Untimely investigations on the digital education governance

Program

10:00-10:45 Keynoteföreläsning av Paolo Landri

10:45-11:15 Gruppdiskussioner

11:15-11.45 Diskussion med Paolo Landri

Om föreläsningen

Education policy and practice are more and more imbricated in digital technologies and platforms. As a result, the very condition of the education policy and practice is being reshaped by a concatenation of data, algorithms, codes and expertise. Pandemic has accelerated this process and now platforms, software, algorithms are becoming ‘the new magic’ to change education from the scratch (Cone et al., 2021; Grek & Landri, 2021). Accordingly, a widespread sense of inevitability characterizes the scenario of the education governance, aligned mostly on technological solutionism (Morozov, 2019). To counter this simplistic and reductionist approach, I will introduce what I will call untimely investigations on the digital education governance, that is a research program interested in ‘pursuing questions no one seems to ask or and looking in a direction where most people are not looking’ (Heimans & Biesta, 2020). By drawing theoretically on Actor Network Theory and empirically on a set of research on the contemporary transformations of the education system in Italy (Landri, 2018, 2020), I will focus on the becoming digital of education governance and school leadership in this country with the aim of (re)considering the political and the educational dimensions of the digital governance. The development of cartographies of the digital education governance will illustrate, in particular, the increasing entanglement of public education in privately owned and commercial platforms through processes of soft privatization and the progressive dilution of educational issues into the language of learning.

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Paolo Landri is Senior Researcher and Deputy Director of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS).  Recently, he has published Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory London: Routledge (2020) and with Denise Mifsud (2021) Enacting and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership within the Mediterranean Region. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Sense Publisher. Currently, he Co-Editor in Chief of the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) https://journals.sagepub.com/home/eer

Attached reading 

Landri, P. (2018). Cartographies of the digital governance of education. In World Yearbook of Education 2019 (pp. 132-147). Routledge.

References

Cone, L., Brøgger, K., Berghmans, M., Decuypere, M., Förschler, A., Grimaldi, E., … Vanermen, L. (2021). Pandemic Acceleration: Covid-19 and the emergency digitalization of European education. European Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211041793

Grek, S., & Landri, P. (2021). Editorial: Education in Europe and the COVID-19 Pandemic. European Educational Research Journal, 20(4), 393–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211024781

Heimans, S., & Biesta, G. (2020). Rediscovering the beauty and risk of education research and teaching: an interview with Gert Biesta by Stephen Heimans. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 48(2), 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2020.1731422

Landri, P. (2018). Digital Governance of Education. Technologies, Standards and Europeanization of Education. London: Bloomsbury.

Landri, P. (2020). Educational leadership, management, and administration through actor-network theory. Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429470493