EdTech vendors, but equally policy actors (e.g., the European Digital Education Action Plan) worldwide, commonly attribute deep structural transformations to the digitization of education, ranging from ‘truly’ personalized or fully ‘delocalized’ learning, to a remaking of schools into networked learning organizations. At the same time, a growing number of critical edtech studies have argued for an urgent need to ‘demystify’ such revolutionary visions, pointing to various implementations of digital technologies in schools that reproduce traditional structures of formal education (inequality, assessment-oriented input learning, etc.) rather than ‘disrupting’ them (e.g., Reich, 2020; Mertala, 2020). As this literature shows, at least part of the reasons for this lie in the complex interplay between the contextual needs of schools on the one hand, and the standardized (and scalable) design of many edtech products on the other hand (ibid.). Moreover, critical edtech studies show the huge need of schools to experiment, in their local context, with various edtech products, in order to obtain a good understanding of their working operations, their pedagogical intentions and design (e.g., Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022). Moreover, such findings show the urgent need of bringing critical edtech research (insights) into schools, rather than chiefly circulating these insights into academic circles alone (cf. Holloway et al., 2022). In this contribution, we will present the German-Belgian SMASCH (“Smart Schools”, www.smasch.eu) research project (2021-2024); a collaboration between KU Leuven and HSU Hamburg, with 13 sample schools in both countries, around ‘pedagogically meaningful’ digitization. Drawing on insights from critical edtech research as shortly outlined above, the project aims to move beyond an instrumental understanding of digitization as technologically-induced change(s), rather working towards a systematic development of a ‘critical, research-oriented attitude’ in schools that aims to foster a nuanced (yet practical) understanding of the promises, potentials and risks of EdTech adoption in concrete school practices. In doing so, SMASCH aims to work and think together with schools with regards to how such pedagogically meaningful digitization can look like, depending on the very specific context in which each school is situated. Thus far, in the context of SMASCH, we have brought insights of critical edtech studies into schools by means of practices of critical co-design; participatory workshops with schools; the creation of study materials for teachers and/students; and the bringing together of schools over the national boundaries of the two countries present in the project – all of which will be extensively discussed during our presentation.

Brandau, N., & Alirezabeigi, S. (2022). Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Holloway, J., Lewis, S., & Langman, S. (2022). Technical agonism: embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Mertala, P. (2020). Paradoxes of participation in the digitalization of education: A narrative account. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 179-192. Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can't transform education. Harvard University Press.