Over the past decades, digital technologies (EdTech) of various kinds – learning management systems, student information systems, business intelligence platforms or adaptive assessments, just to name a few – have become embedded in education governance and practice, many of them increasingly using forms of artificial intelligence (AI). In many countries around the world, these technologies hereby substantially inform government policy, funding decisions, classroom interactions and assessment structures, both in schools and higher education.

While there are indeed growing controversies about the impacts and risks of digital technologies (not only) in education, e.g., using gamified platforms for behavior control, facial recognition for attendance taking, algorithms for school choice allocation, or AI for essay generation and grading (e.g., Andrejevic & Selwyn, 2020; Swist & Gulson, 2022; Manolev et al., 2019), these technologies have remained opaque to both those that use and are impacted by them. Put differently, there are substantial concerns about the capacity of educators, administrators, policy makers, but also, to a growing extent, critical researchers themselves, to understand the presuppositions, the performative dimensions, and also limitations of using complex socio-technical digital technologies in decision-making (EC, 2021). As a consequence, over the past years, there have been growing efforts in the field which seek to specifically address this gap by more substantially integrating practitioners and policy-makers (or the public more generally) into critical technology investigation, empowering them to respond to the problematic impacts of these technologies, as well as motivating them to engage in their future shaping.

This symposium presents selected work from this field of ‘participatory approaches’, or ‘participatory experiments’(Chilvers & Kearnes, 2020), which can broadly be seen to draw on ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that seek to democratise technology (Callon et al., 2009). Such approaches combine both expert and non-expert perspectives to create new ways of looking at and responding to digital technologies. In this symposium, we discuss three fields of application for such participatory approaches: 

The first level refers to potentials and challenges when working with individual schools, that is, when seeking to include a whole school community (including the teaching body, leadership, students, and parents) instead of only a few (anyway) interested teachers. Anja Loft-Akhoondi, Sigrid Hartong, Toon Tierens and Mathias Decuypere present insights from a cross-country project on digital school empowerment, which draws on so-called ‘critical co-design approaches’ (Richter & Allert, 2019). The second level refers to the competence framework development, that is, frameworks that bring together the specific and complex knowledge from critical technology research on the one hand, and the practical needs of educators on the other hand. Ina Sander provides insights to a study which aimed at developing a theoretically and empirically grounded framework for critical datafication literacy, adopting a collaborative approach (see also Sander, 2020). The third level covered in this symposium is collective policy making, which is still less commonly discussed in education than in many other policy fields, and refers to the inclusion of both practitioners and researchers (e.g., Laessøe et al., 2013; Floridi et al., 2018). Kalervo Gulson, Marcia McKenzie and Sam Sellar examine the potentials and limitations of collective policy making related to AI in education, both about AI and with AI.

 Taken together, the three presentations, which will be rounded up by a critical discussion (Felicitas Macgilchrist), offer a systematic, both conceptually and empirically grounded insight into the complex, challenging, but also highly promising field of participatory approaches to shape a better future of EdTech.

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