In recent years, European primary and secondary schools and classrooms have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech ecosystems and their promises to seamlessly interconnect physical devices, educational software and apps, and cloud services. With companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple tightening their grip on classrooms’ transition into digital environments, Big Tech is asserting control over the material infrastructures, discursive framings, and economic logics undergirding educational digitalisation. As noted in recent scholarship (Kerssens & Van Dijck 2021), the notion of platformisation provides a useful conceptual tool to grasp the societal implications of this dynamic – namely the transformation of educational content, activities and processes to become part of a (corporate) platform ecosystem, including its economies (data) infrastructures and technical architectures (Srnicek 2016). Yet while the current scholarship on platformisation provides critical signposts for problematising the present, it offers little guidance for re-imagining digital education design beyond established platform logics (Macgilchrist et al. 2024).

Looking at problematisations of platforms and platformisation in education research, the broad field of study encompassed under the sociologies of education provides fertile soil for critically analysing the roles and impact of digital technologies in/on educational ideas and materialities (Selwyn 2019). Through the analytical lens of platformisation, recent work has examined Big tech influence in public education (Kerssens, Nichols & Pangrazio 2023), including the power of corporate cloud companies in educational governance (Williamson et al. 2022). Other studies have examined specific platforms as new infrastructures for pedagogy (Perrotta et al. 2020). Another strand of research has examined how platformisation of schools affects the day-to-day relations of teachers and students and conceptions of teacher autonomy (Cone 2023).

Yet as the monetary models, materialities, and embodied effects of Big Tech platform education come under increasing scholarly, political, and regulatory scrutiny, the apparent disaffection permeating much of the literature on platforms and platformisation begs the question of how and where to look for alternatives – both from a practical, administrative, and theoretical viewpoint. This question is, in turn, the starting point for the papers and discussions that form the present symposium proposal: What are the theoretical, empirical, and technical conditions for imagining and enacting alternative digital education ecosystems? And what role can sociologies of education play in affirming alternative approaches to and configurations of digitality, infrastructure, codes, and other related issues?

With this symposium, we seek to give space for empirical presentations and theoretical frameworks that can nurture such forms of questioning of post-platform classrooms and thereby mobilise the European educational research community around the critical study of platformisation, and the prospects of imagining and developing alternative digital ecosystems. The symposium includes four papers, representing four different national perspectives (Catalunya, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) that explore possibilities for grounding digital education in other forms of pedagogical and sociological reasoning, infrastructural arrangements, and forms of governance that can challenge the status quo of the platform as the default for educational digitalisation.

Cone, Lucas. 2023. "The platform classroom: troubling student configurations in a Danish primary school." Learning, Media and Technology 48 (1):52-64. Kerssens, Niels, T. Philip Nichols, and Luci Pangrazio. 2023. "Googlization(s) of education: intermediary work brokering platform dependence in three national school systems." Learning, Media and Technology: 1-14. Kerssens, Niels, and José van Dijck. 2021. "The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands." Learning, Media and Technology 46 (3):250-63. Macgilchrist, F., Jarke, J., Allert, H., and Pargman, T. 2024. “Design Beyond Design Thinking: Designing Postdigital Futures when Weaving Worlds with Others”. Postdigital Science and Education. Perrotta, Carlo, Kalervo N. Gulson, Ben Williamson, and Kevin Witzenberger. 2020. "Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom." Critical Studies in Education, 62 (1):97-113. Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Polity Press. Selwyn, Neil. 2019. What is digital sociology?. John Wiley & Sons. Williamson, Ben, Kalervo N. Gulson, Carlo Perrotta, and Kevin Witzenberger. 2022. "Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance." Harvard Educational Review, 92 (2):231–56.