Conference Program

Since the 2022 emergence of advanced generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, narratives of urgency and transformation have come to dominate education policy debates. This paper critically investigates how two major international organizations (OECD and UNESCO) conceptualize “AI literacy” in their flagship policy documents. Drawing on text-mining and network text analysis, we compare their respective visions and the strategic selectivities they advance for reshaping national education systems. Guided by Jessop’s (2005) strategic-relational approach, our analysis identifies a significant socio-technical shift: rather than positioning technology as something to be integrated into society, these frameworks portray society itself as being integrated into generative AI. Within this emerging educational paradigm, students are cast as “cybernetic” co-producers of knowledge who continuously interact with AI systems through feedback loops, while teachers are largely sidelined and confined to basic monitoring roles rather than pedagogical mediation. Educational institutions, in turn, are stripped of their pedagogical functions and reduced to sites that legitimize compliance.

We contend that these strategic selectivities mark a sharp departure from earlier approaches to educational technology policy. In the documents examined, generative AI is presented as a totalizing force that reorganizes classrooms around productivity and assessment while downplaying key issues such as teacher agency, institutional context, and critical engagement. In particular, within the OECD/EU framework, schools are positioned simultaneously as testing environments and extraction sites for generative AI systems, fundamentally reshaping educational priorities and the roles of educational actors. Most significantly, these efforts to define AI literacy risk foreclosing opportunities for learners to develop a critical understanding of power and influence in a world increasingly shaped by oligarchic control.

The accelerated digitalisation of schools following the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the presence of Big Tech corporations in educational settings, raising critical questions about child protection, data governance, and the everyday experiences of school communities. In Spain, as in many other national contexts, the adoption of digital platforms in primary education has proceeded without systematic participation from school actors, and with limited attention to how teachers and families understand, navigate, or resist these processes.

This paper presents the design and validation process of a survey instrument developed within the DigiProtEd project, a mixed-methods study exploring the socio-educational effects of digital platforms and datafication on child protection in Spanish primary education. The survey targets two key school actors -teachers and families of primary school students- across three autonomous communities (Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, and Comunitat Valenciana). Although the ambition is having representativity for as many autonomous communities as possible, at least in these three this would be granted.

A defining methodological choice in the instrument's design is its scenario-based structure. Rather than asking respondents to evaluate abstract propositions about technology, the questionnaire presents four situated scenarios grounded in recognisable school contexts: the institutional adoption of an official platform, inequalities in digital access when tasks are sent home, digital communication between teachers and families, and the generation and use of student data by the platform. Within each scenario, respondents are invited to assess their own practices, identify their concerns, and prioritise different values and responsibilities. This design serves a dual function: it captures empirical data on positioning and practice while simultaneously fostering reflexivity among participants, prompting them to articulate their own stance on platformisation and datafication processes that often remain tacit or unexamined.

The validation process combined expert review —drawing on specialists in education policy, digital rights, and primary education— with cognitive interviews with teachers and families, and a pilot administration in the two target communities. This process allowed the research team to refine item wording, assess the instrument's sensitivity to professional and social diversity, and evaluate the degree to which the scenario-based format effectively activated critical reflection rather than socially desirable responding.

The paper discusses the theoretical and methodological rationale behind the scenario-based approach, including its potential and limitations for studying platformisation and datafication from the perspective of school actors. Concretely, participants respond to grounded vignettes — such as a teacher navigating the adoption of a platform imposed by school administration, or a family confronting requests to consent to their child's data collection — that allow latent tensions to surface through practice-oriented reasoning rather than direct attitude measures. It also reflects on the ethical dimensions of designing a tool that, in the very act of measurement, may contribute to making visible processes —surveillance, data extraction, institutional pressure— that respondents have not previously framed in critical terms.

We argue that survey design in this field can itself be understood as a pedagogical and political act, one that places democracy and educational justice not only as objects of study but as values embedded in the research process.

In recent decades, educational systems have faced increasing tension between standardized teaching models and the need to address the diversity of students’ trajectories, interests, and sociocultural contexts (Matosas López, 2019). In this scenario, personalized learning has emerged as a relevant educational approach aimed at adapting learning experiences to the characteristics, motivations, and needs of learners (Gunawardena et al., 2024). At the same time, digital technologies have expanded the possibilities for designing, implementing, and scaling personalized learning processes through virtual platforms, adaptive systems, learning analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Despite these opportunities, literature highlights significant conceptual, pedagogical, and ethical tensions associated with technology-mediated personalization. In many cases, technological proposals reduce personalization to algorithmic adaptation mechanisms detached from strong pedagogical frameworks and the participation of educational actors (Bartolomé et al., 2018; Vanbecelaere & Benton, 2021). This situation has generated concerns regarding the autonomy of learners and the evolving role of teachers in highly technologized learning environments (Salazar et al., 2024).

From this perspective, we seek the most relevant strategies to incorporate artificial intelligence and learning analytics in secondary school classrooms. We approach it from a critical perspective on the incorporation of digital technologies in education (Macgilchrist, 2021), as well as from a pedagogical perspective far from techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2013) and the submission of classrooms to the logic of techno-feudalism (Durand, 2020). At the same time, we recognize that several countries have incorporated AI into their curricula (UNESCO, 2023), in a transnational framework that promotes digital teaching competence (Punie, 2017), expanded with AI competence for teachers (Miao & Cukurova, 2024) and students (Miao et al., 2024). We give teachers the role of mediator in the incorporation of educational technology with pedagogical meaning (Puentedura, 2013), with the possibility of designing learning scenarios.

In this context, co-design has gained increasing relevance in educational research as a participatory methodology that enables collaborative processes among teachers, students, and other stakeholders in the design of curricula, learning environments, and technological solutions (Westbroek et al., 2019; Zeivots et al., 2024). Codesign emphasizes horizontal collaboration, contextual relevance, and shared ownership of educational innovation. From this perspective, co-design may represent a promising strategy for developing more participatory and pedagogically grounded approaches to technology-mediated personalized learning.

This study analyzes the challenges and possibilities that codesign initiatives may represent for strengthening teachers’ agency and pedagogical mediation in implementing personalized learning strategies supported by artificial intelligence and learning analytics. The research was conducted in four educational centers where teachers participated in structured co-design processes aimed at developing strategies for personalized learning supported by digital technologies. Three collaborative sessions were planned in which teachers identified pedagogical needs, explored technological possibilities, and designed strategies for personalization within their institutional contexts.

Among other findings, the results show tensions regarding the appropriation of the IA and AA by teacher communities. Lack of technical knowledge about the functioning of these digital tools, as well as a perceived lack of clarity in institutional policy and school organization regarding the integration of AI and AA, may explain this scenario.

The platformisation and datafication of education are transforming school life not only through policy and infrastructure, but also through the everyday negotiations of school actors. In Spain, these processes have accelerated in primary education through the expansion of corporate digital ecosystems, the increased use of learning platforms and the growing presence of data-driven tools. Far from being a linear or consensual process, digitalisation is experienced in schools as a contested terrain in which leadership teams, ICT coordinators and teachers negotiate responsibilities, meanings, limits and risks.

This research, developed within the Digiproted project, analyses the tensions surrounding the adoption and use of digital platforms in a Spanish primary schools. Based on qualitative interviews the study examines how actors justify adaptation to platforms, when and why they negotiate their use, and what tensions emerge between actors and within their professional positions. The analysis focuses on how platforms are embedded in school practices and how their use reconfigures pedagogical authority, labour distribution and institutional decision-making.

The findings show that digital platform adoption is often driven less by pedagogical reflection than by organisational and economic rationalities. Platforms such as Google Classroom are valued because they reduce technical maintenance, simplify teacher onboarding and facilitate the management of tasks, materials and feedback. In this sense, platform adoption is linked to efficiency, sustainability and workload reduction. However, this operational logic also produces tensions: greater dependency on external providers, concerns about datafication and profiling, and a partial transfer of institutional control to corporate infrastructures. These concerns are particularly visible in family reservations about privacy and in school actors’ awareness of the trade-off between convenience and sovereignty.

At the pedagogical level, tensions emerge around autonomy, time and the design of teaching and learning. Some teachers value “empty” platforms because they allow them to choose and organise content freely; others experience them as increasing workload and expect more structured tools. The incorporation of complementary content platforms is often seen as a practical solution when these offer pre-designed sequences and personalised pathways. Yet this also raises a central question: who shapes the learning process—the teacher, the platform, or both? Platformisation thus not only introduces tools into the classroom, but also redistributes pedagogical agency and transforms the conditions under which teachers make curricular decisions.

These tensions become even more visible in relation to online research and generative AI. Teachers recognise that students increasingly rely on digital sources and tools such as ChatGPT, while they often feel insufficiently prepared to guide critical uses of information, source verification and AI-supported inquiry. Responses range from prohibition to guided experimentation, but they remain fragmented. A key issue is the lack of collective time and institutional spaces to discuss shared criteria for digital and AI use.

