Interrogating Education, Technology & Capitalism in Chicago and Beyond

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Abstract: This symposium critically examines the changing role and influence of educational technologies and the tech industry on schooling, financing, and policy, with a special focus on Chicago, Illinois, while also situating these phenomena globally. The four presentations analyze what actors, methods, logics, policies, and sensibilities emerge from edtech; how companies wield influence over digital platforms, products, districts, disciplines, and consumers; the ways in which these dynamics are constituted through historical and present-day power relations (e.g. white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity); and what ways teachers, students, and communities are remaking and transforming these spaces and technologies to meet their needs.

Session Summary: The reliance of schools on educational technologies (edtech) and the influence of technology companies on curriculum, STEM workforce preparation, labor, and funding networks has dramatically increased over the past decade (Williamson 2017; Authors 2024). The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated these changes, drastically altering the teaching and learning process, educational spaces, and how we engage with each other and the world. Edtech has been described by policy experts, politicians, and corporations as a panacea for enduring educational challenges, believed to foster more equitable learning, generate new funding/investment streams, and improve teacher efficiency. Yet, edtech also has a tendency to reinforce racial, sexual/gender, and classed inequalities (Author 2019; Benjamin 2019), particularly as educational power and influence are captured by private capital and corporate interests (Lipman 2015, Watkins 2001). This symposium includes four papers that interrogate the changing dynamics of educational technology through the exploration of its impacts and resistances to these dynamics in Chicago and beyond.

Paper one presents the larger dynamics of the edtech industry and its role in influencing and profiting from public schooling and reform. The paper focuses on the changing dynamics and flows of capital in edtech before, during, and after COVID-19 in two cities (Chicago and Orlando) to address the question of who profited from public investment during the pandemic.

The next two papers examine how edtech and investment are shaping particular fields (STEM) and teaching practices and pedagogy that reproduce inequality while proposing how communities and teachers are simultaneously creating avenues of resistance, abolition, and transformation.

Paper two analyzes this through the ways in which the false generosity of technological industries shape learning goals and restrict disciplinary boundaries in secondary STEM education. Drawing from a teacher solidarity co-design research project, the paper illustrates how chemistry teachers in Chicago have resisted this influence in ways that counteract the tendency for technology to be treated as black boxes. By teaching about the scientific principles underlying technologies that measure environmental contamination, these teachers have linked critical pedagogies of technology with local movements for environmental justice.

Paper three, drawing on a teacher-research study, explores the ways in which participatory technology education can catalyze the development of community-designed technologies, and how these efforts may contribute towards disinvested communities’ collective agency to self-determine.

The final paper expands the analysis of the influence of edtech companies and investment beyond Chicago, looking at how these networks, practices, logics, and technologies operate globally. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of two large-scale policies in West Africa that outsourced public primary schools to largely international for-profit school management firms, the paper examines how global edtech investments and the larger global education industry are enclosing public schooling and policy, implementing highly unequal and exploitative labor regimes and capital flows, and surveilling, standardizing, and homogenizing educational practices for the benefits of global capital. The paper concludes with how communities are resisting these edtech companies and larger corporate school models through the creation of new community-based schools.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Organizer

• Tyler J Hook, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• “Hurling Money” at Edtech: Understanding Public Funding, Private Profit, and Union Resistance during COVID-19 - Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge; Klint Kanopka, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; Tyler J Hook, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania; Shahnaaz Khan, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge; María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge; Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Sofya Smyslova, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Critical Engagement with Technologies, and its Corporate Producers, in STEM Education - Daniel Morales-Doyle, University of Illinois Chicago; Alejandra Frausto Aceves, Northwestern University; Shelby Hatch, Northwestern University; Mindy Chappell, Portland State University

• Hacking Systems of Injustice: Reimagining Digital Futures through Participatory Community Tech - Jasmine Jones, M.Ed.; David Jones, Fresh Supply Inc.

• From “Death-worlds” to “Otherwise Worlds”- An Exploration of the Political Economy of EdTech Investments - Tyler J Hook, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• pauline lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago