Critical studies of education and technology … reasons to be hopeful?

Abstract

The past couple of decades have seen the steady rise of digital technologies as a prominent element of education around the world. Digital technologies are now a key feature of education provision in the global north from pre-schools through to tertiary and community education – touching the educational experiences of young children through to seniors. In these regions, education provision now increasingly takes place through platforms and other large systems - dependent on cloud providers and the data industry in ways that were scarcely imaginable a few years previously. At the same time, ed-tech continues to grow in prominence in global south regions as governments, NGOs, philanthropic and industry actors look to implement various digital education innovations to help low-income and middle-income countries address fundamental problems around failing teacher workforces and lack of universal basic education.

While there continues to be much practitioner enthusiasm, financial investment and commercial hype around such technological developments, we are currently living through particularly unsettled times for the use of digital technologies in education. The worldwide school shutdowns triggered by the COVID pandemic and subsequent periods of ‘emergency remote schooling’ at the beginning of the 2020s have since been renounced in a detailed UNESCO report as ‘an EdTech tragedy’. This has been followed by pronounced regulatory turns in many countries – from Ireland to Indonesia - against student use of smartphones and other digital devices, accompanied by e_orts in countries such as Denmark and France to curtail the educational reach of ‘big tech’ corporations. Now we are seeing growing public and practitioner concerns expressed around the dehumanising e_ects of AI-driven education, and the environmental burdens caused by the production, consumption and disposal of digital technologies.

These shifts have certainly been reflected in the changing nature of academic scholarship and research in the area of education and technology over the past few years. In particular, we are now seeing growing interest in what can be termed ‘critical studies of education and technology’ (CSET) – bringing together academics, researchers, teachers, writers and technologists with a shared interest in approaching tech use as a problematic. This is resulting in academic research and scholarship that is focused primarily on the politics of ed-tech, and producing accounts of power, control, inequalities and disadvantage associated with and/or arising from the presence of digital technologies in education. While critical accounts of education and technology have been developed over the past 40 years, the past few years have seen a sharp increase in the number of academic researchers taking this approach. All told, there is now a fast-growing academic literature o_ering critiques of education and technology – o_ering a timely counterpoint to the traditional ‘what works’ approaches to how digital technology might be used in education settings.

In light of the increased significance of this area of research it seems appropriate that we talk more openly about what it means to take a ‘critical’ approach to education and technology. Against this background, this brief report draws on the outcomes of 53 expert ‘CSET’ meetings that were coordinated and convened around the world between the 17th and 21st February 2025 (see Appendix A for further details of this process). These meetings brought together over 500 individuals from across academic, research, educator policymaker and industry communities – all with a shared interest in ‘problematising education and technology’. Each meeting was asked to address the following four common questions:

(1) What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround ed-tech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions? (2) What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality? (3) What does the political economy of ed-tech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does ed-tech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’? (4) What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push- back and resistance against egregious forms of ed-tech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?