In this context, adaptation is frequently reactive rather than strategic. Top-down technology provision, limited school participation in decision-making and uneven training opportunities deepen this dynamic. The Spanish case shows that platformisation in primary education is continuously negotiated through unstable balances between operational efficiency, pedagogical meaning and institutional sovereignty.

This paper investigates how local school authorities, understood as school owners and school leaders, initiate and lead the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools. Digital technologies have been present in schools for decades. However, studies show that school owners and school leaders have limited understanding of what it means to lead in an era shaped by digital technologies (Tømte 2024). AI is rapidly impacting teaching, learning, assessment and school administration. In this context, AI literacy becomes an important leadership competence, referring to leaders’ capacity to critically understand, interpret, and govern AI technologies within educational decision-making and school development processes. School leaders therefore play an important role in working out how to introduce AI into their schools, acknowledging its potential benefits and risks (Fullan et al., 2024). The limited research on AI and school leadership and on school leaders’ readiness to adopt and implement AI in local school contexts (Adams & Thompson, 2025; Tyson & Sauers, 2021; Wang, 2021) highlights the need to understand how district level school authorities and school leaders organise and lead the implementation of AI in local school contexts across leadership levels.

This study adopts a multi-level perspective on leadership and answers the research question: How do district-level authorities and school leaders organise and lead AI implementation in schools and what barriers and enablers are identified for implementing responsible AI in schools?

We followed how the work was initiated, organised and led across leadership levels over a period of 1.5 years in one county school district in Norway governing 43 high schools. The study follows the process from the initial mandate to establish a county-based working group for AI in upper secondary schools, through the AI group’s work, to the implementation of local school development processes at two upper secondary schools organising professional development for teachers’ pedagogical use of AI.

Data consist of semi structured interviews with the regional district school director; members of the county AI working group, including five school authority representatives, four AI pedagogues (teachers hired as technology leaders to work 50% of their time in the county AI working group); two high school principals, two department heads; and 2 teachers appointed project leaders for local school professional development at one high school.

Preliminary findings show that although a formal mandate guided the establishment of the county AI working group, the purpose and intentions of the initiative were interpreted differently across leadership levels. These differences also extended to understandings of the role of AI in schools. Furthermore, the study reveals variation in how local school development processes and teacher professional development related to AI were organised at the two participating schools. The paper provides new insights into how leadership across governance levels shapes the organisation and implementation of AI in schools. We discuss how AI implementation introduces new forms of data and algorithmic decision-support, raising questions about how school leaders interpret, negotiate, and act on these knowledge resources in organisational decision-making processes.

This contribution centralizes ‘the student’ and their aims and experiences, by using the pragmatic concept of ‘transaction’ to research the reciprocal relationship between students and digital educational technology (edtech). Contemporary edtech is part of complex (platform) ecosystems, with embedded platform logics (e.g. datafication) and connection to Big Tech (Van der Vlist, 2022). From a student perspective, ‘edtech’ includes not only school-initiated technologies but also digital platforms like YouTube and WhatsApp that support learning, communication, and educational logistics (Noteboom, 2025), thereby extending inquiry beyond the educational institution.

The ecosystem too provides conceptual room to research student-edtech-relationship as a Darwinian ‘struggle’ between the many actors (biotic) and artefacts (abiotic), that give and take (Elliott-Graves, 2024). This creates possibilities to connect student perspectives with evolutionary inspired philosophies of technologies that focus on user-technology interactions, dynamics, and reciprocal shaping and being shaped. Fields such as the Niche Construction Theory (Sterelny, 2010) approach a subject always in combination withs it, in which it consider technologies as value-laden, that steers or certain behavior—whether for good or bad. Recently, Dewey’s pragmatism has regained renewed attention in these fields as a way to research these complex interactions (Kivinen & Piiroinen, 2020).

I argue that Dewey’s well-known philosophy of education and his lesser-know philosophy of technology together offer a rich conceptual framework to study students’ perspectives and agency amid the ongoing platformisation and datafication of education. His philosophy of education provides a normative lens to assess what constitutes “good” education and what this implies for students. For example on how Deweyan concepts such as inquiry and experience foster growth, and why education in democratic societies should remain open-ended without fixed end-goals (Dewey, 1916). His philosophy of technology enables an analysis of how contemporary edtech–student relationships unfold transactionally within a broader ecosystem of actors and technologies, and whether these dynamics align with educational ideals (Dewey & Bentley, 1960). Together, these perspectives form a normative framework for interpreting and critically examining today’s datafied and platformised educational environments. It shift focus from individual entities, such as students or technologies, to the reciprocal transactions that continually shape each other, for better or worse.