# Trainee Teachers and the Discourses of Ed-Tech # *A research proposal* *January 2025* #EdTech #final *Note: I wrote this as an assignment for an M-Level module, "Introduction to Research Design", and I picked topic and methods so as to force me to read, over a Christmas holiday, beyond my then PhD topic (at the time, Neurodivergent Teachers) and corresponding methods. Any excuse to sit down with some Foucault, eh?* *The structure reflects the submission and there's a lot of meat in the appendixes I would otherwise have had in the main body of the text.* # Background Educational technology (ed-tech), the nexus of digital products and services used in education, is firmly embedded in UK schools, who now spend an estimated £900 Million a year on ed-tech, more than in any European country (Tobin, 2023). For context, this is nearly a third of the £2.9 Billion funding the Pupil Premium in England (Roberts, 2023), and more than four times the state funding of teacher training bursaries last academic year (Department for Education (DfE), 2023). UNESCO described the acceleration 2020-2022 of the "develop\[ment\] and embed\[ding\]" of technology in the education sector as *[an Ed-Tech Tragedy](https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000386701)* ; it noted that the discourse of techno-solutionism (Evgeny, 2013) heretofore rare in education, had been fully deployed in service of this programme of capture (UNESCO and Mark, 2023). The ascent of ed-tech has had a head start in the UK, undoubtedly thanks to the innovative work of entrepreneurs and educators (citation pending), but also in large part to the neoliberal model of education, based on marketisation, privatisation, competition and accountability. Starting with the 1988 Education Reform Act, this model flourished under the 1997-2010 New Labour governments, leading to what Rudd describes as the 'ideological appropriation' of ed-tech deployment (2013), its integration into the sector being driven by neoliberal market principles. This rise hasn't been underpinned by the strength of the evidence for ed-tech (see **Appendix E**) but by neoliberal discourses who foreshadowed global ed-tech discourses today. In this mixed-method study, I propose to investigate ed-tech discourses amongst trainee-teachers in a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) intake, and their positionality relative to dominant discourses of ed-tech in the UK. Student teachers engage with ed-tech both as educators, at school, and as learners, at university, giving them a unique perspective. Their discursive environments are on the one hand vertical, and shared across the cohort (media, policy and university education); as well as, on the other hand, horizontal, as well as distinct for each trainee (placement school and personal social networks) (q.v. Bernstein, \[1990\] 2003, 1996, 1999). # Research Questions 0. What are the dominant discourses surrounding (secondary education) ed-tech in 2025. 1. To what degree have trainee teachers internalised the dominant discourses of ed-tech? 2. Are trainee teachers explicitly adopting or critiquing said discourses? # Literature review ## Theoretical Framing: Critical Discourse Analysis Discourse, in the widest sense, is a "practice by which individuals imbue reality with meaning" (Ruiz, 2009). Language, though this sense-making, shapes social behaviour: as per Ball, "we don't speak discourse, it speaks us" (1994, p. 22). For Michel Foucault, \[D\]iscourse produces \[K\]nowledge: the way we talk about things shapes how we understand them (Foucault, 1975). Discourse, for him, is also \[P\]ower, in as much as the production and distribution of discourses is organised by (and for the benefit of) those in power (Foucault, 1971, \[1982\] 2004). Norman Fairclough, building on Foucault's ideas, approaches discourse as a social practice embedded in power relations (Fairclough, 1989). Where Foucault was famously deliberately vague on methodology specifics, Fairclough formalised Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a method of (inter)textual analysis challenging the discursive embedding of power relations. He proposed a model of discourse with three dimensions: discourse as text itself, discourse practice (its production and distribution), and social practice (the wider social context shaping it) (Fairclough, 2003). Others are quick to note that “\[m\]ethodologically, CDA is as diverse as DA in general, or indeed other directions in linguistics, psychology or the social sciences.” (Wodak and Meyer, 2015, p. 3) The proposed study will not 'use CDA', a phrase Wodak and Meyer warn against (2015, p. 3), but discourse analysis (a method equally loosely defined) within a critical frame: analysing specifically the ed-tech discourses consumed and produced by trainee teachers; whilst no study occupies this specific intersection yet, scholars have applied CDA in the areas of both teacher training and ed-tech. ## Discourse and Teacher Training Viewing the role of the teacher through the lens of discourse elicits new findings: Thomas (2005) gives a worked example of CDA on Australian policy documents, looking at the construction of teacher identity, *problematising* "teacher quality" - surfacing its unspoken, taken-for-granted assumptions, and interrogating them (Celikates and Flynn, 2023). In the UK, Carabine's PhD thesis analysed texts of speeches, parliamentary debates, press release and news stories spanning 2016-2017, contrasting