Mediating educational technologies: Edtech brokering between schools, academia, governance, and industry

Abstract

The use of educational technologies in schools is being reshaped by a new kind of intermediary organization that brokers relations between schools, academia, governance, and industry. In this article we define and examine ‘edtech brokers’ as organizations that operate between the edtech industry, public schools, research centers and governments, guiding schools in the procurement and pedagogical use of edtech. Edtech brokers have remained mostly unexplored despite their potential to redraw the boundaries between public education and the global edtech market. We claim that edtech brokers have become increasingly relevant in the past years, embedding new types of professionalities into education, and taking an active role in co-creating and updating schools’ digital infrastructures, the evidence-making mechanisms around edtech, and the pedagogical practices around edtech. The article proposes three distinct categories of edtech brokers – ambassador, search engine, and data brokers – and explores their practices of mediation. By doing so, we outline the potential effects that brokers can have on schools and edtech markets, and we disentangle their specific imaginaries of the future of education they promote, often aligned with wider policy desires for reform.