Conference Agenda

Digital technologies have become interwoven with the organisational, professional and pedagogical fabric of school education. As they continue to circulate widely across geographical scales and borders, technologies increasingly become a constitutive force that shifts broader social, political, cultural, economic and infrastructural conditions in and through which educational institutions operate (Stalder, 2018; Williamson et al., 2025). To this extent, schools are affected by the spread and continuous development of technologies that, in turn, have come to increasingly transnationally reshape what counts as ‘good educational innovation’ and ‘education quality’ (Tierens et al., 2025). In response, critical education scholarship has intensified efforts to rethink schools’ relationships with digital technologies by redesigning them with education practitioners, attending to issues of in-/exclusion, power asymmetries between commercial organisations and public schools, and the pedagogical and institutional lock-ins that commercial technologies may produce. Exemplary here is co-design research, which engages education practitioners in collective reflection on the (un)intended consequences of technological design and how it shapes everyday educational practice, while enabling participatory re-design of existing or new technologies (Brandau & Hartong, 2024; Macgilchrist et al., 2023). This symposium builds on such work, which shifts attention from design as improving educational technology to design as critically interrogating its performative implications and taking seriously the everyday lives of school actors. Our specific focus in this symposium is to advance a whole-school approach to developing meaningful responses to the current digital condition of school education. More specifically, we develop a notion of school development that (a) unfolds transnationally, (b) enables schools to critically reflect on their relationships with digital technologies, and (c) does so by using digital technology itself (i.e., a platform) to facilitate this work. We conceptualise this as digitality-oriented school development.

To develop a transnational, digitality-oriented approach to school development, we present insights from the SMASCH II project, which contributes to such a whole-school approach by designing so-called proto-practices (for the concept of proto-practice, see: Saari & Decuypere, 2024). In SMASCH II, six schools from five European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Poland) collaborate in tandems and use proto-practices as a distinctive form of transnational, digitality-oriented school development, mediated through a platform designed by the SMASCH research team. Proto-practices function as ‘good examples of practice’ and thus differ fundamentally from ‘best practices’ (Kelchtermans, 2021): rather than reinforcing a ‘what works’ agenda, they invite education professionals to engage in transnational collaboration and in taking school development into their own hands. Proto-practices introduce prototypical ideas about (future) school practice that necessarily require local adaptation, critique, and re-thinking. For this reason, proto-practice as a mode of transnational, digitality-oriented school development is also a deeply normative endeavour – both for those who design proto-practices (as they give shape to educational futures) and for those who enact them in everyday practice (as they take up, negotiate, and re-make these proposed futures).

The symposium conceptually elaborates the possibilities and tensions of proto-practice as a form of transnational, digitality-oriented school development, while exemplifying these dynamics through three proto-practices (on Artificial Intelligence, Technology Design, and Virtual Reality) developed within SMASCH and taken up by schools across Europe. The first presentation lays the conceptual groundwork by specifying what a proto-practice is and how it makes possible a particular form of transnational school development via a platform. The subsequent three presentations address a shared question – how transnational school development, encompassing whole schools, can be enacted through platform-based proto-practices – by examining empirical cases of proto-practices ‘in action’ in transnational tandems across five European countries. Across all contributions, we foreground the implicit and explicit normativities that shape both the research and the practice of school development through platform-based proto-practices.

In this presentation, we mobilize the concept of proto-practice as a theoretical lens and framework for understanding and giving shape to school development in the(post)digital age. Proto-practices are defined as emergent proposals for future practice that shape how schools evolve in response to pervasive digital entanglements. In line with what was argued above, we adopt the term digitality to capture this cultural transformation. As such, with this presentation, we bring two research fields that are traditionally operating relatively separately – the field of critical edtech studies and the field of school development – together (cf. Brandau and Alirezabeigi 2023; Simon et al. 2025). While this cultural shift implies shared responsibility in designing schools and educational practices, explicit connections between school development and (post)digitality remain underexplored. Using the transnational example of the Future Classroom Lab as an illustrative case, we develop six theoretical dimensions of proto-practices: design; practice; continuous deformation; horizontal diffusion; distributed ownership; and affectivity. Those interrelated dimensions together form a conceptual framework for understanding how proto-practices operate: design and practice highlight the interplay between initial conception and everyday enactment; continuous deformation underscores their openness to change; horizontal diffusion points to the role of networks and infrastructural embeddedness; distributed ownership emphasizes shared responsibility and adaptation; and affectivity draws attention to the emotional investments that sustain, or hinder, these processes. We argue that these dimensions offer a robust framework for analyzing and guiding school development in practice and as a normative research agenda in the (post)digital age. In elaborating on the concept of proto-practice and its constituent dimensions, we will argue that proto-practice serves a dual role: it aims to foster digitality-oriented school development and simultaneously provides an analytical lens for understanding the manifold ways in which edtech is transnationally at work in contemporary educational organizations. It should not be seen as consisting of fixed solutions, but rather as hypotheses for promising examples of practice that require inventive recomposition (cf. Hofhues & Müller-Birn, 2025). For proto-practice designers, school developers and educational practitioners the like, this means embracing openness to adaptation, honoring professional autonomy, and resisting interpretations of local modifications as mere reluctance to implement original designs (cf. Kelchtermans, In Press). Taken together, these insights will form the starting point for our exploration of how proto-practice can serve as a fruitful conceptual vantage point for transnational, digitality-oriented school development.

