Louise Couceiro
How is the uptake of digital technology reproducing, reconfiguring and/or alleviating relations of inequality in schools?
This is the question our symposium at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) sought to answer. The chair jovially remarked that when ethnographers are asked what they discovered during fieldwork the answer is often, “it’s complicated”. Certainly, the three papers delivered in this panel highlighted the complexities of how technology and inequality are interwoven in everyday school practices.
Drawing on ethnographic data from the ‘Reconfigurations of Educational In/Equality in a Digital World’ (RED) research project and our own, the papers presented key themes emerging from varied methods including participant observation, interviews, and workshops with students and teachers in Germany, Mexico, Sweden and the UK. The first explored the constitution of inequality through practices of waiting (waiting for connection, waiting for repair, and waiting for help); the second, through the intensification of work; and the third, through the shifting pedagogical relations between teachers and students.
Importantly, each of the three ethnographic case studies included schools at different positions in the local opportunity structure, i.e., more privileged and well-resourced schools, and historically marginalised/poorly-resourced schools. Yet, illuminous across all cases was the mis-match between educational imaginaries and everyday experiences in schools.
Felix Büchner’s paper, ‘When EdTech Makes Us Wait: Temporal Bordering and Inequalities in European Classrooms’, began with a description of a classroom he had observed during a period of ethnographic research in Germany:
The clock on the wall ticks with a predictable steadiness, pens tap lightly on desks, the teacher tries to fix the dysfunctional technology. The students wait.
Büchner explained that while waiting is a central practice of everyday life in the socio-technical infrastructure of schools, not everyone waits equally. Some wait more often; some wait for longer. There is an expectation or at least a hope that EdTech can save time in schools. It can help with improving efficiency. It can minimise waiting. Yet, Büchner contended that EdTech can lead to ruptures in the classroom – waiting practices emerge, often creating temporal borders that affect those who already experiencing disadvantage.
Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt, another researcher on the RED project, drew on ethnographic data from schools in Sweden and Mexico to challenge the oft-cited argument that technology straightforwardly facilitates teachers’ work. Carefully disentangling various temporalities, she demonstrated how teachers’ work can actually become intensified as an effect of complex socio-technical arrangements. For example, she noted how a school’s clock-time – organised into lessons, breaks and terms – often competes with the relentless rhythm of the global digital clock, with constant notifications and updates demanding attention and disrupting the orderly rhythm of the school day. These complexities are of course compounded by disparities in resources and Internet connectivity – while some actors and networks are able to leverage speed as a resource, others are excluded.
Our paper presented a socio-technical analysis of a particular EdTech software that uses adaptive AI to ‘personalise’ to individual students’ needs, offering insight into how the EdTech impacts pedagogic relationships in two of the schools we have worked with so far. Beginning with a technical analysis of the EdTech, we showed how values of completion, duration and punctuality are deeply embedded in its design. Through colour-coded dashboards, summary tables, and leaderboards presenting quantitative statistics on students’ homework performance, we highlighted how the EdTech’s interface suggests completing homework in an appropriate timeframe, rather than learning per se, is the goal.
These same values of completion, duration and punctuality were discursively (re)produced within the school environments. They were alluded to in interviews with teachers and students, and they appeared on homework-reminder posters affixed to classroom notice boards. Teachers often become custodians of the EdTech, directing students to complete their assigned homework and overseeing its usage. Indeed, the repercussions for non-completion and insufficient duration were repeatedly raised during conversations with students. When asked about the EdTech and their perspectives on its usefulness as a learning tool, many spoke about completing the work to avoid detention, rather than anything related to its pedagogic value.
The picture is more complicated, though. Teachers not only seemed to be custodians of the EdTech, but its problem solvers too, compelled to compensate for the product’s deficiencies. Although the EdTech was expected to aid efficiency in its ability to automate and mark homework – something teachers did see as a benefit – the reality is that teachers were undertaking a lot of compensatory work, such as dealing with confusion among students when the software would suggest a method that differed from the one taught in class, or adjusting students’ levels if the initial assessment failed to effectively ‘personalise’ according to their needs. Again, there was a discrepancy between the imagined vision of what the EdTech could offer and the everyday realities of its use.
Most concerning about this discrepancy are the implications for equity. As the EdTech’s design encourages monitoring compliance rather than competence, it sets certain parameters around how students are viewed. Perceived (by themselves and others) through the lenses of completion, duration and punctuality, students are positioned as ‘thin’ subjects (Ball and Grimaldi, 2022), defined in narrow terms relating to behaviour and performance (Selwyn, Pangrazio and Cumbo, 2021). Not only can the EdTech undermine teachers’ professional judgement, but relationships between teachers and students risk becoming transactional, informed by generalised performance indicators that eschew other important dimensions of learning. As these types of technologies are more likely to be adopted by schools experiencing resource constraints as they seek homework and extra-curricular solutions to accommodate pupils’ diverse needs, it follows that those who are more marginalised are more susceptible to the EdTech’s shortcomings.
So, how is the uptake of digital technology reproducing, reconfiguring and/or alleviating relations of inequality in schools? It is indeed complicated. However, the symposium did offer reasons to be hopeful. In addition to illustrating how waiting practices can exacerbate inequalities, whether waiting for connection, help or repair, Büchner highlighted that waiting can offer opportunities for solidarity and the subversion of power relations. Bergviken Rensfeldt’s situated analysis showed that although global neoliberal agendas often overshadow local demands during discussions on teachers’ work, there are still powerful local forces speaking to collective work and social justice issues beyond individual well-being and employment discourses. In our own research, although we have found that EdTech can reconfigure pedagogic relationships in unhelpful ways, we have also observed instances of resistance and cases where EdTech can helpfully support with augmenting pedagogic relationships. More on this in a future blog post.
Image by rorozoa on Freepik.