Navigating digital education landscapes: Exploring the EdTech expansion in Brazil and Egypt

• In Event: The Politics of EdTech: Exploring the changing conditions of educational governance in the age of technocapitalism (Part II)

Proposal

The global education landscape is undergoing significant changes, driven by the rapid incursions of non-state actors and the aggressive infusion of data-driven technologies into public education systems – a situation that has accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic. The educational arena now encompasses a range of actors beyond traditional education stakeholders, such as EdTech startup companies, venture philanthropists, venture capitalists, and intermediaries, which are part of what is known as the Global Education Industry (GEI). Contrary to the narratives that portray educational technology (EdTech) as technical and apolitical, digital systems are shaped and operationalized by specific actors who possess distinct worldviews, sensibilities, and agendas aimed at reforming education in accordance with their own objectives. Not only does the emergent educational technology (EdTech) landscape come with a wide array of new actors, but it also entails the formation of novel relations, complex networks and mutual dependencies that play an important role in shaping educational policies and practices. The digitalization of education has further facilitated the development of these networks, ushering in new methods, discourses, forms of financing, and overall mechanisms for governing education. Practices and discourses are reframed and power is redistributed in particular ways. Thus, the growth of the EdTech sector is deeply intertwined with broader processes of network governance that have been propelling digitalization, financialization, assetisation, and platformization.
This paper explores the growing role of non-state actors in public education and complexification of education governance, focusing on the contexts of Brazil and Egypt, two countries witnessing an aggressive digitalization of education and an expanding EdTech ecosystem. It aims to analyse the various types of organizations, their interrelationships, and their participation in transnational networks of education governance and digitalization, examining how the expansion of the EdTech market in these countries relies on relationships with other sectors, how digitalisation further reinforces complex governance arrangements, and how both dynamics prioritise the engagement of corporate and wealthy actors in EdTech debates to the detriment of grassroots and popular organisations. In particular, this paper examines how startups and philanthropies in Brazil, and startups, market intelligence companies and venture capital firms in Egypt, form interdependent, co-constitutive and reinforcing relationships that amplify the Edtech sector and market. In addition to examining connections within and between those two cases, this paper explores what this means for public education and its institutions. In so doing, it uncovers the dynamics of digital education governance in the Global South and highlights the implications with regards to digital educational futures. The research employs Network Ethnography, literature review and documentary analysis, to examine the connections between social actors.

Authors

• Marina Avelar, Federal University of Minas Gerais and NORRAG

• Hany Zayed, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign