Exploring the gap between aspirational visions of education in a digital society and the realities of everyday classrooms in England

• In Event: Digital tools in education: opportunities, gaps, and policies shaping learning in classrooms

Proposal

In many education systems globally, digital technologies are seen as an important way to address educational and social inequity. This is evidenced by the policy focus in many countries on the provision of access to hardware (e.g. one-to-one devices in schools and Internet access at home for pupils) and provision of EdTech software that are designed to enhance some aspect of the learning process. Typically, EdTech is tied to equity claims through addressing resource gaps such as systems designed to identify struggling students and provide them with extra support in and outside the classroom, or by automating certain tasks to free up time for teachers to focus on other educational activities and deal with large class sizes (OECD, 2023; van der Vlies, 2020). For example, in England, where this research is located, the UK government’s Department for Education recently announced a £4 million project to enhance the ability of AI generative tools to learn from a new bank of lesson plans and resources, enabling teachers to spend more time helping children through face-to-face teaching (DfE, 2024). Yet, despite these rapid technological transformations and developments, there is a lack of in-depth research to examine the ways that digital technologies are being used in classrooms and how the use of such systems can reinforce or reconfigure existing educational and social inequity.

This paper addresses this gap. We draw on policy analysis and in-depth ethnographic data gathered from three purposively sampled secondary schools in England that vary in their cultural, economic and geographic position to highlight the similarities and disparities in digital infrastructure, the nature of teachers work, and the kinds of digital pedagogy employed in these varied school contexts. We ask: 1) how do the ways in which access and use of EdTech (and its associated values and affordances) vary across contexts and circumstances? And 2) how do these everyday realities of classroom practice relate or diverge from the aspirational visions of EdTech typically promoted by policy makers and EdTech companies?

By combining a comparative case-study approach (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017), drawing on reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021) from participatory classroom observation (40 classes per school), interviews with students and teachers (40 per school), and futures workshops with students (2 per school) with ‘socio-technical audits’ of key EdTech platforms (Gleason and Heath, 2021) this paper casts light on the various, complex, and intersecting challenges and affordances of using digital technologies for learning. Through focusing on the experiences of students and teachers, we identify a ‘messy middle’ between aspirational visions of education in a digital society and the realities of everyday classrooms. While the use of digital technologies in schools can be pedagogically useful, this is often contingent on a range of factors that go far beyond adequate resourcing or, what Nancy Fraser (2008) would term, distributive justice. Our analysis not only accounts for the politics of redistribution, but also of recognition and of representation (Fraser, 2008) by attending to questions of identity, power and knowledge. We contend that although resources are of course a central component of addressing inequity, such a framing is too narrow (Collin and Brotcorne, 2019; Facer and Selwyn, 2021; Garcia and Lee, 2020) and risks viewing technology as a neutral tool that can be relied on to bring about straightforward and positive effects.

Envisioning education in a digital society that is equity focused requires us to find ways of working across research, policy and practice communities. This will enable a change in the way that the use of digital technology in schools is thought about, promoted and designed in order to inform future equity focused approaches to EdTech in England and beyond. This paper thus concludes by asking how policy makers in England might develop policy agendas that are fit for purpose when the educational landscape is so diverse and disparities between schools remain stark, and how the actions undertaken by individual schools on a micro-level might contribute to macro-level or structural changes in the future.

Authors

• Louise Couceiro, University of Oxford

• Rebecca Eynon

• Laura Hakimi, University of Oxford

• Valentina Andries