Abstract
Introduction: Reconsidering digitalisation in schooling
Schools have long been positioned as strategic sites for the introduction and expansion of digital technologies (Selwyn, 2011). This positioning intensified dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the imperative to sustain educational provision under conditions of physical isolation propelled digital technologies to the centre of educational practices (Williamson et al., 2020). Platforms for remote learning, data-driven monitoring systems, and commercial educational technologies were rapidly deployed, often framed as indispensable solutions to an unprecedented crisis (Teräs et al., 2020). What emerged in this period was not simply a temporary adjustment but a reconfiguration of educational priorities, practices, and even imaginaries.
The pandemic functioned as both an accelerator and an amplifier of educational technologies. It accelerated processes that were already underway, such as the platformisation of education, the rise of datafication, and the increasing involvement of private actors (Hogan et al., 2016; van Dijck, 2018), while amplifying existing inequalities and tensions within education systems (van Deursen, 2020). In particular, it created an opportunity for private investment and technology ventures to capitalise on the perceived need for the digital transformation of education (Patil, 2021). These developments were often legitimised through discourses of innovation, efficiency, and inevitability, presenting digitalisation as both necessary and inherently progressive.
Yet, the expectation of radical transformation has not translated straightforwardly into practice (Costa and Li, 2025). Instead, what has unfolded is a far more complex and uneven landscape. While there are instances of creative and transformative uses of technology in teaching and learning, these coexist with more instrumental uses. Increasingly, digital technologies are employed to organise, measure, and manage educational processes, often prioritising content delivery and performance metrics over meaningful engagement, relational learning, and experiential depth (Costa et al., 2023). This view of technology raises fundamental questions about what counts as quality in education and whose interests are served through digitalisation.
In this context, it becomes essential to move beyond enthusiastic or purely technical accounts of educational technologies and instead interrogate the social, political, and cultural factors that underpin their adoption and use. This special issue responds to this need by foregrounding critical perspectives on digital technologies in schools, seeking to reorient the conversation towards issues of power, inequality, agency, and meaning.
Towards critical inquiries of digital education
The notion of “critical perspectives” invoked in this special issue signals a deliberate departure from technocentric and instrumental approaches to educational technology. Rather than treating technologies as tools that can be optimally implemented through training or design, critical inquiry approaches digital technologies as socio-cultural and technical assemblages embedded in broader structures of power. Such perspectives draw on social theory (see Murphy, 2021; 2022) to illuminate how technologies shape and are shaped by political economies, institutional logics, cultural norms, and everyday practices.
Critical theories invite researchers to ask not only how technologies work but also for whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. They foreground questions of (dis)(em)power(ment), examining how digital technologies can both enable and constrain the agency of teachers and students. They draw attention to issues of (in)justice, highlighting how digitalisation may reproduce or exacerbate inequalities related to socio-economic and cultural status, geographical and place-based issues, language, and ability, amongst others. They also emphasise the cultural dimensions of technology use, recognising that practices of teaching and learning are deeply situated and cannot be reduced to technical efficiency (also see Macgilchrist, 2021).
Despite the growing recognition of the importance of such perspectives, the field of digital technologies in education has historically been criticised for its relative lack of theoretical depth (Costa et al., 2019; Oliver, 2011), making a critical stance crucial (Selwyn, 2015). Much research has focussed on questions of effectiveness, usability, and attitudes, questions often framed in terms of improving adoption and implementation while leaving broader structural and normative questions underexplored. Although in recent years there has been a visible move towards more critically informed scholarship, the field remains deeply fragmented, with tensions between instrumental and critical approaches continuing to shape inquiries of digital technology across the education sector. On the one hand, instrumental perspectives tend to frame digital technologies as tools for efficiency, innovation, and performance enhancement; on the other hand, critical traditions aim to bring to the fore core issues that affect human experience and practice.
