Conference Program

This paper investigates how the platformization and datafication of primary education in Spain—largely mediated by infrastructures provided by major Big Tech companies—reconfigure educational governance, institutional agency, and everyday experiences in school communities. Grounded in critical perspectives on digital education, platforms are approached as sociotechnical infrastructures embedded in political, economic, and institutional power relations rather than as neutral pedagogical tools (Williamson, 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018). Within this framing, platformization is conceptualized as the reorganization of professional autonomy, data practices, and governance arrangements around logics of standardization, dependency, and infrastructural control (Selwyn, 2019), raising questions about digital sovereignty in public schooling.

Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative qualitative design across three autonomous communities—Catalunya, Castilla-La Mancha, and the Comunitat Valenciana. The comparative focus is justified by Spain’s decentralized governance of education, which produces territorially differentiated policy instruments, procurement arrangements, and administrative infrastructures. Comparison therefore enables us to specify not simply whether corporate platforms become dominant, but how platformization is institutionally assembled through distinct mechanisms—particularly (a) identity and access management and (b) device and service provisioning linked to administrative compliance. Empirical material consists of interviews with policymakers and technology-company representatives, as well as interviews and focus groups with school leaders, digital coordinators, teachers, students, and families.

Findings show that Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and private communication services (e.g., Dinantia) have become integral to school organization and communication, commonly normalized through usability, interoperability, and perceived efficiency. Yet the comparative analysis highlights substantive territorial differences. In the Catalan cases analyzed, institutionally managed accounts and authentication (e.g., domain-based accounts and single sign-on) operating through corporate platforms appear to produce a systemic form of platformization anchored in administrative routines, narrowing the space for locally developed alternatives and reinforcing infrastructural dependency. In the Castilla–La Mancha cases analyzed, the institutional provision of devices and administrative platforms seems to generate a functional duality between bureaucratic compliance and everyday pedagogical practice, intensifying pragmatic teacher adaptations and producing uneven distributions of data-related responsibilities. In the Valencian Community cases analyzed, despite normative controls over application ecosystems and a legacy associated with open-source solutions, Microsoft infrastructures tend to prevail due to perceived stability and security, even as privacy concerns remain explicit.

Across cases, we identify a “usability trap," that is, corporate platforms consolidate dominance not only through policy decisions but also through technical integration that establishes de facto standards and marginalizes public or local solutions. The paper argues that platformization and datafication are political-institutional processes that redistribute agency and digital sovereignty, and it calls for stronger democratic deliberation on infrastructure choices and more just data governance in schooling.