This week, Prof. Dr. Sigrid Hartong, Dr. Karola Cafantaris, Annina Förschler and Nina Brandau are participating in the international workshop “Unpacking the ‘In-Between’”. The workshop was organised by Prof. Geiss and Prof. Röhl (University Zürich) and Prof. Hartong.
The workshop focuses on the so-called “Intermediaries in the Digital Transformation of Schooling”, a topic that Sigrid Hartong and Annina Förschler have already contributed in the past. After the event, we will provide a short video summary and the presented slides on this website.
Abstract Workshop
Despite a rising body of research on the digital transformation of schooling, public discourse often still conceive of the integration of educational technologies into classrooms as a straightforward or linear process. However, such a perspective neglects the large variety of mediators or intermediaries involved in this process, including their important roles in shaping how digital approaches manifest themselves in classroom settings (Williamson 2015, Hartong 2016). Such intermediaries include human actors, among them technology providers or EdTech brokers (e.g., Beer 2017, Williamson 2016), as well as non-human actors such as digital/data infrastructures, platforms, documents or sites (e.g., Sellar 2015, Decuypere et al. 2021, Selwyn 2014, Gulson/Witzenberger 2020).
Even though the scholarly attention for the ‘in-betweens’ of digital education is growing, the function of intermediaries as an interrelated, continuously transforming field of its own still remains to be mapped. With this workshop, we want to address this gap by bringing together cutting-edge European researchers– qualitatively and quantitatively oriented, present-day and historically oriented –, exploring how digital technologies are ‘brought into’ schools. We invite scholars with different approaches and perspectives on intermediaries to participate in this workshop. Further, we are interested in contributions that focus not only on the classroom level and/or on the digital transformation of teaching practices, but also on the broader environment of digital schooling. This includes, for example, technology used in children ́s homes. Another example is school technology used for communicating with parents or for administrative reasons, including the preparation of lessons, the creation of assignments and schedules, registration, or reporting. Finally, providers of educational technology use various ‘intermediary sites’ (e.g. trade shows) to advertise their products and recruit potential schools as customers. Indeed, we argue that such a variety of approaches is needed to understand both the multidimensionality and the common logics of the ‘in-between’ in the digital transformation of schooling.
Interesting articles by the professorship on the topic:
Hartong, Sigrid (2016) Between assessments, digital technologies, and big data: the growing influence of ‘hidden’ data mediators in education. In: Martens, Kerstin; Niemann, Dennis & Teltemann, Janna (Hrsg.) European Educational Research Journal, Special Issue: Effects of International Assessments in Education – A Multidisciplinary Review, 15(5): 523-536. Link.
Förschler, Annina (2021) Der wachsende politische Einfluss privater (EdTech-)Akteure im Kontext digitaler Bildungsbeobachtung und -steuerung: Bemühungen um ein ‚dateninfrastrukturfreundliches Ökosystem‘. In: Bildung unter (digitaler) Beobachtung – Analysen zur wachsenden Bedeutung von Dateninfrastrukturen in der Bildungssteuerung. Thementeil in der Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 67(3): 323-337. Link.
Förschler, Annina (2018) Das ‚Who is who?‘ der deutschen Bildungs-Digitalisierungsagenda – eine kritische Politiknetzwerk-Analyse. In: Pädagogische Korrespondenz, 58(2): 31-52. Link.
Hartong, Sigrid & Förschler, Annina (2020) The rising power of business interests through intermediary policy networking: insights into the ‘digital agenda’ in German schooling. Link.
