a reclaiming of computational methods is not straightforward. Computational social science could be one component of the array of methods that can be used in critical edtech studies, but only if it is grounded in a commitment to questions of criticality, philosophy, inclusivity, context, classification, and responsibility.

Birhane, A., Prabhu, V.U. and Kahembwe, E., 2021. Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.01963. Crawford, K., 2021. The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press. Knox, J., B. Williamson, and S. Bayne. 2020. “Machine Behaviourism: Future Visions of ‘Learnification’and ‘Datafication’across Humans and Digital Technologies.” Learning, Media and Technology 45 (1): 31–45

In this presentation, we challenge the view of technologies, and more particularly generative AI, as augmenting experience through binary human-computer interactions and offloading tasks. Instead, it argues that such technologies exhibit atmospheric qualities, shaping situated encounters through an interplay of infrastructure and affect. Drawing on a strand of research that exceeds an individual and atomic view on sociotechnical relationality (e.g. Pink 2022; Katzenbach and Pentzold 2024; Pargman et al. 2023), the presentation will propose atmospheric analytics as a heuristic framework and methodological toolbox for the critical investigation of these encounters. This framework attends to the relational complexity of emerging (educational) technologies, such as generative AI, through the careful deployment of three analytical optics – density, saturation, and viscosity. These optics direct attention to atmospheric variations in intensity, vitality and resistance associated with the increasing proliferation of technologies like generative AI in educational practices in elementary, secondary, and higher education the like. By focusing on situations as a methodological vantage point, atmospheric analytics move beyond simplistic notions of educational technologies as instrumental tools or threats, instead examining how they are agentially interwoven within an increasing amount of educational realities. Ultimately, in the presentation, we will argue that atmospheric analytics contributes to a critical understanding of the social, political, and ethical implications of algorithmic technologies in education, moving beyond determinism to explore the nuanced and multifaceted realities of human-technology coexistence.

Katzenbach, Claus, and Christian Pentzold. 2024. "Automating Communication in the Digital Society." New Media & Society 26 (9):4925–37 Pargman, Daniela Tjörnebo, Ylva Lindberg, and Anna Buch. 2023. "Automation Is Coming! Exploring Future(s)-Oriented Methods in Education." Postdigital Science and Education 5 (1): 171–94. Pink, Sarah. 2022. "Methods for Researching Automated Futures." Qualitative Inquiry 28 (7): 747–53.

‘Co-design’ is gaining increasing attention as a broad approach to the (re)making of education futures (Macgilchrist et al. 2024) that can ostensibly address issues of inclusion, representation, and ethical decision-making. Co-design has become particularly prominent in Critical Edtech Studies, often with the explicit aim of (re)developing education technologies so that they are explicitly oriented towards educational values (e.g. Brandau & Hartong 2025) and wider social justice concerns, rather than the narrow interests of commercial tech companies. However, there remain substantial questions about co-design as a methodology, including concerns over the ways such methods might be co-opted as a form of solutionism (Sloane et al. 2020), or the extent to which the prioritising of ideals and principles results in an approach that is ill-equipped to deal with a social world of power and corruption (von Busch & Palmås 2023). Furthermore, as Macgilchrist et al. (2024) emphasise, the term ‘design’ itself implies a straightforward sense of control over the future which may promise the unattainable. In light of these promises and dilemmas, this paper reports on research conducted at the University of Oxford in the UK to examine the practical implications of co-design for the research of education technology. The project developed 1) a mapping of co-design methods in Critical Edtech Studies, 2) insights from identified researchers on the values and challenges of co-design methods in practice, and 3) an interactive game designed to prime education stakeholders for participation in co-design methods. The research found not only varied terms – e.g. co-design, participatory design, co-creation - but also a diversity of assumptions about the purpose, methods, and outcomes of co-design approaches. The paper will highlight for discussion findings that contribute to understanding the ways co-design methods might shape the emerging field of Critical Edtech Studies, in particular the extent to which they align with positions of negotiation or resistance. In other words, where co-design is embraced in its more radical orientations, for example, to a politics of recognition, to practices of care, and to collective values, the practicalities embodied in the terms ‘design’ and ‘collaboration’ appear far-removed from the process. The paper will conclude by emphasising this tension between, on the one hand, a set of practical methods to design ‘better’ technologies, while on the other, a much more in-depth questioning of the very assumptions of ‘future-making’.

Brandau, N., & Hartong, S. (2025). Visualising the school: a critical study on co-designing a Moodle-based learning management system. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 46(3), 307–323. Busch, O. von & Palmås, K. (2023) The corruption of co-design: political and social conflicts in participatory design thinking. London: Routledge. Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., Cerratto Pargman, T. et al. (2024). Designing Postdigital Futures: Which Designs? Whose Futures?. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 13–24. Sloane, M. Moss, E., Awomolo, O. and Forlano, L. 2020. Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning. Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, Vienna, Austria, PMLR 119, 2020.