But it is not solely the COVID-19 pandemic that has laid bare these fractures. While the pandemic exposed structural inequalities and uneven capacities for digital transformation across educational systems, the fast integration of Gen-AI – and especially large language modules (LLMs) – into everyday life and knowledge work is making these tensions even harder to ignore (Costa and Murphy, 2025, 2026).
The Gen-AI phenomenon makes explicit the extent to which digital technologies have been instrumentalised within educational and knowledge systems, systems that increasingly prioritise efficiency, scalability, and datafication over critical inquiry, pedagogical autonomy, and human-centred forms of knowing and being (also see Pope Leo XIV’s, 2026 Encyclical letter). While the papers featured in this special issue do not explicitly address issues brought about by AI, the issues revealed under the contexts they examine are now rendered more visible and pronounced by the rise of Gen-AI in education, namely that the underlying logics through which technology is mobilised, governed, and normalised are predominantly shaped by economic and political imperatives.
The rapid proliferation of educational technology research in recent years, while reflecting the urgency and relevance of the topic, has often prioritised speed over depth, not only in education but also further afield (Bramstedt, 2020). Here, responsibility must also be understood as shared by researchers themselves. Especially since the pandemic, there has been a marked acceleration in publications that tend to privilege descriptive accounts or rapid, solution-oriented recommendations, often at the expense of intellectual depth and critical reflection. A similar pattern is now observable in emerging debates around Gen-AI in education, where speculative claims about transformation frequently outpace critical analysis. These trends point to the need for a more deliberate and theoretically grounded engagement with digitalisation in schooling, and arguably across educational research.
Digital technologies in schools: A contested terrain
The increasing centrality of digital technologies in schools demands careful scrutiny. Digitalisation is not a singular or coherent process; it encompasses a range of practices, actors, and interests that intersect in complex ways. At one level, it involves the introduction of tools and platforms into classrooms. At another level, it entails changes to governance, pedagogy, curriculum and assessment, and professional learning, practices, and identities (Costa and Harris, 2017). It also implicates broader questions about the purpose of education and the values that should guide it.
One of the key tensions that emerges in this context is between the promise of transformation and the reality of standardisation. Digital technologies are often heralded as enabling personalised learning, creativity, and collaboration. However, in practice, they are frequently used to streamline administrative processes, deliver pre-packaged content, and monitor performance (Selwyn, 2016). This instrumentalisation of education is likely to narrow the scope of teaching and learning and the overall purpose of education, reducing complex educational experiences to measurable outputs (Costa et al., 2023).
Moreover, the growing involvement of private investment in digital education raises concerns about the commodification of education. EdTech companies and global platforms play increasingly influential roles in shaping educational agendas, often promoting solutions that align with market logics (Nichols and Dixon-Román, 2024; Srnicek, 2019). This can lead to a reconfiguration of accountability, where schools become oriented towards the requirements of platforms and data systems rather than the needs of those they aim to serve.
At the same time, teachers and students are not passive recipients of these developments. They actively negotiate, adapt, and sometimes resist the technologies they encounter. Understanding digitalisation in schools, therefore, requires attention to everyday practices and the ways in which different actors (re)interpret and repurpose technologies for their local contexts. It also requires recognising the uneven distribution of resources and capacities, which shapes not only how digital technologies are accessed and used across different settings, but also which effects they might produce and who they might affect.
Framing the special issue as a critical narrative of digital technologies in schools
The contributions to this special issue engage with these complexities, offering nuanced and theoretically informed analyses of digital technologies in schools across the European educational landscape. While each paper addresses a distinct aspect of digitalisation, as a collection of research-informed essays, they form a coherent narrative that brings to the fore critical concerns and challenges dominant assumptions as a much-needed development in a porous educational research landscape.
A logical point of entry into this narrative is provided by Mifsud and Orucu’s documentation of the rapid digitalisation of education during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the contexts of Malta and Turkey, where technological change was neither gradual nor voluntary but was abruptly imposed. The authors argue that this emergency “pivot online” exposed significant weaknesses within educational systems, including inadequate institutional preparedness, uneven digital infrastructures, and intensified governance pressures on both educators and learners.
