Critical studies of education and technology ... reasons to be hopeful?. Monash University. Report. https://doi.org/10.26180/29265038.v1

Background
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.
5
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:
• 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?
• What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and
education in our locality?
• 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’?
• 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?
Meeting coordinators were invited to prepare and submit brief reports detailing their
participants’ discussions around each of the four questions. This material is being used
to prepare two separate synopsis reports – drawing together common themes, pointing
to areas of divergence and generally bringing together an overview of what issues arose
across the 53 meetings. First, is a report focusing on the first three questions – titled
‘Education and digital technology: an international overview of issues, problems and
ways forward’. Second, the report that you are currently reading presents a synthesis of
the discussions around the fourth of the meeting questions – what grounds for hope
might there be amongst the many reasons to feel despondent and discouraged around
the current state of education and technology?
This fourth CSET question was intended as a provocation for academics, researchers,
teachers and others working along ‘critical’ lines to reflect on the purposes and
intended outcomes of their work. Critical scholarship is not simply an exercise in
pointing out problems and raising di_icult questions (although these are very important
aspects of any critical piece of scholarship). Ultimately, critical scholarship needs to
make a di_erence … so, what might this di_erence look like? How can critical studies of
education and technology make the world a (slightly) better place?