them with interviews with 12 in-service teachers; he finds that teacher identity is shaped in part by the *rejection* of policy discourses, which "\[present\] teachers in a negative light in a consistent and sustained manner" (2023, p. 2) As to teacher training specifically, Mocker and Redpath (2023) also find a pervasive, yet vague "teacher quality" discourse amongst those surfaced in their analysis of media texts on teacher education, comparing UK, US and Australian corpuses. Beach and Bagley (2013), presenting a history of prior analyses of Swedish and UK policy documents, not a move from teacher *education* to teacher *training*, marked by performativity and managerialism, and a shift from *vertical* discourses, transmitted via hierarchical channels to *horizontal* ones, transmitted amongst peers in a community of practice (Bernstein,[1990] 2003, 1996, 1999). This diminishment of the role of the University (compared to the placement school) in ITT is borne out by Tillin, who calls for a greater role for academic, theoretical teacher education (2023). Tillin sought perspectives from trainees of the Teach First programme, upon which Elliott (2018) cast a critical gaze; her CDA of training materials and interviews with students and staff notices a reconstruction of the idea of the teacher. This in a programme whose organisational discourse weaves a 'hero narrative', framing Teach First as an elite route, whose trainees will sacrifice their first years in the workforce for the greater social good before ascending to elite positions, within education or without. Ridgway (2023)'s CDA used a corpus of teacher education policy documents, 2010-2021, comparing it to a 1970-2009 corpus, surfacing discourses of control and marketisation. Using (linguistic, not critical) discourse analysis of messages on online trainee forums, Irwin and Hramiak (2010) notes how the very medium of communication shapes the discursive construction of identity, and tantalisingly wonders if in the years to follow, greater integration of technology in teaching may shape future teacher identity. A decade later, Rowston, Bower and Woodcock (2023), studying the impact of prior occupation on technology integration amongst Australian trainee teachers, find that while previous career does affects their sense of self-efficacy with pedagogical technology, it has no effect on the implementation of this integration. Indeed, Atherton notes that the "realities of \[ed-tech\] use amongst trainee teachers" (2019) show, between aspirations and reality, less a gap than a *'chasm'*, more for lack of practical opportunity than because of a rejection of hegemonic discourses. ## Dominant discourses surrounding ed-tech in the UK My hope was to find out what dominant discourses of ed-tech had already been identified in critical studies. Most of the literature is about higher education, which adopted ed-tech before schools, and conveniently happened to employ authors versed in critical studies of discourse, but the most recent corpus I found ends in 2012. There are few ed-tech discourse studies about school technology, even fewer about UK schools specifically, and corpuses here end in 2007. This prompted me to add **RQ0**, to be addressed in the preliminary phase. The scope of the literature review had me present it here as summaries, with details in appendices. See **Appendix A** for search strings. ### International discourses on ed-tech The development of education technology over the twentieth century, from film to computers via video, was accompanied early by (social) *efficiency* discourse, along with a *marketplace* one, as soon as a marketplace for projection equipment started existing. Later in the century, those will be joined by an *equity* discourse (De Vaney and Butler, 1996). In the twenty-first century, analyses from varied corpuses surface similar discourses of *efficiency* and *equity* (inclusion/fairness), along with that of *effectiveness*, preparation for the job *market*, along with, in commercial corpuses, *transformation* (from *innovation* to outright *disruption*). The discourse of *evidence-basis* is present around Higher Education ed-tech in particular, and, when analysing views of educator, a critical discourse of *limitation* is present (Lee, 2021; Ramiel, 2021; McGarr and Engen, 2022; Suárez-Guerrero, Rivera-Vargas and Raffaghelli, 2023; Lambert _et al._, 2024). See **Appendix B**. ### Higher Education in Britain In the texts reviewed, all using corpuses of national, local, or institutional policy documents, *efficiency*, *effectiveness* (sometimes cost-, more than pedagogical) and *inclusion* are again dominant discourses, along neoliberal discourses of performance-driven goals, entrepreneurship, and meeting the demands of the job market. The *marketplace* discourse this times casts the student as consumer, and HE as supplier a relation manifested in the *personalisation* of learning, with its own discourse. (Clegg, Hudson and Steel, 2003; Hayes, 2015; Munro, 2016, 2018; Clark, 2024). See **Appendix C**. ### British Schools Official discourses on ed-tech under the premierships of Tony Blair (1997-2007), have show an expected neoliberal palette: *marketisation* (the long public/private partnership of the National Grid for Learning), *accountability* (through assessment data - of both students and teachers), and the overarching theme of *transformation*, whilst being careful to balance *innovation* with *stability* - the latter manifest in texts, policy and commercial, addressed to teachers and schools (Mee, 2007; Selwyn, 2007; Chambers, 2017). See **Appendix D**. My searches did not surface studies with a corpus ending after 2007. However, McGarr and Engen (2022) used as corpus text and illustrations from the websites of Apple, Google and Microsoft in 2020, and find all the expected discourses: *efficiency*, *effectiveness*, *transformation* and meeting the demands of the job *market*. The discourse of *evidence* is present in materials aimed at higher education, but not schools. Notable is the absence in those findings of *inclusion*, in spite of its dominance in the PR discourse of those companies at the time. I have included a short history of the discourse of *evidence* for ed-tech in official UK documents in **Appendix E**. ### Review Conclusion An overarching theme in all the discourses found is that of *technological determinism*, a conception of the relationship between technology and society that emerged in the industrial age, then lost steam in the second half of the twentieth century, only to come back, stronger, with the digital revolution (Hallström, 2022; Franssen, Lokhorst and van de Poel, 2024). The absence, in the literature, of a recent analysis of ed-tech discourses in the UK prompted **RQ0**, and I have begun collating a corpus of official documents, with the view of continuing analysis in the preliminary phase. Some of the discourses identified in the literature are quite explicit: *efficiency*, *effectiveness*, and *inclusion* are among the official aims of the DfE (2019, p 3). This gap in the literature speaks to the need for this study. The explicit official support for AI tools for marking (DfE and DSIT, 2024, 2025) is the latest manifestation of new discourse of *efficiency* specifically geared around workload, and learning analytics (Prinsloo, 2019; Selwyn, 2019, 2020) or more recently AI tutors (Civit _et al._, 2024; Ecker, 2024; Nie, 2024) have changed the discourse of *personalisation* (which speaks to both *effectiveness* and *inclusion*. Those recent developments speak to the timeliness of this study. # Method The study will use mixed-methods, in an an *exploratory sequential design* (Bryman, 2016; Creswell and Plano Clark, 2018; Clark _et al._, 2021): - A preliminary, **qualitative** phase, without participant involvement, to establish the principal discourses surrounding school ed-tech in the UK - both dominant and critical. *Findings will inform questionnaire design for...* - A first large-sample, **quantitative** phase. *The data from which will form the basis of participant selection and interview structure for...* - A second, small sample **qualitative** phase Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004) argue elegantly for the timeliness of mixed-methods, refuting the "incompatibility thesis" (Howe, 1998, Cited in Johnson and Onweugbuzie, 2004, pp. 1-3) in favour of the classical pragmatism of Pierce, James and Dewey. Not only does a pluralist (as opposed to purist) approach improves cross-disciplinary communication and exploration, it also makes possible *between-method* triangulation within the same study (Onwuegbuzie, 2000). With this study framing its research by critical theory, I was particularly inspired by Haynes-Brown (2023) presentation of her research on teacher's beliefs and use of technology as a case study in ‘‘the iterative nature of theori\[s\]ing, evaluation, and theory refinement, entailing both deductive and inductive procedure’’ (Gates, 2008, p. 2, cited in Haynes-Brown, 2023, p. 245). ## Sample and Participants I will recruit participants amongst a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) intake at the University of Roehampton, Primary and Secondary. Whilst appropriate to a study on trainee teachers, recruiting them from a single university is a limitation to the generalisability of findings. This choice, however, is defensible beyond the obvious practical aspect. Although much of their training happens in different schools, trainees at the same university will be exposed to shared discourses; *vertically*, in training materials and practices at university, and in their placement schools; *horizontally* within tutor groups, and placement school (q.v. Bernstein, \[1990\] 2003, 1996, 1999). Ideally participation would be mandated, to avoid participants with strong views either way disproportionately self-selecting into the study, a common problem in surveys (Newby, 2014; Bryman, 2016; Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2018). ## Preliminary Phase Along with a deeper review of the literature, I plan to collect and analyse a small corpus of recent texts, to identify the main features of participants' discursive environment (Fairclough, 2003). Findings will address **RQ0**, and inform the next phase. ### Data Collection Compilation and clean-up of a text corpus - Policy: DfE documents on both ed-tech and Initial Teacher Training - Academic: PGCE materials - Horizontal: publicly available policies of placement schools - Commercial: scraping of key ed-tech websites (incl. Bett) ### Data Analysis I will surface discourses in the corpus using Structural Topic Modelling (STM). STM is technique that emerged in the last decades, with advancement in natural language processing (Wallach, 2008). Building on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a statistical method pioneered in genetics by Pritchard, Stephens and