Importantly, the authors conceptualise digitalisation not simply as a technical shift, but as a political and organisational process that reshapes power relations within education. Under crisis conditions, digital transformation normalised new forms of surveillance, monitoring, and managerial control, while prioritising educational continuity over pedagogical quality. Drawing on a Foucauldian conception, the paper interprets digital platforms as technologies of governance that enable observation, regulation, and behavioural management across institutional settings.
The study also foregrounds the lived and affective dimensions of this transformation. Teachers and institutional leaders experienced heightened levels of exhaustion, anxiety, and constant availability, alongside blurred boundaries between professional and personal life. These experiences reveal that digitalisation is not merely technical but deeply emotional and embodied.
Rejecting techno-determinist assumptions, the paper argues that digital adoption during this time was shaped by crisis politics and institutional priorities. Ultimately, it presents the example of “pandemic digitalisation” as a critical moment that expanded forms of governance and control while intensifying inequality and professional strain, calling for greater scrutiny of its long-term implications.
Buchner and Kiesewetter’s paper provides a useful bridge from the COVID-19 context to broader discussions of digital transformation in education, as they challenge the widely held assumption that educational technologies enhance schooling by providing greater efficiency, equity, and innovation. Instead, they argue that EdTech can have the opposite effect, subtly reproducing and even intensifying existing inequalities in everyday classroom practices.
Central to the argument is a reconceptualisation of inequality as not only spatial or resource-based, but also temporal. The authors show that inequality emerges through the unequal distribution of waiting time in digitally mediated classrooms. They identify three key forms of structured waiting generated by EdTech: (1) waiting for connexion, where unstable logins, networks, or platforms delay participation; (2) waiting for repair, when malfunctioning devices and systems require technical intervention; and (3) waiting for help, where students depend on teacher or technical support, often experiencing uneven delays.
In this vein, EdTech operates as a generator of hidden inequality. It introduces new dependencies on infrastructures and devices, moving responsibility onto schools and learners while producing largely invisible exclusions through interruption and delay. By foregrounding time as a form of power, the paper challenges techno-optimistic narratives, arguing that digitalisation does not simply redistribute learning opportunities; it also redistributes time, and, in doing so, creates new forms of inequality.
Castañeda and colleagues examine the dominant leadership logics shaping regional digital transformation in education across Spain’s autonomous communities. Rather than focussing on individual actors, the paper offers a pointed critique by foregrounding leadership as a set of governing rationalities that structure policy and practice.
In doing so, the study investigates how non-binding EU frameworks are interpreted and enacted within diverse governance contexts, and how different Spanish territories operationalise these influences. It identifies three broad leadership models: guidance-focussed, empowerment-focussed, and mixed or adaptive leadership. While guidance-oriented approaches remain dominant, the presence of the other models reveals the importance of flexibility and responsiveness to local conditions, particularly in addressing global challenges and the pressures derived from it.
Overall, the paper provides a nuanced account of leadership in educational digital transformation, arguing against a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, it highlights the need for context-sensitive approaches that are carefully localised to avoid reproducing inequalities or obscuring structural constraints.
Still in the context of Spain, Vigo-Arrazola and Llasheras-Lalana raise concerns about power dynamics and policy, inequality, and inclusion. Their analysis challenges the assumption that technology can inherently foster inclusion, sustainability, and wellbeing in education. Instead, it shows that the dominant use of technology can become instrumental, reinforcing a performative culture in which digital technologies are deployed to meet external accountability demands rather than to support meaningful learning. Consequently, teaching practices often reproduce dominant forms of knowledge while overlooking students’ lived experiences and sociocultural contexts. At the core of this critique is the argument that technological practices are shaped more by policy pressures than by pedagogical or social justice commitments.
This situation generates a structural tension for teachers. While many aspire to use technologies in ways that promote creativity, inclusion, and student wellbeing, they are required to comply with top-down digitalisation agendas and standardised curricular demands. As a result, socially just practices emerge within and amid tensions in which digital education practices are often treated as peripheral rather than central to educational work.
Despite these constraints, some teachers report enacting innovative approaches by integrating students’ voices, identities, and local contexts into their use of technology. These practices challenge technocratic models of education, showing that transformative uses of technology are possible, even though they depend more on teacher agency than on policy design.
Equally important in this paper is the role of rural schools as overlooked sites of innovation. Although often framed from a deficit perspective, rural contexts can foster community-based, contextually grounded practices that challenge dominant urban-centred models. Overall, the authors have created a powerful, evidence-based narrative calling for a critical rethinking of how digital education policies are translated into practice, with attention to the balance between teacher performance accountability and autonomy.
Still on the link between policy and practice, the paper by Cruz and Costa draws attention to teachers’ everyday practices, offering an empirically grounded account of a key tension in digital education policy: teachers are expected to implement digital competence agendas while having little influence over their design. The authors critique the top-down nature of reforms that prioritise policy objectives over teachers’ professional judgement and autonomy. Focussing on the Escol@s Digitais Project in Portugal, the study foregrounds teacher participation, deliberation over curriculum design and decisions, and professional empowerment as central concerns.
The researchers argue that teachers are often positioned as passive implementers of externally defined frameworks, constrained by standardised curricula and excluded from meaningful decision-making. In contrast, the project reported in the paper seeks to reposition teachers as active contributors by involving them in the design of competence frameworks, curriculum adaptation, and the sharing of interdisciplinary practices. However, this effort unfolds within a broader context marked by significant frictions between ambitious policy agendas and complex classroom realities. Teachers face time constraints, uneven digital preparedness, and uncertainty about how digital competence should be enacted in practice.
The paper also raises concerns about the limitations of the “empowerment” rhetoric. Teacher agency remains fragile where participation is temporary and structural conditions remain unchanged. Ultimately, the study argues that meaningful development of digital competence depends on recognising teachers as curriculum designers and co-producers of knowledge, supported by effective structural change rather than short-term participatory initiatives.
Wiklund’s paper introduces a critical discussion of educational digitalisation framed from the Swedish context, which is known as an earlier adopter. She identifies constraints derived from simplified binaries, such as whether technology is inherently good or bad, and by taken-for-granted assumptions about progress and innovation. At its core, the study shows that digital technologies in education are constructed through discourse, shaping what is considered legitimate, desirable, and even possible within educational systems.
Drawing on a wide range of empirical materials, the author identifies several dominant discourses. In discourses of professionalism, teachers are portrayed as individually responsible for continuously updating their digital competence, moving the gaze away from structural conditions. In educational discourses, digital technologies are presented as enabling personalised and self-directed learning, whereas in discourses of technology, they are seen as an external force. Relatedly, economy discourses reframe the issue through an understanding of efficiency, positioning digital technologies as tools for optimisation, privileging measurable outcomes and managerial logics over relational and democratic educational values. And in discourses of modernity, technology is constructed as unnatural and dangerous.
Using a Foucauldian lens, the study shows how such narratives not only become dominant “truths,” marginalising alternative approaches, but also how such constructions condition education in different ways. In essence, Wiklund proposes that digitalisation should be understood as a contested discourse, and that critical problematisation can open up more democratic and socially just educational possibilities, inviting us to take action.
Finally, Richter and colleagues provide an examination of a key question in contemporary EdTech debates: whether publicly funded digital infrastructures can offer a more democratic alternative to commercial educational platforms. They argue that replacing private systems with state-supported ones does not automatically resolve issues of inequality, control, or pedagogical narrowing. Digital infrastructures are embedded in institutional routines, governance arrangements, software architectures, and pedagogical assumptions that shape educational possibilities, constrain alternatives, and can become difficult to challenge.
Focussing on Germany’s Mein Bildungsraum initiative, a national educational platform, the paper shows that publicly funded infrastructures can still reproduce standardisation and narrow educational models. Even when data privacy becomes an improved difference in comparison to commercial alternatives, such systems may continue to prioritise efficiency, interoperability, and administrative coordination over democratic and relational educational values. In this sense, infrastructure itself acts as a pedagogical actor, influencing how teaching is organised and what forms of learning are prioritised.
The study also highlights risks of infrastructural design “lock-ins,” whereby adoption of certain operational features can lead to dependency on particular technical and governance arrangements. Overall, the paper argues that public digital infrastructures must be grounded not only in the practice of secure systems but also in democratic participation, educational plurality, and pedagogical values.
Emerging themes and critical reflections
Across these papers, a coherent set of critical themes emerges that, despite being grounded in different empirical contexts, converge around a shared exploration of digitalisation as socio-political and pedagogical processes rather than an inherently progressive force.
First, all papers, in one way or the other, challenge techno-optimistic assumptions that position EdTech as a driver of efficiency, equity, and innovation. Instead, they reveal how digitalisation often reproduces or reshapes inequality, whether through hidden temporal mechanisms such as “structured waiting,” uneven regional infrastructures, or differential access to resources and support. Inequality is thus shown to be not only material and spatial, but also temporal, systemic, and (infra)structural.
Second, a recurring concern is the dominance of instrumental and performative logics. Across contexts explored in the papers featured in this special issue – classrooms, rural schools, national reforms, technological developments and pandemic responses – digital technologies are frequently mobilised to meet external accountability demands, privileging standardisation, efficiency, and measurable outcomes. This contributes to the marginalisation of socially just, relational, and context-sensitive pedagogies, often reducing teachers to implementers of externally defined agendas.
Third, the papers foreground digitalisation as a form of governance. Whether through policy discourses, infrastructures, or platform design, digital technologies operate as mechanisms of coordination, control, and regulation. This is evident in the role of metrics, data systems, and crisis-driven reforms, as well as in the embedding of educational logics within infrastructures themselves. Consequently, digitalisation reconfigures power relations, professional autonomy, and institutional authority.
Fourth, some of the studies presented highlight tensions around teacher agency and participation. While policy frameworks frequently link digital technology to empowerment and innovation, teachers’ capacity to shape digital education remains constrained by structural conditions. Meaningful transformation is shown to depend on teacher-led, contextually grounded practices, yet these remain fragile, often existing in tension with dominant systems.
Fifth, the papers, some in more general terms than others, place emphasis on the role of discourse, and by extension technocratic ideology, in shaping digital education. Policy narratives around empowerment, efficiency, and inevitability function as framing devices that legitimise particular reforms while obscuring inequalities and limiting alternative imaginaries. This shows the importance of problematising these issues to expose taken-for-granted assumptions, something this collection of papers does very well.
Finally, the papers seem to converge on a central message: digital education is not a linear process of improvement but a contested, uneven, and deeply socio-political transformation. Whether through temporal inequalities, infrastructural lock-ins, rural innovation, or crisis-driven governance, these studies collectively call for a rethinking of digitalisation in context and grounded in democratic participation, social justice, and pedagogical values and diversity.
Conclusion: Reclaiming a critical perspective for and in education
As digital technologies continue to permeate schools, the need for critical inquiry becomes ever more pressing. The contributions in this special issue demonstrate that such inquiry is both possible and necessary, offering insights that challenge dominant narratives and open up alternatives to think differently about digital education.
Rather than accepting digitalisation as an unquestioned approach or inevitable innovation, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers would benefit from engaging with its complexities and contradictions. This involves not only identifying problems but also imagining alternatives and other possibilities, that is, ways of integrating technology that are aligned with educational values of equity, inclusion, and meaningful learning.
In essence, the task at hand is not to reject digital technologies but to situate them within a broader view of education, one that prioritises human relationships, critical digital engagement, and social justice. By centreing these inquiries on critical perspectives, this special issue contributes to this goal, inviting ongoing dialogue and reflection in a field that is likely to remain at the centre of educational debates for years to come.
