{"title":"Working at the frontier: Swiss educational information and communication technology coordinators as mediators and intermediaries of the digital transformation","authors":"M. Geiss, Tobias Röhl","doi":"10.1177/00345237241242989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241242989","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Swiss educational information and communication technology (ICT) coordinators (‘Pädagogischer ICT-Support’; PICTS) in Swiss compulsory schools in their ambivalent role between active agents of change and mere facilitators for their colleagues. Using a qualitative research design, it explores the history, self-perception and current roles of PICTS in the canton of Zurich and their interaction with other actors in the education system and the cantonal authorities. This paper draws on science and technology studies to understand the unique role of educational ICT coordinators. The results show that the perceptions and self-understanding of PICTS have remained consistent since their establishment, even though the digital technologies they deal with have evolved rapidly. Their dual role allows PICTS to be both active agents of change and part of a school’s teaching staff. Working at the frontier, they are ambiguous figures, embodying the contradictions of digital transformation in education without necessarily making them explicit.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140366840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Approaches to spatial inequalities in a Nordic welfare state – the case of Norway","authors":"Unn-Doris K Baeck","doi":"10.1177/00345237241242992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241242992","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the position of the core ideas of equity and equal opportunities within the Nordic model of education today is problematized, using Norway as the case of interest and spatial dividing lines as the main variable in question. I am specifically preoccupied with geographical education differences as part of the ‘unequal opportunity problem’ in Nordic education. Focusing on spatial inequalities in education, something that is rarely addressed by educational authorities, brings light to the assertion that aims that used to be the foundation for the Norwegian education system, are harder to see as guiding principles in education policy today. Through highlighting this, the aim is also to contribute to a discussion of how research related to education in rural areas is situated in the Norwegian context, viewing this in light of Norway as a representative of the Nordic model of education. In the article understanding the agential doings behind the paradox of the Nordic education equality ethos on the one side and the persisting and empirically documented spatial education inequalities on the other, represents the analytic intake.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140368463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring the intermediary role of ed-tech consulting in Germany: In-between policy, pedagogy, and economics","authors":"Lucas Joecks","doi":"10.1177/00345237241242993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241242993","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a critical analysis of the multifaceted intermediary role played by ed-tech (educational technology) consulting providers in the realm of educational governance. The study draws on multidisciplinary research and uses illustrative examples from Germany to outline their impact on the integration of digital technologies in schools. By employing an analytical framework that encompasses three key perspectives—policy, pedagogy, and economics—the paper explores the complexities of consultancy between governance actors, sectors, and fields of knowledge. Considering these dimensions together, the study offers a comprehensive understanding of ed-tech consulting, shedding light on its influence on policy enactment, educational practices, and economic value chains. It underscores the challenges and tensions that consultants must navigate, while raising concerns about their potential to pre-empt pedagogical decisions and diffuse commercial interests into educational settings. As such, this paper aims to provide a conceptual foundation for investigating these ambiguities, with the goal of stimulating further research into the growing field of ed-tech consulting.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140373929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Catherine Heinemeyer, Matthew Reason, Natalie Quatermass, Natalie Wood, Olalekan Adekola
{"title":"Mutual learning through participatory storytelling: Creative approaches to climate adaptation education in secondary schools","authors":"Catherine Heinemeyer, Matthew Reason, Natalie Quatermass, Natalie Wood, Olalekan Adekola","doi":"10.1177/00345237241236191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241236191","url":null,"abstract":"Unprecedented global temperatures have brought the question of how to teach sensitive issues of climate change to the fore. In this paper we suggest that a refocusing on adaptation productively shifts the debate to climate justice and practical solutions to building community resilience. The paper examines a practice-led project that sought to innovate and test the use of participatory storytelling with young people to explore climate adaptation. Our insights relate to two areas: first, the benefits of mutual learning through engaging in dialogue with frontline communities; second, how participatory storytelling supports emotionally intelligent sensemaking, agency and leadership by providing both ‘connections’ and ‘containers’ for engaging with climate.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140035575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impacts of neoliberal school reforms policy on students with disabilities in Nepal","authors":"Mukti Thapaliya","doi":"10.1177/00345237241234606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241234606","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that special and inclusive education policies in Nepal have been influenced by neoliberal policy reforms. The study employs discourse analysis as a theoretical perspective to analyse the effects of market-based schooling practices on students with disabilities in Nepal. The findings of this study are informed to some extent by the outcomes of the doctoral research project (Thapaliya, 2018). Data was collected through policies and documents. A selection of key education policies and documents between 1990 to 2020 were examined and analysed. One core theme and five sub-themes were identified from the data analysis. Disability as a resource management issue was a main theme. (i) Managing resources; (ii) resource allocation criteria; (iii) professional experts deciding resource funds; (iv) competing for limited resources; and (v) competition and school choice were sub-themes. The available evidence signals that the marketisation model of education does not assist students with disabilities adequately. The findings of this study reveal that the current policy and practice signal changes in government structure rather than working to fulfil these commitments in the everyday practice of students with disabilities. The limitations of the study and recommendations of this research are also discussed.