Over the last years, the field of Critical EdTech Studies (CETS) has grown exponentially. With ‘critical edtech studies’, we denote studies that do not take educational technologies (‘EdTech’) at face value and/or merely try to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, but that rather aim to probe how they have come to increasingly shape and steer education through encoded and blackboxed logics—norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—invisible to schools and teachers and unaccountable to the professional sector (Macgilchrist, 2021). Prevalent in fields like media studies (e.g., van Dijck et al., 2018), data science (e.g., Daniel, 2019), and philosophy (e.g., Serres, 2014), CETS are widespread and not to be situated in one singular academic niche. However, CETS are especially prevalent and thriving in the field of sociologies of education – a broad academic discipline that has proven to provide especially fertile soil for critically analyzing the roles and impacts of digital technologies in/on the educational field [see, for instance, Castaneda & Williamson (2021), Decuypere et al. (2021), and Nichols & Garcia (2022) for recently published Special Issues on this topic]. Yet, despite this expansion and mainstreaming of CETS as an academic discipline, its highly valuable insights into how edtech invisibly reshapes education are not easily finding their way into concrete classroom practices, and are not easily used ‘to support teachers and other practitioners to rethink the ways that edtech works in their institutions and classrooms’ (Castenada & Williamson, 2021:11). To fill this gap between research and digital education in practice, this symposium addresses the following question: How can knowledge generated by CETS contribute to the conscious, responsible, and educationally valuable, implementation of EdTech by educational practitioners in schools (educators, students, ICT coordinators, data managers) and edtech developers? 

To address this question, this symposium invites one discussant and three papers in the field of CETS to present practice-based (research) projects (still under development or already implemented) that are, through different approaches, committed to a shared objective of fostering responsible, conscious and pedagogically valuable adoption of EdTech in specific educational settings. Participants will discuss the design of tools that make the actions and (blackboxed) operations of EdTech platforms and apps legible for teachers and learners, the development of workshop formats in which teachers and students co-design the use of digital technologies in education, and the development of instruments that assess the impact of digital technologies on fundamental public and educational values of schools. 

Castaneda, L., & Williamson, B. (2021). Assembling new toolboxes of methods and theories for innovative critical research on educational technology. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 10(1), 1-14. Daniel, B. K. (2019). Big Data and data science: A critical review of issues for educational research. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(1), 101-113. Decuypere, M., Grimaldi, E., & Landri, P. (2021). Introduction: Critical studies of digital education platforms. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 1-16. Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? Three responses. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 243-249. Nichols, T. P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform Studies in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 209-230. Serres, M. (2014). Thumbelina: The culture and technology of millennials. Rowman & Littlefield. Van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & De Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.