Backstaging the teacher: On learner-driven, school-driven and data-driven change in educational technology discourse

It is generally assumed that edtech providers aim to erase power and politics from contemporary education. To explore the discourse on digital education, this paper draws on discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews with for-profit and non-profit organizations in the field. It asks (i) what industry insiders describe as driving change in contemporary educational technology (edtech), and (ii) whether new actors/technologies are shaping a novel educational hegemony, and if so, what this hegemony looks like. This paper presents initial findings from an ongoing project. It observes a shift in who/what drives change: The teacher used to be seen as key. Today, three different drivers are named: (1) learners (individual dimension), (2) schools (systemic dimension), (3) data (analytics dimension). Overall, the paper suggests that power and politics are not at all erased from the edtech industry’s accounts of digital technologies. It illustrates how the socio-material affordances engineered into contemporary technologies effect a change from "education" to "learning", invite particular teaching practices, and thus affect power relations in education.