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139978811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Governance by intermediarization. Insights into the digital infrastructuring of education in Estonia","authors":"Sigrid Hartong","doi":"10.1177/00345237241234613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241234613","url":null,"abstract":"With the rising prevalence of digital data, infrastructures and platforms in education, the challenge of conceptualizing and investigating ‘intermediaries’ has substantially increased. This not only refers to various new types of actors that have been materializing around practices of data infrastructuring (e.g., data management), but equally to the rising empowerment of data infrastructures themselves as intermediaries of policy and governance. The aim of this article is to sharpen our conceptual understanding of this interrelation between intermediaries and data infrastructuring. More specifically, the article suggests to approach intermediaries through a lens on performative contexting, thus shifting the focus towards how ‘intermediary contexting’ is used, by whom and where exactly, rather than seeking to map intermediaries as an object ‘from the outside’. Data infrastructuring, then, can be regarded both as part, and as a result, of such contexting efforts. Using Estonia as a case study, it is shown what we see (differently) when applying such a lens to the digital transformation of education. The findings hereby indicate a gradual emergence of what could be described as ‘governance by intermediarization’: a process in which more and more actors are shifted into the (self)contexting as infrastructural stewards, while the politics of digital transformation become centered – i.e., seemingly depoliticized – around asserting continuous change through digital connection.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139956851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The death of thought: Reading Bataille in the ruins of a university","authors":"Ansgar Allen","doi":"10.1177/00345237231223902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231223902","url":null,"abstract":"This paper takes on and explores the disturbing and perhaps counter-intuitive notion that the university is the place where the intellect goes to die. This idea is explored alongside Georges Bataille’s suggestion that the death of thought might actually be a worthy pursuit and only thought which seeks its own limits is worth striving for. The deleterious effects of the university upon thought are nonetheless contrasted to Bataille’s own attempts to take thought to the point of its expiration. The key difference between the ‘teaching of death’ that Bataille has in mind, and the enactment of the death of thinking that the university achieves is this: Bataille seeks, however impossibly, to bring death “into the field of vision”. Academic knowledge production, by contrast, with its systematism, its rigor, its proceduralism and its subsumption by work, merely abandons the thinking subject to the inevitable result, which for Bataille, is unthinking servility, a premature, utterly suppressed, and domesticated, death-in-life.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139139398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital utopia and dystopia of schools after the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Nóra Fazekas","doi":"10.1177/00345237231219149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231219149","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to capture the digital imaginaries of Hungarian schools through the lens of digital utopianism as a theoretical framework. Employing a qualitative research approach and semi-structured interviews, this study contributes to the body of literature concerning organizational and policy-level educational management. It investigates utopian and dystopian visions of digitalized schools within the Hungarian education system, featuring participants comprising school leaders, teachers, and administrative staff drawn from five institutions, offering either general or vocational education, representing diverse ownership structures, including state and religious ownership. The study highlights prominent themes of the imaginaries, such as funding and infrastructure, equity, misuse, and social and pedagogical relations and suggests further research directions and methodologies applicable in this field.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138593340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unpacking English as a foreign language PhDs’ return mobility and identity (re)construction at Chinese universities: A qualitative case study","authors":"Bingbing Ai, Jie Zhang, Alexander Kostogriz","doi":"10.1177/00345237231219145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231219145","url":null,"abstract":"Using qualitative case study as a method, the researchers collected data from four PhD returnees specializing in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and inquired about their experiences of teacher identity (re)construction after their return to Chinese universities. The collected data demonstrate that these participants have encountered various challenges in complying with Chinese higher education practices; their unique insider/outsider experience and the contribution that they can make to internationalization of the university culture and pedagogy are undervalued, while they often feel unsupported to develop their research profile. This paper contributes to the current research into EFL PhDs’ mobility and their teacher identity (re)construction in the context of the internationalization of Chinese universities. The challenges and issues raised here may have commonalities with those faced in other international tertiary education settings, where EFL PhD students gain their qualifications overseas and return to a career in EFL in their own country.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139239046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Youth educational mobility and the rural family in China","authors":"Haoyang Zhang, Li-Chung Hu, E. Hannum","doi":"10.1177/00345237231216309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231216309","url":null,"abstract":"Urban-rural economic opportunity gaps drive rural youth to seek economic stability by migrating away from home and family. The links between educational attainment and economic outcomes for rural youth are well studied in China and elsewhere, but the implications of educational mobility for rural family relationships remain less understood. Extending tenets of second demographic transition theory, we posit that education sets the stage for “individualization:” geographic mobility for urban work distant from rural family networks. Educational mobility may thus set conditions for upending traditional family co-residence patterns, direct-support relationships, and family-gender attitudes. In this paper, we consider first whether educational advancement is associated with urban economic mobility for rural youth in young adulthood, and then ask whether education is linked to disruption of rural family relations. Specifically, using the case of children growing up in rural northwest China, we estimate relationships between secondary and tertiary educational attainment and (1) economic stability, (2) intergenerational geographic separation and material exchange, and (3) traditional family and gender role attitudes, after adjusting for potential confounders. Results show that for both men and women, education is associated with greater economic stability in young adulthood, across several measures, and with an erosion of adherence to traditional family and gender attitudes. Moreover, for men, education correlates to less family proximity and more material exchange.","PeriodicalId":45813,"journal":{"name":"Research in Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139239651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}