Brandau, N., & Alirezabeigi, S. (2023). Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(2), 337-349. Hofhues, S., & Müller-Birn, C. (2025). Informatik als Teil von Gesellschaft. Zur Bedeutung interdisziplinärer und kontextsensitiver Forschung und Entwicklung. In S. Hofhues & J. Schütz (Eds.), Plattformen für Bildung (pp. 315- 322). Berlin: Transcript. Kelchtermans, G. (In press). Teachers’ sense-making of educational innovations: resistance, commitment and professionalism. In L.A. Goodwin et al. (Eds.), International Handbook of Educational Change. Third Edition. Sage. Simon, S., Vassaux, C., Guigon, G., Čarapina, M., & Consoli, T. (2025). The Postdigital Classroom: a Guide Toward the Imaginary. Postdigital Science and Education, 1-23.

Situated within the outlined approach of digitality-oriented school development and the potential role of proto-practices herein (Saari & Decuypere, 2024), this presentation focuses on context-specific and curiosity-driven technology (re)design as an increasingly important practice of school and classroom development. More particularly, it presents the critical co-design approach (Brandau & Hartong, 2025), which during the first phase of the SMASCH project was developed from approaches such as speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), critical design (Richert & Allert, 2017), and participatory design (Cumbo & Selwyn, 2022) and has been specified for application to technology-related school development. Unlike other design thinking approaches, critical co-design focuses less on the development or efficient integration of products or “solutions” (in this case, edtech). Rather, it shifts attention to the numerous moments of opening, closing, and active decision-making that arise in the process of technology (re)design, and seeks to support school actors in the systematic reflection of, and experimentation with, such moments. In the case of the presented project, this particularly refers to the participation and empowerment of students. The presentation first gives an overview of the critical co-design approach, also in relation to the proto-practice and transnationality concept, before providing insights into its application within the SMASCH project. Through the school year 2025/2026, the developed material was tested within two secondary schools – one in Germany and one in Belgium – who each engaged with the approach very differently, including its specific embedment within school development. Using artifact analyses, digital reflection prompts, regular focus groups, and participatory observations, the study unpacks the dynamics which manifested in both schools, as well as in their interaction with each other, when putting the approach into practice. The findings allow for important conclusions regarding the potentials, but also limits of developing critical co-design as a proto-practice (i.e., as an example of ‘good practice’) into a ‘scalable’ approach of school development.

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. Cumbo, B., & Selwyn, N. (2021). Using participatory design approaches in educational research. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 45(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2021.1902981 Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2024). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT press. Richter, C., & Allert, H. (2017). Design as critical engagement in and for education. EDeR, 1(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.15460/eder.1.1.1023 Saari, A., & Decuypere, M. (2024). Governing by prototype and proto-practice: Topological configurations of future classroom labs. Journal of Education Policy, 39(5), 683–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2024.2304567

Sub-paper had to be withdrawn.

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Proliferating academic, professional and political discourse on the future of schools is increasingly tied to the presumed necessity of AI in education (Selwyn, 2022). Artificial intelligence is no longer seen as being ‘exceptional’, but as (potentially) foundational to a multitude of day-to-day processes and practices in schools related to learning, teaching, administration and school governance (Rahm, 2023). It is for this reason that accelerated artificial intelligence-related change in schools is seen not only as a necessity, but also as that which defines ‘good school development’ today (e.g., professional and pedagogical development of ‘AI proficiency’) (Ng et al., 2025). This paper explores how schools can navigate these imaginaries of desired technological change and how they can re-imagine their own future beyond what is given today. It does so by providing insight into the ‘AI proto-practice’. The presentation zooms in on two transnational school tandems (Belgium – Denmark; Switzerland – Germany) that engaged with the AI proto-practice and illustrates how this proto-practice enacts possibilities for transnational futuring – where futuring is understood not as the creation of abstract utopias (Oomen et al., 2022), but as emergent practices where alternative futures come into being through different ways of relating to artificial intelligence in the present. To this extent, this contribution scrutinises how the AI proto-practice creates possibilities for professional, organisational and pedagogical life in schools where it becomes collectively felt that alternative futures of school education are possible, and that these are not speculative but rather everyday acts that are (de-)formed (and hence not fully determinable within the design of the proto-practice). This is inherently normative in that the proto-practice propagates the idea that the existing apparatus of thinking and speaking about artificial intelligence in relation to school education can be disturbed. As this contribution will show, it is partly because of that normativity that the proto-practice enables practices of futuring on the level of a school through the transnational design of ways of feeling, thinking and doing in relation to artificial intelligence, which can be seen as a concrete form of school development. This practice of school development, we argue, makes possible an ‘obstinate’ response to artificial intelligence in school education.This does not refer to an ignorance or stubbornness of school actors, but to the making possible of performances of the future that are particular to specific schools and that emphasise the potentiality for another world beyond our common categories (Savransky, 2025).

Ng, D.T.K., Chan, E.K.C., & Lo, C.K. (2025). Opportunities, challenges and school strategies for integrating generative AI in education. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 8, 100373. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2025.100373 Oomen, J., Hoffman, J., & Hajer, M.A. (2022). Techniques of futuring: On how imagined futures become socially performative. European Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 252-270. DOI: 10.1177/1368431020988826 Rahm, L. (2023). Educational Imaginaries of AI. In S. Lindgren, Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 289-300). Edward Elgar Publishing. Savransky, M. (2025). Interstitial Politics: Thinking in Catastrophic Times. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 50(6), 1115-1139. DOI: 10.1177/01622439251372845 Selwyn, N. (2022). The future of AI and education: Some cautionary notes. European Journal of Education, 57(4), 620-631. DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12532