Towards equity focused approaches to EdTech: a socio-technical perspective

For decades, technology has been promoted as a way to address inequity in schools. Proponents argue that providing more digital resources, in the form of access to equipment, networks and software, will lead to greater educational and social equity. These digital resource based aspects of inequity are of course highly significant, but such an approach focuses only one dimension of a highly complex societal problem which leads to simplistic interventions that are unlikely to be successful.

This study aims to reframe the ways that the use of digital technologies in schools is conceptualised and promote a more equity focused approach to EdTech. Seven ethnographies in secondary schools in England will be conducted to capture and explore the multi-faceted implications of the use of technology in schools and the ways it can reinforce or reconfigure existing educational and social inequity. It takes a relational, socio-technical approach, that attends to the ways in which varied digital technologies are used in the classroom and examines how the use of such EdTech systems change or maintain existing relationships and practices between teachers and students, problematizes the inbuilt biases and underpinning values promoted by such technologies, and explores how access to EdTech and its uses varies across contexts and circumstances.

This much needed rich ethnographic study will contribute to academic understandings of the relationships between equity, digital technologies and teaching and learning. Through a strong knowledge exchange and impact strategy that engages with social scientists, data scientists, EdTech companies, policy makers, teachers, students and the wider public the study also aims to change the way that the use of digital technology in schools is thought about, promoted and designed in order to inform future equity focused approaches to digital interventions in education.