Donnelly (2000), then extended to natural language. Whilst powerful, LDA is a coarse statistical method, using 'bag\[s\] of words', that is, presence and frequency of words rather than their order (Jelodar _et al._, 2019). STM, conversely, consider textual context, thus handling polysemy, as well as meta-textual context: date, publication, authors. The incorporation of those data in automated analysis makes STM ideal of critical discourse analysis (Aranda _et al._, 2021). Using a technique that is both explicit (the analysis can be reproduced by a third party) and inductive (themes are truly inferred from the data rather than from the researcher's preconceptions) is fitting to CDA, a technique often accused of putting critical theory before methodology (Jacobs and Tschötschel, 2019). With machine analysis, the time cost does not scale with the size of the corpus; my time will instead be spent setting up an automated modelling process tuned for CDA, which will be ready to be used at low marginal cost during the subsequent analysis of participants interviews. ## Quantitative phase The aim of this arm is to answer **RQ1**, and inform the emergent parts of the design of the qualitative phase. ### Data collection Quantitative data will be collected with a self-administered online questionnaire, in three parts: #### Teacher information Gender, age range, stage (primary/secondary), subject (see *Ethical Considerations* on data protection). #### Technology Acceptance A set of rating scales based on the Technology Acceptance Model. Originally conceived in the 1980s (Davis, 1986), and since then considerably improved and extended (Marangunić and Granić, 2015), the TAM is powerful in that it considers not only the user (or user-to-be) *attitudes* towards the technology to be 'accepted' (a somewhat chilling term), but also their *agency*: 'perceived behavioural control'. It furthermore conceives those two factors as stemming from categories of *beliefs*, either personal or normative. The TAM has been used in education research, often with education-specific extensions, from early years (Hong, Zhang and Liu, 2021) to higher education (Sharma and Srivastava, 2019; Lazar, Panisoara and Panisoara, 2020), in context varying from pre-service teachers (Şahin and Şahin, 2022) to AI chatbots (Chocarro, Cortiñas and Marcos-Matás, 2023). #### Discourse adoption This section will measure discourse adoption with another set of Likert-like (they will not have been statistically validated) scales. This will be developed during the preliminary phase, as I review the literature further, and decompose the STM-identified discourses into sub-statements, and identify proxy statements showcasing internalisation if not agreement. Optional, open-ended questions will let participants comment on their position vis-a-vis each discourse. A voice note mailbox will be made available for participants to record long-form responses verbally, lowering the barrier to meaningful participation. Answers in both forms (the latter trasncripted) will join the qualitative data corpus of the next phase. The aim is for the questionnaire to take ten minutes or less to complete, in the hope of maximising participation. The questionnaire will conclude with a checkbox for participants to volunteer for the next arm. ### Data Analysis This survey will measure both categorical variables (age, gender, phase, subject) and ordinal variables (scores on the rating scales). Although the survey design could allow for multivariate analysis, the expected sample size makes it unlikely for its results to be meaningful. Quantitative analysis will thus use what Bryman understatedly describes as "very basic techniques" (2016, p. 330): - Univariate analysis of summated ratings: This will assess a baseline of acceptance of technology, and discourses internalisation, across the whole intake - Bivariate analysis of discourse internalisation against categorical variables This will measure whether, and how, trainee teacher differ in their adoption of ed-tech discourse, depending on their demographic characteristics, and of their phase and subject. - Bivariate analysis of discourse internalisation against technology acceptance. This will surface any relationship between trainees relationship to technology at large, and their acceptance of ed-tech discourses. - Bivariate analysis of tech acceptance against categorical variables Whilst technically beyond the scope of this study, analysing relationships between demographic or educational characteristics and technology acceptance has a negligible marginal cost and could yield interesting findings. It could help elucidate whether demographics could be a confounding variable, making relationship between acceptance and internalisation spurious, or if acceptance is an intervening variable between trainee profile and discourse internalisation. (Newby, 2013; Bryman, 2016) ## Qualitative arm ### Sample Responses to the questionnaire will inform the final selection of 4-6 participants (amongst those agreeing to further participation), with diverse perspectives so as to generate varied qualitative data, in subsequent *semi-structured interviews*, to address **RQ2**. ### Data Collection Prompts for the interview will be formulated based on the identified ed-tech discourses, as well as topics emerging from the survey, in particular responses to the open-ended questions. Interviews will be recorded over video conferencing software, with only the audio being kept and transcribed. Whilst there is valuable data to be collected from the video, time constraints would not allow for a meaningful analysis. Recordings will then be transcribed, and it is those transcripts, along with answers to the open questions of the questionnaire, that will form the corpus of data to be analysed (q.v. *Ethical Considerations*). ### Data analysis Whilst the quantitative arm focuses on the *implicit*, unconscious internalisation of ed-tech discourses amongst trainee teachers, the purpose this arm is to surface themes in the way participant trainee teachers *explicitly* relate to ed-tech discourses: adoption/belief, acceptance, rejection. Thematic analysis is not a clearly defined set of techniques, (Bryman, 2016) - Cohen and colleagues (2018) use the term as an outcome, more than a method, preferring instead to write simply of 'coding'. I propose to combine manual coding and thematic extraction with a verification by automated STM analysis using the model tuned in the preliminary phase. # Ethical Considerations ## Informed Consent Participants, being selected from a PGCE intake, will all be adults, and English speakers. Consent will be sought, to collect questionnaire data, then to record and transcribe interviews, for the purposes of research to evaluate PGCE students *views* of ed-tech. The information form will not disclose the fact the *true* purpose is to assess how those views internalise, adopt or reject discourses surrounding ed-tech, lest this biases answers. This minor piece of deception will be corrected once all data has been collected, contacting interview participants, then following up an announcement to the PGCE intake, with an explanatory note and a link to the research proposal - this very document. If you are a participant reading this, hi! Thanks for taking such a thorough interest. ## Data protection Dominant discourses around ed-tech also serve to occlude the privacy risks it poses (Regan and Steeves, 2019; Pullinen, 2021; Stockman and Nottingham, 2022; Birch _et al._, 2024; Day _et al._, 2024; Livingstone _et al._, 2024). It thus befalls this study to be exemplary in its handling of personal information. All data will be collected, processed and stored adhering to the **UK's Data Protection Act 2018**: participants will have the corresponding **rights** of **access**, **rectification** and **erasure**, and can **withdraw consent** to data processing. Technical details of principles and procedures for data protection for each phase are in **appendix F**. # Indicative timeframe The study will run over the course of an academic year: ## Sep-Dec - Ethical approval, design of information and consent form - Further literature review - Collection and cleanup of the discursive corpus - Identification of discourses by STM ## Jan-April - Questionnaire design - Questionnaire administration - Selection and interviews of further participants - Start of quantitative analysis ## May-Aug - Qualitative analysis - Interpretation - Data presentation and write-up. # Conclusion I hope to have shown that this study is both necessary and timely: there is no critical study, in the literature, of discourses of ed-tech in the UK after 2012, indeed 2005 when it comes to schools, and recent developments in AI have renewed of discourses of (workload) *efficiency* and *personalisation* of learning through automation. Furthermore, the relationship between trainee teachers and ed-tech has never been studied through the lens of discourse, but other discourse studies on trainees show them to be source of rich discursive data, at the intersection of schools and university, with different discourses and praxis - all the more so when it comes to technology. I am using a critical *frame*, but not will not use critical *lens*: interviews for the qualitative phase will be designed based on the findings of the quantitative phase, whose questionnaire will come from CDA of a contemporary corpus the use of STM for both the surfacing of ongoing discourses and the analysis of participants self-described positionality will ensure my own does not bias strictly inductive findings. 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SAGE. # Appendices ## A: Search Strings and Semantic Struggles My literature review was made difficult by *lexis*: ed-tech, a term of recent coinage, was, in its inception in the 60s, described as "Computer-Assisted/Aided Instruction" (CAI), then later, "Technology Enhanced Learning" (TEL), which, read as a full sentence, voices in the past tense the underlying techno-solutionist assumption. ![[NGram ed-tech.png]] All those terms are however dwarfed in usage by 'e-learning': ![[NGram elearning.png]] Add to this the number of different styling of both ed-tech and e-learning, and the reader can imagine the difficulty in systematising my literature review. My search string started as > `"Discourse analysis" AND ("Instruction* Tech*" OR "e learning" OR "e learning" OR elearning OR edtech OR "Ed Tech" OR "Ed * Tech *")` Then adding `AND (UK or Britain OR United Kingdom)` as well as `AND (secondary schools OR primary schools)` to focus on the study's context. I ran searches again after I found out about TEL and CAI, substituting the relevant parts. TEL in particular surfaced a number of quality texts, including several doctoral dissertations, as it has been the term of choice in British Academe. ## B: Literature on international ed-tech discourses | Text | Location | Period | Corpus | Scope | Discourses found | Notes | | ----------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | (De Vaney and Butler, 1996) | US | 1920-1990 | Oral history tapes from important figures, research reports, technical manuals, journal articles, textbooks. | Education in the broadest sense,<br>including military training | social **efficiency** <br>**Marketplace** discourse <br>Later **equity** | Discourses of efficiency, marketplace and equity/inclusion surrounded even pre-digital technology for education | | (Ramiel, 2021) | Israel | 2013-2014 | Ethnographic observation <br>Interviews | K-12 and Higher Ed <br>(one EdTech R&D Unit) | **disruption** <br>**innovation**<br>preparedness for the **job market** | Focusing on MindCET, a tech R&D Unit of CET, the largest edtech company and education publisher in Israel | | (Lee, 2021) | Canada | 1977-2015 | Intitutional documents <br>(Athabasca University | Higher Ed | **innovation** <br>**inclusion** (openness, access) | Looks specifically at those discourses, and the tension, sometimes incompatibility, between them in the context of an open (distance-learning) university. | | (McGarr and Engen, 2022) | Global | 2020 | Websites of Apple, Google, Microsoft (education section) | K-12 and HE | **transformation** <br>meeting **job market** demands technological determinism <br>**Efficiency**<br>**Effectiveness** <br>**Evidence**-based (only for HE!) | The sole study based solely on promotional materials, those of Big Tech. <br>Notable is the absence of Inclusion/equity in what is an otherwise complete recap of the dominant discourses, especially given the emphasis given on this value in other PR and marketing narratives of those companies. | | (Suárez-Guerrero, Rivera-Vargas and Raffaghelli, 2023 | Europe | 2022 | Interviews with educators, professors, researchers | Higher Ed | **Effectiveness**<br>**Efficiency** <br>Technological determinism <br>**Evidence**-based | Authors identify five edu-myths amongst HE educators discourses which clearly internalisation of dominant ones: <br>- ‘The Silver Bullet’: digital technology will solve education problems <br>- ‘Digital nativity’: digital competence is an extension of use <br>- The neutrality of evidence’: sufficient scientific support is found in the use of digital technology <br>- ‘Without technology there is no paradise’: digital technology ensures a better socio-educational future <br>The last one is horizontal discourse specific to educators: <br>- ‘Pedagogical materialism’: the internet is educational material added to the classroom | | Lambert et al. (2024) | Myanmar<br>New Zealand <br>Indonesia <br>Philipines<br>Vietnam <br>China <br>Cambodia | 2023 | Media discourse from the seven countries, via M.Ed. students' reports on Ed-tech claims and narratives in their country (vs available local evidence) | Mixed: Primary, Secondary, teacher education, workplace training | **Effectiveness** <br>**Efficiency** <br>**Fairness**\* <br>**Limitation**\*\* | * Mostly reported in Primary in the Philiippines <br>** acknowledging the potential drawbacks of ed-tech was a significant part of the discourse across the different contexts, <br>but the corpus was secondary discourse of M.Ed. students at Monash University | ## C: Literature on British HE ed-tech discourses | Text | Period | Corpus | Findings | | | -------------------------------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | (Clegg, Hudson and Steel, 2003) | 1997-2000 | Policy documents, draws heavily on Greenwich Speech* | Demands of Job Market<br>Inclusion (access/flexibility)<br>(cost-)effectiveness | * David Blunkett, then Secretary of State for Education, gave a speech at Greenwich university who set the tone and agenda for New Labour's policies - and discourse, on ed-tech. Ironically, for a technologically-minded scholar, whilst there is a digital copy of the full text, and it seems it was available online through the University of Greenwich until 2015 at least, it now only exists in the Blunkett Archives held at the university of Sheffield, seemingly on its original memory stick, in an archive box. | | (Hayes and Jandrić, 2014)(Hayes, 2015) | 1997-2012 | Policy documents, University strategy documents | Neoliberal discourse. <br>Growth through entrepreneurial performance-driven goals. <br>Technology as neutral tool. <br>Efficiency <br>Effectiveness <br>Technology as agent of change* | This is the Thesis of Dr Sarah Hayes, along with an article published before it using some of her work. Her analysis work involved a herculean 2.5 million word corpus.<br>* both texts remark upon how *nominalisation* casts abstractions ('the use of technology', 'the strategy'), rather than humans as bringing about the desired outcomes. | | (Munro, 2018) | 2003-2013 | Thechnology and Learning strategy docs, Gov dept, and public bodies | marketplace*<br>personalisation **<br>privatisation <br>(cost)-efficiency,<br>improving quality <br>broadening choice\*\** | * student as consumer<br>\*\* ("epitome of neoliberal individualism" p 5)<br>*** inclusion via marketisation | | (Clark, 2024) | 2020-2022 | Agency reports about HE | Transformation <br>equity\*\* <br>Personalisation <br>marketplace* <br>Data as strategic asset*** | * (HE as supplier, students as consumers)<br>\*\* Social Justice<br>*** This is a unique instance, which I attribute to the timeliness of the corpus. | ## D: Literature on British school ed-tech discourses | Text | Location | Period | Corpus | Findings | Notes | | ------------------------ | -------- | --------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | (Mee, 2007) | UK | 1997-2005 | Policy documents | Transformation <br>Marketplace <br>Neoliberal: public/private partnership. | Mee specifically traces the history of the National Grid for Learning, a core ed-tech programme of New Labour for schools | | (Selwyn, 2007) | UK | 2000-2005 | Policy documents <br>Print Ads | transformation (but continuity) <br>personalisation <br>assessment / monitoring / control | Selwin notes tensions and contradiction, within a corpus containing both policy and promotion: <br>Marketing aimed at educator foreground ideas absent from policy: continuity within the transformation, additional avenues for data-based assessment and monitoring | | (Chambers, 2017) | England | 1986-2016 | Policy documents, and academic publications on digital literacy in English schools | Technological determinism <br>Marginalisation of teachers voices and expertise <br>(a critical discourse in academic publications) | This is a doctoral thesis presenting Foucauldian discourse analysis of a 30 year corpus solely focusing on digital literacy: <br>education about technology, not quite technology for education, I have presented discourses at the overlap. | | (McGarr and Engen, 2022) | Global | 2020 | Websites of Apple, Google, Microsoft (education section) | transformation <br>meeting workplace demands technological determinism <br>Efficiency<br>Effectiveness <br>Evidence-based (only for HE!) | The sole study based solely on promotional materials, those of Big Tech. <br>Notable is the absence of Inclusion/equity in what is an otherwise complete recap of the dominant discourses, especially given the emphasis given on this value in other PR and marketing narratives of those companies. | ## E: Discourse of evidence, DfE documents, 2019-2023 In 2019, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) published an evidence review based on a meta-analysis of international studies, some dating back to the 1960s or 70s, and, by their own admission, on very different interventions (Lewin _et al._, 2019). The EFF is a key producer of the discourse of "evidence-informed practice", the questionability of its methodological grounding notwithstanding (Simpson, 2017), yet in this case, even it was unable to surface meaningful evidence: positive effects are slim, and often caveated with critical comments about the design of the study. The guidance report that follows is careful not to repeat claims for effect, but instead asks first that stakeholders think through and plan ahead any deployment of technology, then expounds on areas (teacher modelling, pupil practice, assessment) where it 'can be used to', 'can offer ways to', then even 'can play a role in' improve/ing those areas(Stringer, Lewin and Coleman, 2019 p. 4-5). The next month the British Department for Education (DfE) publishes "Realising the Potential of Technology in Education" - a statement of intent, in which the sole occurrence of the word 'evidence' is in a commitment to build a wider evidence base for the effectiveness. Two of the four themes that emerge in this document have to do with education: an intention to address specific, administrative challenges, and support infrastructure, procurement and training. The other two are to do with the technology sector: supporting the sector itself, and supporting collaborative initiatives between education and industry. There is a palpable imperative that ed-tech must be adopted, fostering the > *"aim to support the education sector in England to develop and embed technology in a way that cuts workload, fosters efficiencies, supports inclusion and ultimately drives improvements in educational outcomes" > (Department for Education, 2019). Readers of Hayes (2015) will notice the language implies it is the development and embedding of technology that will deliver those benefits, not the users of the technology. Five years and seven Secretaries of State for Education later some would dispute that those aims have been progressed commensurately to schools' spending on ed-tech. The DfE's own published data on 'attainment 8' in England, a measure of academic outcomes at the end of mandatory public schooling, doesn't show the expected steady rise ed-tech was promised to deliver: ![[Att8 2016-2024.png]] (Local Government Association, 2024) The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, resulting public health measures, and the emergency assessment policies of 2021 and 2021 show their effect, and the much commented upon 'learning loss' is visible. The argument that this loss absorbed the ed-tech gain is not as specious as it seems: technology enabled distance learning during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, to be sure. Those circumstances lead 64% of schools to adopt new digital platforms ([ref](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/implementation-of-education-technology-schools-and-colleges)) - in a manner understandably prioritising expediency over oversight (Lossec _et al._, 2020). The DfE commissioned research to assess the natural experiment of the pandemic; CooperGibson Research's report shows very positive results, unsurpisingly: impact on workload and attainment were not measured directly, but by the proxy of their perception by leadership and teachers (with the former having a more positive opinion than the latter). No mention is made of supporting inclusion. Effectiveness is assumed, and the report focuses on barriers to effectiveness, coming from teachers or pupils - first amongst which, barriers to adoption (2021). Interestingly, the majority of both teachers and leaders report reported their needs for planning, tracking, sharing and collaborating were *already met* by software. This survey was followed by a research report, this time with a deeper survey of a smaller sub-set of schools having recently adopted new technology (CooperGibson Research, 2022). It foregrounds the same points: the need for 'strategic planning', for prioritising pedagogy, and for evaluating impact, are all re-iterated, but the details as to what shape those should take are left to schools and trusts. Two years later, the DfE publishes a follow-up survey, this time by IFF Research, a social research agency which, unlike CooperGibson, is not specialised in Education. Using, again, only self-reported answers from teachers and leaders, it explicitly states this survey is not comparable to the previous ones due to different designs and methods, whilst referencing "indicative findings" of progress between the two surveys. Indeed, failing to gather enough respondents, IFF ended up circulating links to their *online survey* by backchannels, favouring self-selection in respondents. The wording and order of questions seems much more likely to bias responses than in the '22 survey: asking, for example, about fitness for purpose without ever defining purpose, or asking about awareness of standards before asking if the school met those standards. (IFF Research, 2023) Finally, the 2023 'Frameworks and Standard Review' (DfE, 2023) shifts the discourses: a discourse of *digital pedagogy* encompasses both *effectiveness* and *innovation*; *effectiveness* has become 'digital competence', *inclusion* makes an explicit return, and a new discourse of *user-centric design*, advocating for 'research-based approaches'. It is on the front of *evidence* that we see the end of a journey started by the EFF research in 2019, with the characteristically neoliberal conclusion making no prescription, let alone commitment of action, for research, passing the burden of abiding by 'evidence-based practice' to actors in the markets of both education and technology. That is, schools, who are not famed for the amount of time they can dedicate to formally evaluating technology products, are to do their own research, or, better yet, accept that made by the manufacturers. This is the *manufacture* of (schools's, teachers's, parent's and pupils's) *consent* Noam Chomsky wrote of, and whilst he was writing about mass media and society at large, the phenomena are the same: economic incentive structures work towards the filtering and framing of information in a manner that creates a "manufactured reality" aligning with the interests of the powerful, steering public opinion towards supporting the status-quo (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). ## F: Data protection Different phase of the study will each handle different data, both in format and degree of sensitivity, calling for specific data protection practices in addition to general principles. ## Preliminary phase The preliminary phase, using a corpus of publicly available documents, need no particular data protection practices. It has a bearing on data protection, however, as it is at this stage that the STM model for automated CDA will be developed. The lack of sensitivity of the data will allow this to take place on remote compute infrastructure (Google Collab), and be benchmarked for performance on local compute infrastructure (the laptop on which I am writing this). I do not expect computational demands to be an issue, but should they be, it will give time to look into safe, local solutions. ## Quantitative arm The online survey will collect data anonymously. This makes it impossible to technically enforce that only PGCE students respond, that they respond only once, or indeed that they all respond; however the expected parameters of the survey makes these unlikely (even, sadly, the third one), and it is an acceptable risk given the significant additional compliance burden of collecting a university email address along each entry. Even with several hundred students in a PGCE intake, the collection of demographic information, combined with phase and subject, can make the records de-facto identifiable. As soon as it is collected, survey data will be removed from the online platform that ran the survey, and manipulated locally (in the computing sense of the term). The aim is for the data to reside on a known set of storage systems, so its access can be controlled and its eventual deletion complete. That is, **not** in 'the cloud'. All data will be backed up to a separate drive. ## Qualitative arm Interviews will be recorded with files on the researcher's computer - not the server of the video conferencing software - with the video stream being immediately discarded. First-pass machine transcription of the audio will similarly use systems running locally, without the audio being sent to a server. The resulting transcripts will be held processed locally, including both coding and analysis software, and topic modelling systems. The STM systems developed in the preliminary phase will run locally. As with quantitative data, primary sources and documents derived from them will be held on my own computer, alongside a *local* backup.