Rise to power of edtech brokers: exploring the emergence of new intermediaries in digital education policy and practice

Abstract

The goal of this doctoral dissertation is to conceptualize and empirically scrutinize educational technology brokers as a new kind of actor that mediates relationships between schools, academia, governments and industry. Edtech brokers are defined as intermediary organizations that guide schools in the procurement, adoption, and pedagogical use of edtech. Their services include the promotion of hardware (i.e., laptops, tablets, smartboards) and software (i.e., apps, platforms, data management systems), the creation of knowledge of “what works” in educational technology, and pedagogical guidance to schools in the form of workshops and training sessions.

This project investigates edtech brokers through in-depth case studies of four edtech broker organizations operating in Europe selected from a wider range of brokers identified at the outset of the project. The cases were purposefully selected to explore the multifacetedness of brokers, and to emphasize the different ways in which they operate. Through four empirical studies, this project has two main goals. The first one is to disentangle the main practices through with brokers connect traditionally differentiated spheres of public education, private edtech markets, governments, and research centers. The second one is to understand how, when performing such practices, brokers influence and transform the actors they connect. From an analytical perspective, this project stresses the embeddedness and relationality of edtech brokers in an attempt to capture their agency as emerging experts in education policy and practice.

The dissertation is comprised of four chapters, each of them addressing different layers of edtech brokerage. The first chapter is grounded on an exploration of the edtech sector and the policies about school digitization, specifically studying three cases of edtech brokers. It offers an initial conceptualization of the different types of edtech brokers, including the main ways in which they mediate between schools and the edtech market, and the most prominent education imaginaries that guide their actions. The second study explores the different ways in which brokers build evidence of “what works” for guiding schools in the usage and adoption of edtech, as well as the impact this evidence has in markets and governments. The third study focuses on how edtech brokers, through coaching and training sessions to schools, aim to encourage teachers towards the use of edtech, reconfiguring in important ways the notion of teacher professionality in a digital age. The fourth study explores edtech brokering “in action”, studying how brokers’ new forms of expertise operate in school, placing emphasis on how their practices are received, negotiated or even contested when they arrive in local school settings.

The concluding section offers analytical, empirical and methodological contributions to study edtech brokers, and extend an invitation to continue the empirical explorations on intermediary actors operating in education policy and practice. These actors, of which edtech brokers are an exemplary case, demand further investigations as they play an important role in defining, among other things, how schools and school systems continue to digitalize, how edtech markets gain access to school systems, and how governments enact policy reform and imaginaries into the locality of schools.