With the growing importance of digital technologies in learning and teaching environments, various new actors have emerged in the governance of education. While the involvement of big tech corporations and affiliated philanthropies has been raising issues for critical examination for many years now (Selwyn 2014, Cuban 2003), there is a growing field of research that is concerned with the role of “intermediaries” and “boundary brokers” that operate in-between different professional, disciplinary or sectoral systems (Williamson & Hogan 2020). These actors range from policy innovation labs (Williamson 2015) to data mediators (Hartong 2016). They engage in the formulation, dissemination and enactment of (digital) education policies and are consequently considered to be crucial nodes in increasingly networked governance landscapes (Caves & Oswald-Egg 2021).

However, many of the actors that mediate in and between ed-tech networks and discourses are still to be researched in-depth. In particular, little is known about the intermediary role of IT-service and consulting providers and their work as ed-tech consultants for schools and administrations – despite their growing presence in ed-tech procurement and implementation processes (Förschler 2021). Consultants in education systems have been examined as political advisors (Gunter 2017), participants in school improvement processes (Goecke 2018) or well-connected drivers of reform discourses (Player-Koro and Beach 2017), and accordingly, have mostly been analyzed as linking elements between politics and pedagogy. While these studies highlight that consultants are to be understood as “knowledge actors”, who “variously generate, identify, carry and deploy saleable beliefs, ideas, debates and solutions that can be packaged and repackaged” (Gunter 2017: 338), the specific context of IT-related consultancy and technological expertise, however, has only played a minor role.

In order to get a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how technologies are mediated to schools via consultancy, this research project aims to approach IT-service and consulting businesses in the context of their coordinative work between political, pedagogical and technological spheres. Drawing on Bernstein’s notion of “recontextualization” (Bernstein 2000), the work of ed-tech consultants is examined as a relational process of moving and selecting knowledge from one context to another, or more specifically, as a practice of translating policies and technological rationales into something that practitioners can “enact” (Singh et al. 2013). Ed-tech consulting businesses, in this view, are not merely neutral linking elements that lubricate ed-tech related processes, but active agents in the construction of new pedagogical practices and values. Hence, the intermediary position of ed-tech consultants is to be considered as a critical junction that enables them to “structure the potential field of the actions of others” (Foucault 2007: 97), and thus, potentially exert power.

The local focus of this study, namely the German education system, provides a vivid example in which IT-service and consulting companies – driven by recent “school digitalization” reforms in Germany – are increasingly offering schools highly demanded amalgamations of interdisciplinary expertise (Petry et al. 2021). The companies offer comprehensive ed-tech implementation packages that reach from the (pre-)selection of products, integration of hard- and software to pedagogical frameworks (“media concepts”) and professional development (Rednet 2023). These “ed-tech implementation knowledges”, their production and transmission as well as the norms and values attached to it, are to be disentangled in the context of this investigation.

The study entails two phases of data collection. Given the fact that information about the work of IT-service und consulting companies is rather scarce, first exploratory insights into the field are gained by theory-building expert interviews (Meuser and Nagel 2002) with actors connected ed-tech consulting processes from private and public institutions. This first step of the research project aims to analyze the structural position of service and consulting companies in Germany’s educational system (funding, partnerships, dependencies, etc.) and the procedures that ed-tech consulting work encompasses (targeted issues, degrees of involvement, etc.). The second phase of research pursues in-depth insights into the knowledge work of IT-service und consulting providers through cases studies of several companies. Close attention is paid to the dominant “knowledges, knowings and knowledgeabilities” (Gunter 2017: 338) and their normative implications for pedagogical practices. Data is collected through in-field observations, websites, interviews and commercial documents by using ethnographic research methods. The variety of these data sources, drawn from, for instance, accompanying meetings, examining organizational departments and different professionalities, are expected to offer a comprehensive view that goes beyond their publicly promoted “corporate image” (Jaworska 2020) in order to explore the “hidden” practices of intermediaries (Hartong 2016).

Insights on edtech service and consulting companies, on their embeddedness in ed-tech integration processes, their modes of action and their ideals and values will offer new ways to grasp “the already fuzzy divide between the public and the private sector” (Ball 2010: 134). The rise of IT-service and consulting businesses in the education system shows that actors and modes of transmission are in demand and are likely to be needed to support ed-tech related school development projects. Yet, it is pivotal to critically examine the very actors that engage in these tasks and reconstruct the ways in which they coordinate and value various ideas and interests. Preliminary findings suggest that IT-service and consulting companies in Germany portray themselves as rational experts and only seldomly as educational visionaries or reformers. They seem to focus on the practicality of their services and promise an unbiased, “frictionless” integration of ed-tech. Most outstandingly, ed-tech consultants commonly assert that their services are bound to a “primacy of pedagogy” (over technology) – a phrase that originated from political debates in Germany as a counter-narrative to hardware-centered ed-tech policies. Thus, despite their affiliation with the IT-sector, they interestingly imply to value pedagogical knowledge over technical rationales. While this narrative serves their claimed status as objective advisors by seeking to reject the notion of being too closely tied to ed-tech producers, the understanding of “pedagogy” – a concept that became a rather vague buzzword in this context – is yet to be examined in more detail.

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